I am sitting on a plane en route to Puglia in south-eastern Italy reading the Swedish author Niklas Rådström’s autobiography Som har inget redan hänt (As if Nothing Had Already Happened). My own body is full of cytostatics – a drug called paclitaxel, derived from the bark of the highly toxic yew tree Taxus brevifolia. The poisonous and medicinal properties of this conifer have long been known to Indigenous peoples in North America.  Since the 1990s and without acknowledgment of its history, a drug extracted from the tree has been used by Western medicine in the treatment of aggressive cancers of the breast, lungs and ovaries. In the last years, I have come across a number of biographical accounts of living with cancer and I recognise myself in them. I also recognise what I am taking into my body: poison and antidote.

The plane makes a sharp turn over the Mediterranean and begins its descent towards Bari Airport. I look up and continue reading. A year before, I had received high-dose cyclophosphamide, a mustard gas derivative used to treat multiple myeloma, a bone marrow cancer. Rådström was diagnosed with acute leukemia and recounts how mustard gas became a cancer treatment. As Rådstrôm writes: ‘On December 2, 1943, the German Air Force bombed several US ships off the port of Bari in southern Italy. On board one of the ships was a large stockpile of mustard gas that exploded along with the vessel, and its toxic contents spread over the sinking wreckage and the surrounding area.’ ⁰¹ In the days that followed, hundreds of people would die in terrible agony. At the same time, the disaster led a young team of doctors to a new and effective cancer treatment.

As researchers sought to develop an antidote to mustard gas, they realised that the gas had permanently damaged the bone marrow of affected soldiers. Since cells reproduce through division, perhaps mustard gas could be used to inhibit the division of cancer cells. Could a non-lethal dose of the toxic substance prevent cancer cells from spreading through the body via the bloodstream? Could mustard gas, a weapon of chemical warfare, be used to fight cancer? This macabre discovery marked the beginning of modern chemotherapy. Rådström goes on to describe the chemotherapy drug Daunorubicin, which a group of Italian researchers discovered in the 1950s while searching the soil around Castel del Monte, also in Puglia. This substance, isolated from the soil bacterium Streptomyces peucetius, also proved capable of combating cancer. Following this discovery, an intensive, global search for plants was launched to find new and effective cancer drugs. Thousands of plant samples from around the world were collected in a collaborative effort between the National Cancer Institute (NCI) and the US Department of Agriculture. Bark, leaves, roots and seeds used in traditional medicine were harvested and sent to labs, with the goal of finding ways to produce cytostatic drugs. This led to the discovery of the extremely toxic taxanes (yew) and vinca alkaloids (periwinkle). New hope and a lucrative new market were born. Poison and antidote again.

Upon arriving at the farm south of Bari, my friends show me around.⁰² Behind high stone walls, ancient fields open up. In the middle of the property stands a masseria, a traditional, sturdy structure dating back to Roman times. The garden is not merely decorative. The trees are meant to provide fruit for the household and shade during the hot months. In addition to olive trees, there are pomegranates and figs, as well as medicinal plants that the owners take pride in showing me. Eruca vesicaria (arugula) grows here, an ancient antioxidant, and Verbascum thapsus (mullein), which is said to help with coughs and catarrh. Here I can also find Calendula officinalis, the anti-inflammatory and antibacterial marigold; Artemisia absinthium, used for healing wounds, but also against epilepsy, cholera, and malaria; the diuretic Asparagus officinalis; and the beautiful violet flowers of Orchidea selvatica, long used against infections and tumours.

Eat Your Image
In recent years, the artist duo Goldin+Senneby, known for their work about offshore finance and speculative fiction, have increasingly engaged with illness, disability, ecology and the metaphors through which these subjects are made comprehensible. Like me, this interest comes from personal experience. They explore autoimmunity and the widespread notion that ‘the body is at war with itself’. They examine how sudden flare-ups attract private investment and generate extremely profitable treatments for diseases such as multiple sclerosis (MS), an autoimmune neurological condition that affects the central nervous system in the brain and spinal cord. MS treatments, they argue, have been optimised to improve MRI scans of the brain, but do little to alter the underlying course of the disease. In their work Spot Price (2003), they created blockchain-based artworks that offer MRI views of Jakob Senneby’s diseased brain and an investment linked to the drugs targeting such images. This is how he puts it in the essay Regions of Interest: ‘I felt an urge to look at – and possess – the portraits of my brain that had captivated the attention of so many doctors and served the shareholders of so many drug companies. I wanted to see myself as they had seen me.’⁰³

In the series Swallowimage (2025), Goldin+Senneby inoculate older oil paintings with a fungus that slowly spreads across the back of the canvas. The fungus in Goldin+Senneby’s work is an immunosuppressive species called Isaria sinclairii – long used in traditional Chinese medicine and patented in the 1990s as the basis for the first oral MS treatment. The images the artists chose vary from vanitas motifs that preach the transience of all things and remind us of life’s fragile thread, to depictions of diseases ranging from the plague to polio. The title of Goldin+Senneby’s work is borrowed from the German Schluckbildchen, a phenomenon in European folk medicine where the sick were encouraged to swallow an image of a saint to find a cure.⁰⁴ The original images were printed in large quantities and distributed at pilgrimage sites where people afflicted by illness sought refuge.

In Goldin+Senneby’s recent exhibition ‘Flare-Up’, shown first in Accelerator in Stockholm and later at MIT List Visual Arts Center in Massachusetts, coniferous trees and resin take centre stage.⁰⁵ The title alludes to a period of increased inflammation in the human body, during which symptoms intensify or recur, as well as to the inflammable nature of pine resin. One ton of amber-coloured pine resin was heated to melting point and then poured over the exhibition hall’s floor to cover it in shimmering shades of fiery yellow. Inside the gallery, a persistent humming sound echoed from Lego Pedometer Cheating Machines (2019). These are devices copied from homemade Lego contraptions found on various YouTube patient forums and designed to trick smartphone pedometers and thus circumvent insurance companies’ requirements to share personal health data. Visitors were invited to navigate the whole exhibition via a 15-metre-long ramp made from the waste of the Swedish wood industry. The ramp served to make the exhibition wheelchair accessible despite the split levels of the galleries.

Resin is a tree’s immune system made tangible; it heals the tree’s wounds and protects against fungi and pests. It has long been used in folk medicine and played a central role in the global economy with the production of tar for waterproofing ships since Viking times. To extract the viscous liquid, cut after cut is made in the coniferous trees that have been planted across Sweden. Goldin+Senneby’s Multiple Scars (2021) consists of casts and frottages of scar formations on pine trees that have been tapped for sap. The title alludes to multiple sclerosis and the scars it leaves in the body. In (2025), a loblolly pine was genetically modified to drastically increase resin production, thus boosting the tree’s immune system and ‘fighting’ more effectively against insects and pests. The Florida lab that initiated the genetic modification envisioned a new lucrative source of renewable energy. Here, encased in a massive block of back-lit yellow resin, the spindly pine evokes the energy crisis and mummification, as well as the trade in medieval relics, believed to cure disease and ward off evil. The weeping baby tree has also become a fragment in an ongoing literary project through which the artists invited author Katie Kitamura to tell the story of the pine from its own point of view.

Painting the Forest Floor
It strikes me that many of us no longer know how to use the earth – or rather, how to coexist with it. Ecological solidarity rests on the mutual dependence of humans and nature, on what we might call an ethics of care. The silent knowledge of the garden – the knowledge of the inherent power of plants, of poison and antidote – lives on, visually encoded in art history. At the Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, there is a seventeenth-century Wunderkammer or cabinet of curiosities. These structures housed collections of all manner of wondrous and, from a Western European perspective, exotic objects without distinction between science and superstition, nature and the man-made. The cabinets also encapsulated Europe’s fascination with its new colonial territories and its desire to possess all the wonders and knowledge of the world for itself. Such cabinets were, of course, the precursors of today’s museums.

On the walls of this particular section of the museum hang several examples of sottobosco painting, that is, close-up depictions of amphibians, plants, insects, and fungi. Together they form the understory, a micro-landscape celebrating the delicate ecosystem of the lowest level of the forest. Teeming with life beneath the surface, they stand in contrast to the nature morte (dead nature) or still life paintings that captured imaginative arrangements of plants and fruits drawn from different seasons and continents. In many cases, all the animals, insects and fungi in the sottobosco paintings are specified in the museum’s descriptions of the works, but the plants are only described in general terms, or not mentioned at all. Yet the plants are at least as important to the context as the rest, and bring to mind pharmakon, the Greek word for medicinal herb or remedy, a concept meaning both poison and cure in philosophy, and, strikingly, also used to describe toxic pigments or artificial colour. Perhaps we no longer possess the keys to interpret these works. New research shows that an artist such as the mid-seventeenth-century Dutch painter Otto Marseus van Schrieck deliberately placed a poisonous plant next to the herb that could serve as its antidote in his compositions.⁰⁶ He depicted inedible mushrooms with colour pigments known to be toxic. Today we know that this micro-world plays a significant role in the forest ecosystem by absorbing and retaining water, creating new habitats, preventing erosion and supplying the soil with nutrients, both toxic and healing. Van Schrieck probably sensed this too. Poison and antidote.

Hospitalising the World’s Oldest Spruce
When the Skåne region in southern Sweden planned a new hospital area in Malmö in 2018, Goldin+Senneby were awarded a major public art commission. The region’s prospectus describes the new environment as a ‘Hospital of the Future’, featuring ‘healing greenery’ in the form of living green roofs and both vertical and horizontal plantings.⁰⁷ Goldin+Senneby proposed to bring a spruce tree into the hospital. Their proposal coincided with the beginning of my cancer treatment. We too are connected by poison and antidote.

The artists’ installation Spruce Time (2024–ongoing) developed as a greenhouse constructed in a passageway between two eleven-storey hospital buildings on Inga-Marie Nilsson Street in Malmö. On one side of the passageway are the neurology and urology departments, and on the other side, intensive care, the pain clinic and radiation physics. Healthcare staff hurry past a small convenience store and the Apoteket Hjärtat (The Heart Pharmacy) in the strong wind that sweeps between the high hospital buildings. Inside the glass and metal architecture, a specimen of the species Picea abies has been growing since 2024. It is a cloned sapling from the tree Old Tjikko, a windswept spruce whose root system is estimated to be over 9,000 years old and which attracts curious tourists to Fulufjället mountain in Dalarna on the border with Norway. According to Wikipedia, Old Tjikko is the world’s oldest known individual tree clone. Whilst old parts have died, the roots have survived and new parts have grown so that it is still genetically identical to its ancient root system.

The artists chose the form of this tall glasshouse in a way that brings to mind a huge incubator or a life-support chamber. On a cold and windy day in April, the little sapling inside stirs my protective instincts. The artists describe it as a dedicated nursery for the spruce – a miniature hospital where all the focus is on the care of this single tree. The greenhouse is connected to the hospital’s existing cooling system, and the tree’s needs for light, humidity, carbon dioxide and nutrients control the climate. Work on the tree chamber was developed in collaboration with Skogforsk (the Forest Research Institute of Sweden), drawing on early dialogues with the Tree Computer Project at MIT Media Lab in Boston – a biosphere controlled by sensory feedback from a single tree.

In many ways, the cloned spruce is a living marker of the Anthropocene, a geological epoch defined by human impact. As global warming accelerates, the contrast deepens with the climate in which Old Tjikko has lived most of its life on Fulufjället. By offering a rare moment of stillness within a large-scale healthcare environment, Spruce Time highlights the value of care and interdependence at a time when social divides widen and access to medical treatment is becoming increasingly limited. How much should healthcare cost? Is professional care a civil right? Will today’s growing demands for cost-effective and productive healthcare extinguish the idea of welfarism, the political philosophy holding that the state’s primary task is to maximise the individual’s health, welfare and social security? Tellingly, Goldin+Senneby’s project has been criticised for its costs. Some people ask why invest in an artistic installation when the region is grappling with staff cuts and lengthy waiting times for patients?

At the time of writing, I have recently started a new antibody therapy that will take approximately two years. I have received four of forty injections included in the first part of the treatment, using a preparation that currently generates over US$11 billion in global annual market revenue. I am told that the antibodies act as ‘homing missiles’ that target or block disease-causing cells or proteins. Research is progressing, closely accompanied by new military-strategic metaphors. As patients, we are constantly urged to fight and wage war so as not to ‘lose the battle’. And yet time remains many patients’ worst enemy.

As I stand at Malmö University Hospital and look into the incubator at the spruce, I think of another conifer – the yew tree that recently filled my blood with paclitaxel. Two conifers: one the source of a poison turned cure, the other a nine-thousand-year witness to everything we are only beginning to understand. I realise that Goldin+Senneby’s work is first and foremost about us humans and our persistent attempts to take control of the uncontrollable. And about the right to receive appropriate care. Their art becomes an image of the welfare model’s undergrowth for me, recalling those sottobosco paintings in Stockholm. The undergrowth sustains life close to the ground but is rarely seen or valued until it disappears. Perhaps I am really living in the Age of the Spruce.