Herber, désherber (Planting, Unplanting) (2020)
A woman digs a hole in the ground with her bare hands. Her fingers are covered with dark, textured clumps of soil. It gets into the lines of her palms; it gets under her fingernails. In the hole, she places a seed or a small plant. She presses the soil down, smoothening the surface, its grooves, its bumps. She repeats this gesture again and again, in long columns, row after row.
The same hands move over the same terrain some time after. This time she rips plants from the soil, quickly, skilfully, ruthlessly. Extracting the entire organism, from its leaves to its roots, her aim is clear - to destroy life, completely, entirely, so that it will not grow back.
Both gestures are not very different from each other and both participate in the process of care. In the first case, it is fostering the conditions for life to thrive. In the second, it is removing life that is thriving.
The gestures of planting and weeding are part of the usual scope and uses of soil for food production. It is a hands-on, repetitive, physical labour which involves both care and violence. It is care that maintains and repairs interdependent worlds so that we can live in them as well as possible. Violence is the doings needed to sustain our bodies through the consumption of other living beings.
Foregrounding those doings needed to sustain human life, means acknowledging the violence involved in the removal of some plants and the care for others. Those gestures participate in the complex webs that connect the living and nonliving, the human and nonhuman, in continuing cycles of living and dying.
Those cycles are fundamental to regeneration and without regeneration there is no sustainability. Sustainable forms of agriculture involve maintaining long-term soil fertility and the conditions for biological activity and diversity within the soil. It involves thinking in circles, instead of along lines, the lines of progress and production.
Herber, désherber, 2020, HD Video with sound, 17 min.
