DISOBEDIENT FLORA DIARIES

Disobedient Flora Diaries explores the relationship between flora, memory, care, and forms of embodied knowledge. The project takes as its starting point the pedagogical diaries and writings of Rosa Sensat (1873–1961), a Catalan teacher and pioneer of educational renewal. In 1914, Sensat became director of the Forest School, a pioneering outdoor public school established on Montjuïc, Barcelona, where she developed an educational practice rooted in direct contact with nature, observation, and experience.

The project revisits these diaries and pedagogical writings as a living archive, bringing them into dialogue with the plants and landscapes of Montjuïc. The collective work is developed with future early childhood and primary school teachers, who engage with the archive through collective reading, weed gathering, handmade paper-making, and the printing of fragments from Sensat’s writings. These practices explore how attention to plants, materials, memory, and care can generate forms of knowledge based on interdependence.

The project has been presented through exhibition and performative formats, including an exhibition at the Museu d’Horta d’Almàssera and a performative action at the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica in Barcelona. These presentations transform the archive from a static repository into a living, material practice.

Disobedient Flora Diaries approaches weeds as a political and ecological category: plants that resist systems of classification, control, and value. Through craft, collective learning, and attention to material processes, the project proposes fragility as a form of resistance and as a way of questioning established hierarchies of knowledge, while opening up situated and ecological forms of learning.