Residual Green

There is a silent knowledge rooted in the memories of women and in the fibres of plants. It is transmitted through gestures. A fragile heritage that moves through time, resists oblivion, and gives back to the earth a primordial voice.

Residual Green explores the transmission of medicinal knowledge among Dao women in Northern Vietnam, investigating an archaic knowledge rooted in the symbiotic relationship between body and nature. Through a rituality of gestures and memories, these women safeguard the integrity of the forest, acting as a living archive of a layered knowledge that proceeds through cycles, combinations, and returns.

The plant is an instrument of healing and a form of knowledge. Every leaf, root, or mixture carries an ancestral heritage that aligns with the rhythms of the earth. Healing is intertwined with natural cycles, where the time of recovery is marked by the alternation between light and shadow, in a subtle continuity between body, environment, and cosmos, through the use of approximately three hundred botanical species.

Today, this equilibrium appears fractured. The forests are weakening, the rhythms of modernity are redesigning trajectories, and the transmission between mothers and daughters is thinning, risking to remain without a voice. This is an urgency recognised also by the Vietnamese scientific community, which attempts to codify this knowledge before the botanical memory vanishes.

Through photographic investigation and manual intervention, the project documents what remains of these practices, of the oral knowledge and its sacred bonds with the environment, outlining the tension between the permanence of an archaic knowledge and the fragility of a memory that risks becoming a residue without a voice.