ENDEMIQUE [Long-term project]
ENDEMIC, adj. Said of living species specific to a well-defined territory. Figurative sense: Said of a disease that is constantly rampant in a country, an environment.
This double meaning proposes an immersion in traditional Reunionese medicine, based on the use of plants from the tropical forest and exotic species cultivated in the courtyards, called "tisanerie", through the prism of the link between the islanders and the plants of their environment.
Indian Ocean, 2005. Reunion Island is hit by an epidemic of chikungunya that never ends. One year later, more than 40% of the inhabitants have been contaminated by the arbovirus. Paralyzed by joint pains, exhausted by fever, general practitioners' offices are crowded with patients to whom nothing specific can be offered. The population then turns to the knowledge of the "gramounes", their elders, who still know a little about the virtues of herbal teas. But also to the "tisaneurs", who have made a profession out of this knowledge in order to heal. Desperate, even some doctors decide to refer their patients to them after having had positive feedbacks, even if empirical. The herbalist's shop, once forgotten, is making a comeback in the hearts of the islanders, even though herbal medicine has been banned in metropolitan France.
2020. On the island, the Covid-19 epidemic that is sweeping the globe has an air of déjà vu. Plagued by epidemics since its colonization, there is a strange atmosphere, between apprehension and reassurance of past experiences.
In Reunion Island, it is customary to "refresh" oneself, in the sense of decreasing inflammation, the heating up of the body, with a decoction or an infusion of plants. In prevention, in everyday life, or for example after a festive meal, it is a matter of making a beverage based on a "simple" of a single plant or a mixture in the tradition of each family. Good health is achieved by cleansing the blood of its toxins, with the liver and/or kidneys being the main focus. These recipes, based on wood, bark, leaves, or berries, follow personal rules, spiritual or not, without much scientific reference.
For the past ten years, traditional Creole knowledge has been on the rise, even though contemporary medicine has taken an important place since the departmentalization of 1946. This is notably because the Aplamedom, the Association Plantes Aromatiques et Médicinales de la Réunion (Aromatic and Medicinal Plants Association of Reunion Island), has taken up the idea of a herbarium competition addressed to the students of the island from CE1 to Terminale. All of them have to ask their relatives about the precise use of the collected plants. In this way, family recipes are compiled, studied and used for scientific research.
If the belief in the healing power of the "zerbaz'" is all the more alive, it is accompanied by a progressive fading of the spiritual link uniting humans to their environment. Whether these plants have a recognized use in human health or not, they are not spared by the current crisis of biodiversity at the time of the sixth mass extinction.
With this work, I continue to question the revival of Reunionese herbal tea, a major pillar of Creole culture, subject to contemporary issues of reappropriation of health, all the more exacerbated by the recent health crisis, in the face of ecological challenges which man is at the origin. Meeting with those who believe in it as hard as ironwood.