Vegetation and politics

Immersed in the leather smell of the estate agent’s car, Oyster observes the yellow carpet of Brassica tournefortii in full flower, extending beyond the car window. The jaundiced light is thrown back and colours eyes and skin yellow.

“The cowboys didn’t have tumbleweeds”, he says. “It wasn’t until the late nineteenth century that tumbleweed seeds, Russian thistles, came over from Eurasia in the wool of sheep. Moroccan mustard came over in the dirt that sailing ships used for ballast. The silver trees out there, those are Russian olives, Elaeagnus augustifolia. The hundreds of white fuzzy rabbit ears growing along the highway shoulder are Verbascum thapsus, woolly mulleins. The twisted dark trees we just passed, Robinia pseudoacacia, black locust. The dark green brush flowering bright yellow is Scotch broom, Cytisus scoparius.”
“They’re all part of a biological pandemic”, he says. “Those old Hollywood westerns,” Oyster says, “with the tumbleweeds and cheatgrass and shit?” He shakes his head and says, “None of this is native, but it’s all we have left.” He says, “Almost nothing in nature is natural anymore. What we think of as nature,” Oyster says, “everything’s just more of us killing the world. Every dandelion’s a ticking atom bomb. Biological pollution. Pretty yellow devastation.” “The only biodiversity we’re going to have left,” he says, “is Coke versus Pepsi.”

Born of the vitriolic pen of Chuck Palahniuk, hardcore environmentalist and aspiring eco-terrorist Oyster, from the novel Lullaby, in a series of quips while on the road, seems to hit on some of the central themes of the exhibition “Vegetation as a Political Agent”. Hosted by PAV – Parco Arte Vivente in Turin and realised in collaboration with the city’s Botanical Garden, it describes, from the point of view of social conflict, the deep, passionately-committed and demanding relationship that has always existed between man and plants. From Neolithic times, when the cultivation of grain played a decisive role in configuring the birth of the first settled community formations, to primordial forms of economic globalisation that defined, through colonial plantations and maritime trade, the first systems of species control and up to more recent expressions of post-colonial oppression carried out by agricultural multi-nationals via genetic engineering applied to seeds. “This exhibition has emerged from the desire to retrieve a political-social history of the plant world”, says curator Marco Scotini, “and to recognise in the vegetal element a moment of social emancipation, of disobedience and resistance to the practices of subjugation perpetrated by the wielding of power. Green is now not just something to simply protect but to reinvent”.

Situated in a basin shaped like a plant cell at the Parco d'Arte Vivente – a luxuriant oasis of 23,000 square metres peacefully set in an ex-industrial site – the collective “Vegetation as a Political Agent” is like a twelve-spoked wheel and the energy that makes it turn is that of artists, architects, activists, agronomists, naturalists who have made the ennoblement of the ecosystem-world the sole commitment in their work – at times with a deliberately romantic spirit at times with a decidedly warlike attitude. A terribly rigorous exhibition, yes, but also delightful and intoxicating like a lilac aftershave, that uses the work of RozO (Philippe Zourgane and Séverine Roussel), Quando la vegetazione non è decorazione (2014) to locate its gravitational field. Here, in the shade of a temporary architecture of bamboo and coconut leaves – a kind of hut built in the Reunion islands to commemorate 150 years since the abolition of slavery – two teeming swarms of images are juxtaposed against stills from the film Chien thang Tay Bac (North West Victory), filmed in 1952 by the Viet Minh military forces during the war against French occupation (won thanks to the construction of ghost bridges of vegetation under the surface of the water), and the bucolic photographs of the harvesting of wheat in Algeria taken in 1956 and in 1958 by the French army, that show the Maghrebi landscape mercilessly subjugated by foreign domination. As if to say that vegetation can be as much an instrument of conquest as a device for resistance to occupation. A tossed stone, a parched flowerbed, exhausted by an energetic bath of herbicides and weedkillers (Steril Field by the collective Critical Art Ensemble) becomes a theatre of extermination for invasive species not genetically modified, while a purple-coloured colony of Mesembryanthemum (a plant originally from southern Africa that the South African artist of Swiss origin Dan Halter planted in the heart of the PAV in the spring) in full bloom assumes the appearance of the alien from the famous Space Invaders video game.

Inside the museum, the voice of Amilcar Cabral, Guinean agronomist and politician who in 1973 led the Guinea Bissau and the islands of Capo Verde to independence from Portugal (here remembered in the short film Conakry by Filipa Cesar), softly rises like an exhalation of menthol smoke. All around is a ferment of accounts of community projects effortfully germinated over the last thirty years like poppies between the rocks: from the agricultural community The Farm by Bonnie Ora Sherk, blossoming on the edges of the San Francisco highway in 1974, to the collective gardens of Boston and the self-managed allotment of Marjetica Potrc at the Ubuntu Park in Soweto, in South Africa (2014). Your head turns from here to there. In one room you can listen to what is said at Nomeda & Gediminas Urbonas, the legislator Mel King on the advantages of urban permaculture. In another it is Adelita Husni-Bey who gathers the treesitting protests of a community of British activists, while not far away Fernando Garcia-Dory relaunches the pioneering model for the recycling of refuse by George Chan. You can see the original sachets of biological seeds for rebalancing the ground by Ayreen Anastas & Rene Gabri and the powerful mural Zapantera Negra with which Emory Douglas took it upon himself to retie the opposing ideologies of the Black Panther movement and the Escuelita Zapatista supporting the rural working-classes. The theatrical piece Stop Pollution! staged in 1983 by Piero Gilardi in the Mohawk Indian reserve, with its decidedly carnival feel, can be seen alongside the more intimist agricultural actions self-choreographed by Imre Bukta in the 1970s: a contribution to a conceptual discipline in which the Hungarian artist lends himself, like a fruit tree, to multiple grafts of identity. Finally a series of postcards of a dry and muggy day in Mexico where transgenic maize is illegally cultivated, sent to the curator of the exhibition by Claire Pentecost, a theoretical demonstration in defence of bio-diversity led by three belligerent hyper-nourished corn-cobs (O.G.M. Free by Gilardi), reminds us how genetically modified organisms are the new colonial symbol of modernity.

In what way is it possible through vegetation to produce a space in which to escape control and surveillance is a very deep question that can mean different things. In this sense the extensive exploration of “Vegetation as a Political Agent” pushes itself beyond the gardens of anthropocentrism to promote new forms community in the name of social ecology and ecosophic ethics, before nature remains nothing but a memory, like the smell of cologne that lingers on an old handkerchief.
–
© all rights reserved

until November 2, 2014
Vegetation as a Political Agent
curated by Marco Scotini
PAV – Parco Arte Vivente
Via Giordano Bruno 31, Torino