Justine Youssef

With the toughest care, The most economical tenderness is an artwork shipped to the viewer, where audiences can register to receive a package containing a vial of scented oil.

Distilled by hand using a process which Justine Youssef inherited matrilineally, the scented oil is made of the Blessed Milk Thistle (Silybum marianum), a therapeutic plant native to Lebanon that becomes invasive under certain climates. First introduced by settlers to Maui, Hawai’i for medicinal use, the plant quickly eluded cultivation and its presence is now considered highly noxious in the Makawao area. 

The work is in dialogue with the scent-related artefacts that have been uprooted from Greater Syria and housed at the Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture & Design in Honolulu. The scent of Blessed Milk Thistle unfolds both a space to interrogate histories of settler relationships to land, and a portal to access traces of the plant’s restorative properties, knowledge of which has become erased through displacement. 

With the toughest care, The most economical tenderness moves through routes similar to early colonial ships, via ruptured supply chains from Dharug Land in Sydney, Australia, where the plant was harvested and is equally invasive. It takes its name from Judith Wright’s The Eucalypt and the National Character, a poem that co-opts a native plant and likens it to the settler Australian identity.