Céline Curiol
A plant love story
Translated version in English
He arrived looking relaxed, although no-one had yet dared enter the caravan. I’d been waiting for nearly half an hour, in the middle of a heatwave, ready to believe that my project was dead in the water, when he approached, smiling. As he settled down behind the microphone, he congratulated me on this initiative and then cleared his throat. “I was getting ready to go on holiday, my motorbike was ready, the sun was blazing in the sky and I said to myself, have a little drink before you go and there was a lemon on the table, which I cut and squeezed before spitting out the seeds into the sink”.
So began Marc’s story, and I let him tell me how, on his return, this little seed had literally grown, burrowing roots into the sink drain, and how Marc, with an almost childlike obstinacy, had then set about saving this shoot, full of a new admiration for plants and the efforts made “to accomplish this magnificent feat.”
It was July 2022 and I had just launched an ambitious project, the first part of which, at Beauport Abbey, had received funding from the government’s New Worlds programme. Over the next two months, I collected 65 stories from people of different ages, genders, social backgrounds and nationalities, all of whom had agreed to respond to this incongruous proposal: tell me your plant love story. As a writer, I have never doubted the power of stories – the power to escape, to soothe, to pass on, to inspire, to mobilise, to edify. For this project, however, I didn’t want to write, I wanted to listen. I wanted to get other people to tell stories that they had never told before, keeping the magic of their own voices.
Concerned about the environment, I’m convinced that art has a role to play in the thought revolution that needs to take place if we don’t want to lose our world. But I’m also fully aware of the fact that we need to move on from “raising awareness through information” – factual and intellectual – to changing behaviour, involving the body and emotions. To want to protect, you must first be able to love. And this is where oral narratives can have an impact.
American anthropologist Anna Tsing has studied the way in which the plantation system used by Europe from the 16th century onwards to expand its wealth changed the relationship between humans and plants, and in particular their cultivation, by replacing love with coercion. In this way, the use of intensive single crop farming has established a relationship of extreme domestication guided by the domination and control of both the plants and the workers forced to look after them. However, for such a system to work, the boundaries between the crops, between owners and slaves, whites and blacks, foremen and workers, had to remain clearly established. According to Anna Tsing, the task of maintaining these boundaries – those of the home, the family, the plants and the race – fell to white women. Consequently, the family circle, embodied by the house, set the limits of love. “With the fetishism of domesticity, the home as a space of purity and interdependence, extra-domestic intimacies, whether within or between species, were regarded as archaic dreams or ephemeral affairs”1.
It is these extra-domestic adventures, this age-old intimacy between plants and humans, that my project aims to highlight by rethinking the terms of this relationship. To escape a production-driven or utilitarian approach and enter the precious realm of emotional and memorial connections, I based myself on the notion of love. Incongruous at first, it helped participants recall moments of close proximity to a plant, a tree, a flower or a vegetable to which they had devoted interest, attention or care. Reinforcing their uniqueness, this care made them represent a certain symbolism, an identity even an identity. Often told for the first time, theplant love story acquires a density, a legacy, a liveliness thanks to which the plant is no longer seen as an accessory, a backdrop or a subordinate, but as a companion, a vital encounter, a fully-fledged component of a life. In this way, these stories reflect the concern and fascination, the pleasure and questions that plants raise for the people who have told me about how they have come into contact with them.
The day pregnant Kedma fell in love with a fuchsia without knowing its name. Delighted by the flowers hanging from a Parisian balcony, she had no idea that the plant was, like her, originally from Haiti and had been stripped of its vernacular name to be named after the German botanist Fuchs who had ‘discovered’ it… As a child, Sarah would go every weekend to her father’s bonsai garden, a huge space filled with hundreds and hundreds of trees of various sizes. Twenty-five years later, most of them have grown up for the woman who remembers and struggles to free herself from this vivid and cumbersome legacy…
If the “experience of nature is disappearing”2, I believe it is appropriate and essential to collect, share and circulate these stories. They lead us to reflect on our experiences of nature and the need for them. That’s why, during my residency at Villa Medici this year, I continued to make recordings with gardeners and local residents. In the future, I’d like to continue building the great sound archive I’ve been dreaming of. It would reflect all the facets of the relationships between humans and plants at the beginning of this century, and provide insight into the ways in which the former understand, and therefore also act towards, the latter.
In 2003, psychologist Susan Clayton defined the concept ofenvironmental identity as “a sense of connection with certain parts of the non-human natural environment (…) that influences the way we perceive and act towards the world”3. She found a correlation between environmental identity and the ecological behaviours that people reported adopting. Today, on the strength of its studies, environmental psychology argues that “affects towards nature give rise to an impression of belonging that can ultimately lead to a moral responsibility towards non-humans”4. Art and storytelling in particular awaken these emotions in everyone. So there’s nothing absurd about believing that this sharing of experiences of nature will shape our behaviour and our political choices.