A story of travelling, transformation, identities and getting wild.
- Wild Cabbage Experience, 2023
The Wild Cabbage cloak, 2024, manipulated, dyed, and embroidered antique cotton.
The second iteration of the Wild Cabbage series deepens an ongoing exploration of migration, hybridity, and vegetal identity through the figure of Brassica oleracea — the wild cabbage. Rooted in ecological inquiry and mythopoeic storytelling, the performance traces the imagined temporal and geographic journey of the plant from the Sicilian coastline to the untamed urban edges of Dublin 8.
Performed as a dialogue between two textile artefacts — a hand-manipulated cloak of antique cotton, dyed and embroidered to evoke the cabbage’s layered history, and a sculptural walkig stick formed from an Irish broom branch interwoven with Irish, Italian, and reclaimed yarns — the work invites reflection on the porousness of botanical, cultural, and political boundaries.
The Wild Cabbage, once domesticated and multiplied into countless cultivars across Europe, reasserts its wildness by taking root in marginal spaces. Its trajectory resists static notions of nativeness, proposing instead a model of ecological becoming shaped by dispersal, adaptation, and disguise.
Wild Cabbage: Second Performance enacts a ritual of vegetal transformation — a narrative of travelling, shedding, and rewilding — questioning dominant ecological hierarchies and offering a soft resistance to the binary of native and non-native.
The performance at the GalleryX, Dublin, was featured in the Dublin Inquire newspaper.
Wild Cabbage, The travel, Performance at the GalleryX, 2024, Dublin
The Travel, 2024, Branch of the Irish Broom tree woven with Irish, Italian, and recycled wool.
For the inaugural performance from the Wild Cabbage series, I wore a sculptural headpiece formed from an imagined cartographic bridge between Sicily and Dublin — a speculative botanical map linking the Mediterranean to Ireland through the symbol of Brassica Oleracea, or wild cabbage, which choes the leaf. This speculative geography questioned the fixed ideas of origin, mapping the migration of plants, people, and knowledge across perceived boundaries.
Through guided imagery meditation, the audience was invited to inhabit the plant, sensing, growing, and adapting within a shared microecosystem. Once assumed to be native but later revealed to be foreign, the plant becomes a figure of migration, resilience, and ecological ambiguity. The performance channels these entanglements through embodied stillness and slow attention.
Developed through research in the Art & Ecology programme at NCAD and informed by site-specific encounters in Dublin 8, the performance weaves together ecological observation, textile processes, and myth-making. Wild Cabbage opens a space for rethinking borders, identity, and wildness, tracing botanical pathways as a method of personal and collective transformation.
Wild Cabbage, 2023. Sculptural mixed media headpiece, hand-dyed, printed, embroidered and manipulated fabric.
Wild Cabbage, 2024. Performance at NCAD FIELD, Dublin
Cristina Nicotra 