"Meek is the Warrior – Part One" examines the intersections of lost knowledge, medical innovation, and the dispossession of feminist practices through the lens of fermentation. The project revolves around fermenting insect shells to create a wound-healing balm, a process rooted in ancient wisdom and often associated with witchcraft and care practices historically marginalized under patriarchal and capitalist regimes.

Fermentation—a practice long carried out in domestic and communal spaces—has been appropriated by contemporary medical and scientific innovation. Within the framework of capitalism and imperialism, these processes are reframed as "new discoveries," erasing the histories of knowledge systems that were never allowed to define the future. This reclamation of "innovation" under the guise of progress underscores a broader hegemony in medical history, one that privileges institutionalized expertise while suppressing practices historically linked to women, witches, and indigenous communities.

The work also interrogates the concept of the body—not only as a physical entity but as an emotional and cultural archive. Bodies carry inscriptions: marks of care, trauma, healing, and history. These inscriptions tell stories of dispossession, from the commodification of knowledge to the erasure of practices deemed irrational or primitive under patriarchal logics. By working with insect shells—fragile, discarded, and symbolically transformative—the project makes visible these layers of history and materiality. Insects, with their exoskeletons that are both protective and breakable, become metaphors for bodies that resist and adapt, that carry both memory and potential for healing.

This feminist exploration challenges the medical-industrial complex’s narratives of progress by highlighting the historical continuity of care practices often dismissed as unscientific. It asks: How do we recover knowledge systems that have been dispossessed? What happens when innovation is built on the erasure of the very pasts it claims to transcend?

In this first chapter of Meek is the Warrior, the fermenting balm becomes both a literal act of healing and a speculative vessel for imagining futures that honor the interconnectedness of material, emotional, and historical bodies. It reclaims the transformative potential of what has been dismissed, suggesting that the knowledge of witches, healers, and care networks has never been truly lost—it has only been waiting to reemerge.