How to speak without disturbing their silence? How to map when their elusive illegibility is refused to be mapped? How to understand without botanizing/formalizing their dynamic beings?
In the ruin of Agricultural school of Bahia in Brazil, in the land of a formal sugarcane plantation, the project follows the spatial practices of African Oil Palm (Elaeis Guineensis), Strangler Fig (Ficus Aurea), Sugar Cane (Saccharum Officinarum) and Mangrove (Rhizophora Mangle) that were encountered at site.
All the memories/histories are rooted in the earth, water and air. The project tries to translate the intertidal area among languages of species, while recognizing the asymptote of translation. In its waxing and waning are the spatial practices of the botany, the migratory ancestry and their collective resilience/ reconciliation, and they are the unspoken language, or the notations of the plants. Words are the shadow of things, plants are in the shadow of history. Yet the plants are already reclaiming the place, hiding in plain sight, doing spatial practice, the choreography of the impossible: Fugitivity is sugar cane’s spatial practice; Resilience is African Oil Palm’s spatial practice; “In am_bush” is strangler fig’s spatial practice; Quilombo (quilombamento) is mangrove’s spatial practice and wisdom.
And what is memory? In Yoruba’s old saying, “Exú killed a bird yesterday, with a stone he threw today.”
