August 2015 – presque perdu / nearly lost

salmon smoking rack bean trellis

above: early February 2016 after the runner bean vines have died back

below: July 2015 at the height of flowering of the runner beans

This work is currently installed on Plot 20 in The Burgoyne Valley Community Farm at 2232 Fulford Ganges Road, east of Reid Creek, on Salt Spring Island. The trellis is roughly in the centre of this modified scene, just south-west of the West Gate.

The dimensions are roughly 9 meters x 3 meters and extending at times to a height of 7 meters. Some of the vines may well establish as perennials and the local, dead wood, harvested from the riparian forest along Reid Creek, is already beginning to break down — contributing more nutrients such as nitrogen to a clay soil that is depleted by partial water-logging and standing water in the winter. The trellis will be replanted next year but the design will change as the height increases to support the long vines.

This traditional variety of Scarlet Emperor Runner Bean, that was only planted on June 10, 2015, started blossoming massively on this trellis on July 24. Many honey bees and some hummingbirds are now enjoying the trellis.

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Focusing on traditional indigenous fruit trees: Revisiting traditional experiences of gratitude

chokecherry drupes, Salt Spring Island, 2015 August 13

Focusing on traditional indigenous fruit trees: Revisiting traditional experiences of gratitude

For most of us, fruit comes as a gift unless we’re working full-time in orchards or vineyards. Even if we buy fruit, it is typically under-priced. Fruit wild trees can be free. There is a movement to make new orchards where the fruit can be freely picked with a monetary exchange. Fruit in many culture carries symbolism as very special gifts. In the monotheistic religions, fruits such as the apples of Eden and the dates of desert oases link providence and knowledge.

Both the recent human societies of Western Europe and on the West Coast of North America were build on the fruit of a small number of gene pools especially:

Malus species including apple, pear and crabapple;

Prunus species including plum and cherries;

Corylus species all producing similar kinds of hazelnuts;

Rubus including raspberry and blackberry;

Fragaria, strawberry; and

Vaccinium including blueberries and huckleberries.

While many of these wild species in both Europe and in North America are under-documented, there are a number of archives with precise, scientific photographs. In contrast, we have not been able to afford, in recent years, the medium-format photographic equipment with which I was educated and on which I developed my career. In recent years, Julian Castle and I started photographing and making video clips with the best equipment that we have been able to find: old (un)smart, mobile telephones — without the focusing functions of more recent smart phones.

The images are blurred and crude but at least we found these wild trees. Some of these groves were carefully cultivated and protected by Salish communities as late as the mid-twentieth century. These trees hold many stories and layers of culture within the landscape. Celebrating this fruit and carefully harvesting it for food can be part of a decolonial recovery process when there is full acknowledgement of the ownership of these sites and resources by the traditional communities that nurtured and have protected them. This decolonial process, linked with gratitude, could eventually lead to many more areas returned to their rightful owners with traditional stewardship and harvesting re-established.

In Canada, we are currently reconsidering a swath of damaging over-generalizations about the diversity of indigenous cultures and religions.[*] After well over a century of cultural genocide, this recovery is sometimes painful. But while indigenous cultures in the Americas often have ‘loved’ the Earth, there is as much richness in those experiences and practices, and as many contradictions, as those across European and Asian cultures.

Two relatively common experiences around the Salish Sea, related to food resources, ecosystems and sites, are rich feelings of gratitude, especially around fish and fruit, often expressed in quiet practices, prayers and reflection embodying ‘conversations’ with those plants. In Salish cultures, people engaged in rich sets of horticultural practices from planting to burning and pruning, often ‘talked’ to plants particularly ones that they ate (and in harvesting rarely killed entire plants outright). So the blurred aspect of these photographs is not just about temporary economic constraints and as about finding ways to enjoy, learn from, and protect these often dwindling groves and legacies of indigenous communities now struggling to recover their cultures. The blurs are the beginnings of new conversations.

Last year, we ate more fruit in the Rubus and Vaccinium gene pools. This year has been one of the warmest and driest on record so those berries dried early. These days, we have been fortunate to find early ripening crabapple and chokecherries, both genetic linked to similar apple and pear (Malus) and cherry and plum (Prunus) populations in Asia and Europe.

These drupes (little tasty and very edible cherries) of chokecherry, Prunus virginiana subsp. demissa, are from Salt Spring Island on August 13, 2015. This fruit (with medicinal bark) was a crucial fruit in the formation of Salish society and there are sites at the eastern end of the Fraser Valley with many thousands of cherry pits in old pits going back at least 8,000 years. As well as still important to the W̱SÁNEĆ (Saanich) First Nation and the Shhweenustham ‘u tu Quw’utsun Hwulmuhw (Cowichan Tribes), this slender tree (preferred on the prairies for teepee poles) is important for maintaining woodland and vegetation cover, more generally, because it is poisonous and is not eaten by deer and (introduced) rabbits.

Along with berries, these crabapples was perhaps the most important fruit in terms of quantities eaten. Crabapple groves often held powerful nutritional, spiritual and cultural importance.[†]

The rich gene pools of Rubus, including raspberry, and Vaccinium, including blueberry and cranberry, also span Pacific Canada, Asia and Western Europe. There are four native Rubus species on Salt Spring Island: salmonberry, thimbleberry, trailing blackberry, and blackcap (raspberry). Salmon berry, Rubus spectabilis, starts blooming in late February and will be fruiting as early as late April with blackcap raspberry, Rubus leucodermis, fruiting from late June into August. And of the native Vaccinium species, red huckleberry, Vaccinium parvifolium, is more common but vulnerable as damper forests are cut and the climate heats.

salmonberry, Rubus spectabilis, Salt Spring Island, 2014 May 27

blackcap raspberry, Rubus leucodermis, Salt Spring Island, 2014 June 26

red huckleberry, Vaccinium parvifolium, 2012 July 26

All of these species are the objects of ceremonies to celebrate the first fruits of every year. Reflecting on these practices linking gratitude, conversations, horticulture and ecological protection is for another year and another essay.

[*] Garneau, David. 2015. Indigenous Criticism: On Not Walking With Our Sisters. Border Crossings 34(2) (#134): 78 – 82. http://bordercrossingsmag.com/article/indigenous-criticism

[†] Nancy J. Turner. 2014. Ancient Pathways, Ancestral Knowledge: Ethnobotany and Ecological Wisdom of Indigenous Peoples of Northwestern North America. Volume Two – The Place and Meaning of Plants in Indigenous Cultures and Worldviews. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. See pages 90, 189, 196 – 198, 211 – 214, 271, and 344.

Rifting on Proust’s Twentieth Century notions of memory, desire, subjectivity, landscape & narrative

“how paradoxical it is to seek in reality for pictures that are stored in one’s memory” Marcel Proust 1913*

More than any other major twentieth-century author, it was Proust who codified the modern subject: largely a viewer and consumer with peasant knowledge of plants and place effectively under-valued and reduced to a cultural anachronism. Proust’s writing effectively re-enforced French colonialism, extolling the primary of metropolitan culture, at a time when its empire already in decline. Today, Proustian subjectivity in aesthetic experience effectively excludes a group of vital material and collaborative practices particularly important to making public space more effective for a wider range of audiences and populations. And some of these site-based practices, if sufficiently valued in a post-Proustian world, could, in turn, transmit knowledge on how to better survive both as new urbanists, acknowledging and sometimes learning some of the old peasant and traditional indigenous expertise, and in deteriorating environments where new kinds of creative survival are increasingly necessary.

It has been over a century since the publication of Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu: Du côté de chez Swann. This 1913 volume and the following six in the subsequent decade, comprising the entirety of À la recherche du temps perdu, effectively constructed and reproduced modern notions of memory, subjectivity, desire, landscape, and narrative. If there was one single body of text that laid the basis for both contemporary experience of subjectivity, class positioning, sexual autonomy, consumerism, and landscape aesthetics, it was À la recherche du temps perdu. Much of what we consider ‘modern’ and even ‘postmodern’ was codified by Proust.

Marcel Proust centre with partner Lucien Daudet, on right, with photograph from the years when Proust was completing À la recherche du temps perdu

But today we can see some of the constraints and redundancies embodied in the world of Swann and À la recherche du temps perdu, more generally. Swann lived in an aggressively culturally chauvinist, colonial and imperial world where control, devaluation, often the effective obliteration of the planet’s indigenous communities was the norm when not the oeuvre. Without mentioning colonial economics and cultural politics, À la recherche du temps perdu normalized and sometimes glorified the imperial project on which much of the social changes of Cambray and the new wealth of Swann’s stockbroker family were bankrolled. While Proust outlined a kind of autonomous sexuality, defined by desire and empowered by class and a rigid masculinity, erotic diversity was effectively side-lined when not suppressed. And the transformation of France’s agricultural landscapes and communities lead to a fetishized experience of nature often divorced from ecological and other labour and economic relationships. Thus the waning peasant class, centred on traditional knowledge rooted in manual labour, was considered backward in comparison to the rapacious tastes of the new urban bourgeoisie. From today’s vantage point of deterioration of the biosphere, forms of globalization intensifying social inequities, and a resurgence of indigenous governments and renewed assertion of language, culture, land ownership, Swann’s relatively elite world is receding and becoming less credible.

The galley drafts for the first edition, in 1913, of À la recherche du temps perdu: Du côté de chez Swann

Today the architectures of Proust’s early twentieth century memory is worth exploring as part of the process of decolonizing the narratives of forgetting, remembrance, knowledge, landscape, sexuality, and individuality. Today’s investigations, spanning research, visual art and interventions in public space, becomes devices for exploring the differences in experience, legacies, wealth, and opportunities for Western European communities that were not colonized, such as around metropolitan Geneva, and societies and cultures that are still experiencing neocolonial inequities on a daily basis as with the Salish and other indigenous populations in the rapidly urbanizing south-western corner of Pacific Canada.

Our goal in this 2014-2016 project based at Utopiana, Geneva, is to imagine and propose the re-establishment of wild and traditional fruit trees in some of the public space of Geneva, Romandie, and the Pay du Gex, in Europe, and on the edge of the Salish Sea. To complete this work, we explore the divergent experiences of traditional knowledge, forgetting, and remembrance for uncolonised Western Europe and for postcolonial British Columbia unsorted the contradictory legacies of the colonized and the colonist.

So while there is much to ‘unlearn’ from Proust’s world, there were whispers in À la recherche du temps perdu of what new relationships are coming alive today with clues in the text remaking what we know as the ‘individual’, the ‘community’, ‘remembrance’, ‘nature’, and ‘desire’. Re-structuring these underlying modernist relationships through art interventions in public space to reassert knowledge, cultures, and most importantly ecosystems and human material relationships is the underlying project in responding to Utopiana’s call for the 2015 thematic residence, La Bête et l’adversité, and in our work, À la recherche de certaines récoltes presque perdu: Decolonising permaculture: The greatest adversity comes from forgetting.

Our exploration of La Bête et l’adversité is that ‘The Beast’ in nature also includes human memory. There are perils with the human brain, the typical Homo sapiens ‘hard-wiring’, in what we forget and remember, what our cultures guide us to recall. This ‘beast’ is as natural as nature and as constructed as any other aspect of human culture and community. So at times, we honour the pioneering reflexivity in Proust’s ‘Remembrance’ and moreover rift on it in exploring the new ways, new art, and new interventions in public space, for which the seven volume planted some of the seeds for the uncertain but very fecund present.

*Proust, Marcel. 1956. Swann’s Way. (C. K. Scott Moncrieff trans.). New York: Random House. page 611.