SANCTUARIES, SOUP, SNAKES, AND SOIL: A correspondence between AO Roberts and Zoe Cinel

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Also see PPE (rituals), a browser-based iteration of the speculative virtual world Plants Properties Equipment. Within this sentient crip landscape – functioning as both archive and interactive altar – visitors navigate beacons to encounter oracles, receive sonic offerings, and perform data-erasure rituals.

This project is supported by EQ Bank as part of an ongoing partnership that highlights Canadian digital art practices, featuring commissioned works showcased in print and through expanded digital formats.

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January 28, 2025

Dear Zoe,

On my way to the studio, I look back at my tracks in the snow and notice the dot…dot…dot my cane made on the edges of the sidewalk. These marks make me think about Morse code, our correspondence, and sick and disabled letter writers of the past. I think of Audre Lorde writing to Pat Parker about chemotherapy: “ANY DECISION WE MAKE ABOUT OUR OWN BODIES AFTER CONSIDERING FACTS IS THE RIGHT DECISION!”¹ Judith Heumann’s correspondence collection, or the writing of Bob Flanagan and Sheree Rose. But there is so much missing, so much that was never saved, so many connections never forged. 

I find myself doing willful crip readings of non-disabled letters, like searching for queer subtexts of straight films. In Poland in 2015, John Berger wrote to the long-passed Rosa Luxemburg. He describes the Polish people as “not intrigued by power, because they have lived through every conceivable kind of power-shit.” Berger goes on to describe the Poles’ expertise at survival ploys; he says they are good at keeping secrets, and that they ”make sorrel soup from wild sorrel.”² This description evokes disability wisdom; I wonder what our equivalent of wild sorrel soup would be. So much of survival is about the sharing of these recipes. Can we speak to the future? Should we speak to the dead? What images, rituals, plants, songs, mobility aids, or oracles could we invoke?

An astrologer once told me that my life’s arc travels from the Mercurial inheritances of overwork and labour towards the luck and playfulness bestowed by Jupiter. I don’t know if this is true. But I do think of it when I am trying to slow down and embrace rest. I have a genetic connective tissue disorder that, for me, causes chronic joint hypermobility, pain, tendon-rupturing, and a host of other internal issues. I have dislocated and subluxed my joints too many times to count; my shoulders, in particular, are the most unstable. According to Hellenistic astrologers, the shoulders are the seat of Gemini, ruled by Mercury, something I like to joke about as a constant reminder of the flux of life, with my limbs attempting to travel on their own accord. 

The medieval occult text The Picatrix (or Ghayat al-Hakim, in Arabic) describes the process of creating magical images: take a base form, obliterate and transform it until it is unrecognizable, then add the remains to drawn figures, spoken words, or plants. I think about combining skin sloughed off my shoulders into a mix of chamomile and borage on a new moon in Gemini. But I don’t. I’m tired. I watch a lot of television. During a recent recovery period, I binge-watched all of “Lost,” in league with the castaways, with no way to solve the moving parts of this body island. I’d like to think about how to transform these images together.

February 1, 2025

AO, 

Dots in the snow are easy to overlook and disappear under a storm, but pressed snow makes the path resistant for the next cane. I think about how mentorship in crip worlds happens simultaneously in the solitude of the body and in community books, online talks, accessibility guides, and in exchanging letters. I am grateful for your marks in the snow and for responding at our own pace. 

Reading about your Mercury-to-Jupiter trajectory, I realized that this is one of three Capricorn seasons I have spent in Minnesota since moving here in 2015. My first solstice was after finishing grad school, and the second one was in 2020. Despite the solar return, Capricorn season in Minnesota was about being powerless, bound, and sick. This Capricorn season is different, grounded in duality. Does this year of the snake bring some good rebirth energy? This winter, I got into thinking about snakes, non-binary things, and growing roots. 

Like the birds in Berger’s letter, I migrate in winter. Unlike the birds, my travels are regimented by checkups with a government-funded rheumatologist and meticulous plans to restock on medication where it’s affordable. I am privileged to access Italy’s medical system by birthright. It’s not perfect, but even to a white, non-binary, English-speaking immigrant like me, it feels more caring than the American system, which is so deeply rooted in capitalism. I think about how life with illness is ungrounded, life with immigration is ungrounded, and I wonder which identity mentors the other: the sick or the immigrant? This Capricorn season, I feel the weight of duality: when I am in Italy, there is a growing sense of being uprooted from a place, customs, and climate that should by now be familiar. As I prepare to leave Minnesota, I also feel sad that I won’t witness the first buds blooming to reveal life under the snow blanket. Missing this transformation feels like skipping a friend’s birthday or a graduation party. This and your “body island” metaphor made me think about Robin Wall Kimmerer’s question about how to develop a sense of belonging “while upholding the rights, dignity and teachings of those Indigenous to the land?”³ If the body was land, would belonging be ensured? Or is it learned?

February 2, 2025

Hi Zoe, 

Kimmerer’s and your questions about belonging reverberate here on Treaty 1, where Winnipeg’s modern medical system grew out of the Grey Nuns’ 1871 establishment of the St. Boniface Hospital. Also known as the “Sisters of Charity,” this is the same monastic order that perpetuated decades of abuse in residential schools across Canada.⁴ Medicine here grew out of colonial violence, tied up with Christian ideas of charity, not as something we all inherently deserve and have an obligation to provide one another. 

Your mention of “snakes and non-binary things” brings to mind the caduceus and our misuse of it. Apparently, over millennia, Western medicine has confused this symbol of Mercury (the Roman messenger god of commerce and communications) for the staff of Asclepius (the god of medicine and healing), which had no wings and just one snake wrapped around the center.⁵ Mercury’s caduceus had prominent wings to carry trade messages and even a pouch to collect coins. It seems fitting that all reference to healing has been drained from this symbol, now wielded by our corporate healthcare systems as an amulet against their clients. All of us could be Luigi Mangiones. 

But I am not immune to amulets. As someone raised without religion, I am an outsider to faith, pulling at the roots of Western culture’s spiritual relationship with healing. I recently visited a replica of the Catholic pilgrimage site, the Sanctuary of Lourdes. Unlike the original in France, this version is in a village northwest of Winnipeg, an awkward imitation grotto built out of spray foam and poured concrete. The walls of the original Lourdes are lined with thousands of assistive devices, a kind of cruel display of faith, abandoned by disabled visitors who found (temporary?) healing in its spring waters. In the Manitoba version, no crutches hang from the ceiling, but there is a small Mary statue with bird droppings down her face and an extension cord running up to a bare bulb in the niche where she stands. Behind the altar sit discarded Smirnoff Ice cans, overturned white plastic chairs, and a long-out-of-service Pepsi machine. I feel at home with the plain-faced ugliness of this place, a friendly familiarity with its impossible promise.

There is a grotto in my recent project, Plants Properties Equipment (PPE), a downloadable world that holds the complications of pain and pride, accepted limitations, and crip wisdom. PPE is a space to think about what we can offer each other: not fantasies of being made whole, but practices that can make tangible liberatory visions for the future.

February 5, 2025

Dear AO,

Reading your discovery of Mercury’s caduceus being mistaken for Asclepius’ rod explains why, in the Western medical system, money and care are entangled in this snake’s nest that was never meant to be, and it’s biting itself with fury. 

Snakes have been a driving force in my practice lately, a force both new and ancient that has brought, for the first time, Italian culture and its symbolism into my work. I wonder about timing and reason. Perhaps, after almost ten years of immigration, as I grow roots in this cold, complex, and traumatized U.S. ground, I can finally extend branches toward my ancestry.

During my last visit to Italy, I got interested in Italian Albarelli, traditional ceramic vases, decorated in maiolica style, used in late Renaissance and medieval times to store medicine. I am drawn to their artistic looks, their sometimes obscure and sometimes humorous symbolism, and their durable qualities as handmade, utilitarian objects that bear history and culture. When I compare them to our plastic pill containers and disposable injections, I feel a sense of loss. What would it mean to receive care from a unique, handmade vessel? My recent artwork, Rest With Me #2, channelled this question, offering comfort in a gallery space. This interactive soft sculpture–an invitation to comfort and rest in the gallery–was created in community with Sarah, LaVanda, Alanna, Gretchen, Lake, Joey, Alison, and Malini, who lent their skills in stitching, printing, illustrating and construction. While making, we shared food and stories. This soft vessel was a training in interdependence, and it made me wonder if this process was similar to creating albarelli. Did the community come together around the warmth of a kiln, taking turns to keep the fire running while producing these objects of care? What stories and foods did they share? Can interdependence be tradition, a gift of mentorship for future generations?

This differs from our time, where vessels of care are disposable and made of plastic. How do you build a connection with standard, sterile objects? If you are irreversibly sick, can healing be found in the process? Can illness be grounding? Every three weeks, I give myself an injection of adalimumab to manage the swelling and pain of rheumatoid arthritis. Just as venom can be medicine, there is duality in care: adalimumab alleviates inflammation AND it demolishes my immune system; access to it is a privilege, AND its storage, refrigeration, and transportation are a burden. Also, I truly don’t like needles, at a visceral level. When “injection Monday” comes, I avoid it, preferring swollen joints to the needle. But I am urged to develop a sustainable relationship with this life-long treatment, and I look at traditions where taking medicine was a ritual: the symbolic decorations on albarelli, the myth of Asclepius, erased healing traditions of witches. Every three weeks, while the injection gets to room temperature, I have a little fun with myself by composing altars in my kitchen with objects that bring me comfort: gifts from the garden, presents from friends, books, and more. I call this ritual Three Weeks Calendar. This image contains one of the recipes, a soup from me to you.

Ingredients: 

• A miniature ceramic reproduction of holy water font decorated with a blue and yellow maiolica style
• A green sleeping mask with red machine-stitched words: “ut you look fi“
• Six yellow pills of Methotrexate, one blue pill of Lunesta
• An unused injection of adalimumab, Hyrimoz brand
• Repeating text in the background: “but you look fine”
• Three jars of dried nettle harvested from the garden
• A wooden tray

Feb 8, 2025

Dear Zoe, 

I spotted nettles on your Three Week Calendar. I’ve always appreciated their contradictory nature, the threat of their itchy hair-thin needles coexisting with their potential to reduce inflammation; strange oppositions that seem to allude to sympathetic magic. I recently found references to healing songs in Homeric hymns. Practitioners sang to the ill in paeans, a word we now understand as a hymn of praise or ode. But this form of sung healing poetry originally lived as a prescription, a spell. Of course, there are resonances here with Indigenous cultural medicinal practices and the power of being with. So much of coping with being sick, mad, and/or disabled is about this experience of, or the desire for, witnessing. Diagnosis itself is a container of knowledge and feeling. When and if it arrives, diagnosis can provide a kind of ode. Imagine if a diagnosis could be delivered in song, with nurses and doctors there to testify to the struggle to find its name. 

Your paradoxical relationship to adalimumab is familiar in my management of Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. I take meds for the side effects of other meds, and methods of symptom management will suddenly stop working, leading to months of trying or discarding new treatments. My living space can feel like a repository, as I collect braces, mobility aids, and therapy tools. The grotto location in Plants Properties Equipment holds this accretion of objects, some helpful (like the stack of crip theory texts) or some harmful (like the cloying “Get Well Soon” balloon). But the rocky enclave is also populated with sonic offerings by Deaf and Disabled artists, Molly Joyce, Johanna Hedva, Andy Slater, Chisato Minamimura, and Medical Museum.⁶ In Molly Joyce’s track, she sings: “I see the world. I see my body in the world. I am visible for you and me. The invisible is glue and lining of our worlds.”⁷ Joyce’s toy piano chords drone between her voice, intoning a back-and-forth between being and being witnessed, of finding this shared thread, like a remembering.

February 17, 2025

AO, 

After reading your last letter, I am again thinking about how absolutely non-binary the experiences of illness and healing are, and how my Rheumatoid Arthritis diagnosis felt like a curse that transformed into a circular space for catharsis and celebration. 

I was diagnosed in the summer of 2020. It was the thick of the pandemic, when vaccines and safety practices were still a mystery, and George Floyd was killed just a few blocks from where I used to live. At that time, I moved alone to a new city (Rochester, MN). While not having access to a car or public transportation and working a highly labour-intensive museum installation job, I was depending on ten tablets of Prednisone a day to be able to stand on my feet, hiding my illness in plain sight. Amidst the social isolation, job uncertainty, and grieving in response to the pandemic and systemic racism, diagnosis came. It was quick and it was brutal: this is what you have, this is a medication to manage it, the nurse will show you what to do, now go figure out how to survive your own invisible apocalypse. I remembered thinking: shouldn’t there be someone here to care for how the news is delivered? To grieve with me? To tell me about biographical disruption?⁸ About crip pride? About accessibility and ableism? Reading about your ideas–singing through pain, witnessing, easing into, and holding hands in diagnosis–brings up immense joy, enthusiasm, grief, anger, and unprocessed trauma. 

Passing through the portal to the grotto in your Plants Properties Equipment reminded me of that difficult time. In 2020, when I walked through it on my own, it looked blurred, scary, ominous, fatal, a curse.

To walk through that portal now, in the daylight, almost feels comfortable, like walking hand-in-hand with slowness and understanding. The clock of the body in illness is still steadily unpredictable. Like in your virtual world, life moves at the speed of light, sometimes slowly, as pain consumes and the day disappears. But I have now “witnessed,” and what awaits on the other side of the portal is a sense of identity, a place to rest in pain. Thank you for sharing your soup and recipes with me.

Suggested Further Readings: 

• Eli Clare, Brilliant Imperfection: Grappling with Cure, (Duke University Press, 2017).
• Mel Y. Chen, Alison Kafer, Eunjung Kim, Julie Avril Minich, eds. Crip Genealogies (Duke University Press, 2023).
• Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Witches, Midwives, & Nurses: A History of Women Healers (Feminist Press, 2010).
• Sarah Lyons, Revolutionary Witchcraft: A Guide to Magical Activism (Running Press, 2019).
• Vin Caponigro, Medusa + Madonna (Snake Hair Press, 2023).
• Silvia Federici, Witches, Witch-Hunting, and Women (PM Press, 2018).
• Rupa Marya and Raj Patel, Inflamed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021).
• Marta Russell, edited by Keith Rosenthal, Capitalism and Disability: Selected Writings of Marta Russell (Haymarket Books, 2019).

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AO Roberts is a multidisciplinary artist, musician and writer based in Treaty 1, Winnipeg, working with sound and disability futures. Recent shows include Plug In ICA STAGES Biennial, The Auxillary UK, and Stephen Lawrence Gallery, London. A 2022 MacDowell Fellow and 2021 Sobey Longlist awardee, Roberts performs solo electronics as VOR, and their 2022 Ruminant was released by Makade Star. aoroberts.com

Zoe Cinel is an immigrant interdisciplinary artist and curator based in Mni Sota Makoce. They work collaboratively to produce social change while researching nonbinary and interconnected ways to heal, belong and care. They are a 2023-2024 MCAD Jerome Fellow, a 2022-2023 Second Shift Resident. Their work was presented at Mia, the Walker Art Center, Mana Contemporary Chicago, among others. www.cinelzoe.myportfolio.com

1. Audre Lorde and Pat Parker, Sister Love: The Letters of Audre Lorde and Pat Parker 1974–1989, ed. Julie R. Enszer (New York: A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2019), 201.
2. John Berger, Portraits: John Berger on Artists, ed. Tom Overton (New York: Verso Books, 2015), 433–438.
3. Robin Wall Kimmerer, adapted by Monique Gray Smith, Braiding Sweetgrass for Young Adults: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teaching of Plants (Minneapolis: Zest Books, 2022), 189.
4. Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, The Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015, pp. 44-50.
5. Jason Folt, “Asclepius and Snakes: Symbols of Medicine and Healing,” Asclepius Snakebite Foundation, March 9, 2025, https://www.snakebitefoundation.org/blog/asclepius-and-snakes-symbols-of-medicine-and-healing^.
6. Plants Properties Equipment OST, Field Hospital Records, 2024, https://fieldhospital.bandcamp.com/album/plants-properties-equipment.
7. Molly Joyce, “The Invisible,” Field Hospital Records, 2024.
8. Michael Bury, “Chronic Illness as Biographical Disruption,” Sociology of Health & Illness 4, no. 2 (1982).

This article is published in issue 42.1 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue