5 Cocktails

5 Cocktails, socially engaged artwork launched at Utrecht University Botanical Gardens, 2022. Collaboration between Anna van Suchtelen & Brian Goeltzenleuchter.

5 Cocktails, 2-sided leporello artists’ book, 5.5” x 15.5”, 5 pages, risoprint, edition of 80, signed and numbered by the artists, 2023.

Project Notes

Twenty-five medical students enter a botanical garden. Located on the campus of Utrecht University, this teaching garden houses a variety of plants used to treat disease. The students are divided into five groups. Each group is tasked with studying plants that have been used to treat a human organ: eye, lung, brain, bladder, and intestines.

The five groups head to their own section of the medical garden. They are asked to study a pair of plants: The eye-group studies chamomile and blueberry. The lung-group studies fennel and thyme. The brain-group studies lemon balm and lavender. The bladder-group studies stinging nettle and cranberry. The intestine-group studies rhubarb and peppermint. The students look and draw, smell and taste, talk and listen. With all their senses focused, they are charged with writing a story in which the organ and the plants come to life and carry on a conversation. Things are getting weird. 

When their stories are complete, the students enter a classroom which has been transformed into a bartending academy. The very plants they studied in the garden are now arranged on a bar table alongside cocktail shakers, muddlers, strainers, sugars, and spirits. The final task is to transform their story into a signature cocktail (or a mocktail), which will be presented alongside a reading of their short stories.

Reflection

This project was commissioned for a discrete audience, which allowed Anna and I to shape the narrative and temporal flow in a way that led participants down a shapeshifting rabbit hole. The students entered the hole as future physicians looking to understand the pharmacological efficacy of plants; they exited the hole as alchemists distilling the essence of those very same plants into alcoholic elixirs. Ultimately, the poetic confusion between pharmaceutical and alcoholic uses of the term “cocktail” created a conceptual tension between positivism and intuition.