Palm Trees and the City

Select Views of Luminous Subjects: Palm Trees and the City Juana María Bravo Supervisor: Samuel Silva, PhD Masters Dissertation and Project Work Presented to the MADEP Faculty of Fine Arts – University of Porto in Art and Design Class of 2018–2020 for the Public Space. Abstract: The present work is an essayistic exploration of image-based relationships between nature and city in the context of Climate Change. It burrows through the history of palm trees in Porto to relate how tropical vegetation became a repository of dispairing meanings for the European consciousness during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and how that process affected nature/culture and metropole/periphery duologues. Finally, it looks at how the environmental crisis has impacted these duologues using the concept of Landscape Crisis, i.e., the moment when Climate Change is made visible in familiar and dear images. Keywords: Landscape Crisis, Natural History, Contemporary Art, Gardens of Porto, Garden Cities, Mydy taha, Tropicality, Timefulness Note: The videos and exercises associated with this text, as well as other projects I developed during the Masters are available at the Students’ Blog: https:// studentsdropwork.com/2018/08/01/juana-bravo/ Table of Contents Introduction (6) A Brief (Hi)Story of the Authorship of Palm Trees (15) City Gardens (32) Palm trees in Porto (39) Garden Cities (51) The Mountain as a Screen (68) Conclusions (79) List of Images (84) Acknowledgements (90) Bibliography (92) Years do odd things to identity. What does it mean to say I am that child in the photograph at Kishmish in 1935? Might as well say I am the shadow of a leaf of the acacia tree felled seventy years ago moving on the page the child reads. Might as well say I am the words she read or the words I wrote in other years, flicker of shade and sunlight as the wind moves through the leaves. — Ursula K. Le Guin, Leaves fig. 0.0 Introduction 7 “I want to tell you what to do” was the opening sentence in the first video I made for this project. It was followed by drawn-out footage I had filmed in Lisbon, over which I made some commonplace reflections on the urgency of the current climate crisis (without naming it explicitly) and the feeling of not having enough time. Eventually, I confessed, “I want to tell you what to do, but I don’t know what that is.” That second statement rings truer now than it did one year ago, by which this text is less a self-assured and concluding dissertation and more a storytelling exploration of climate crisis anxiety with two main characters: palm trees and cities. Specifically, palm trees taken from the tropics to more temperate climates during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and cities where they became part of the urban landscape, particularly Porto. Rationale, Questions, and Structure This inquiring about palm trees in Porto is part of a more general reflection of nature’s place in the city. To this effect, I chose palm trees over other kinds of vegetation for their readability; whether in the city or the dense jungle, palm trees stand out from the background even to the most botanically illiterate of us. I also chose them to explore transatlantic relations between Europe and South America derived from a colonial past and enlightenment science protracting. The third reason I chose them turned out to be the trap door into despair: palm trees in Porto (and in many other cities) are dying. Different ailments plague different species. In Portugal and Spain, the Red Palm Weevil has received special attention for being particularly ruinous to the Canary date palm,1 one of the most widespread and best-regarded species in the region. 1 Fernandes, 2016; pp. 4–11 8 The condition of their disappearance dictated how I approached their history in ways that I did not anticipate. While I’d been concerned with the environmental crisis for several years now, this was different, and I can’t tell why. Simply put, I started looking out my window to the Canary date palms in the Cemitério de Agramonte and feeling the water coming up to my neck (our neck?). This daily melodrama and a new-found love for disaster movies informed the first stages of the project, but the state of shock from where I was working is not a place I’d want anyone, including myself, to stay in for very long. I hoped writing was a way out of it. Like such, a few months elapsed in a wax and wane of lethargic lonely pondering and urgency for collective action. The climate crisis allows for these types of contradictions because it happens in extreme slow motion, and then all at once. Within the broader field of landscape research, this inability to cope with changing sceneries is called “landscape crisis.”2 To some extent, is the moment the climate crisis is made visible in comprehensible ways, that is, through the changes in images we find familiar—I would add, images that we inhabit. This becomes relevant once we consider that facing the climate crisis involves understanding phenomena at different scales and in an embodied way; large events over large scales of time are mostly not circumscribable in most people’s minds. However, this doesn’t mean that localized, unimpactful images like dead palm trees are “effective” in mobilizing climate action.3 They might’ve had a 2 Antrop, 2013; p. 17 3 “Communicating with and engaging the public in the problem of climate change is likely to involve a movement away from the traditional icons of climate change, including polar bears and melting polar ice caps, towards landscape-scale visualizations relevant to local people. Work has begun to examine how climate change is framed in communication strategies, such as the National Trust’s (2005) Shifting Shores, through images of gain and loss, both distant and local. The effect of such images of clifftop erosion and severe storm events utilized by the National Trust to gain support for their strategies cannot be guaranteed, for ‘whilst making climate change personally relevant may help to situate it in people’s everyday lives, it might also lessen the extent to which impacts are viewed as severe and requiring action.’” (Leyshon & Geoghegan, 2013; pp. 464–465) 9 profound effect on me personally, but I mainly understand them as hints or strings to the hyperobject4 that is global warming. Landscape is an encompassing and somewhat hazy concept with deep historical liaisons to art and visuality at large. In this work, I approach questions about the distance between culture/ nature, humans/nonhumans, and metropole/periphery, through a rudimentary understanding of landscape as a cultural interplay between humans and biophysical elements; because of this, the conceptual delineations of “landscape,” “city,” and “nature” are fluid throughout the text. The debate on the concept of “nature,” particularly, has become contentious in recent years. There are valid reasons to be more specific when talking about “nature” as a failure to do so can result in oversimplification, further division between the categories of humans and nonhumans, and essentialistic discourses. Here, however, I’ve decided for the sake of clarity to use “nature” in its colloquial definition, as shorthand for living and non-living organic things, their processes, the processes around them not directly caused by human economic activity, the soil, the earth’s mantle, the stratosphere, etc. That said, the text will unfold in five chapters: 1. A Brief Hi(Story) of the Authorship of Palm Trees, where I discuss some of the mechanisms through which landscape images of South America gained scientific validation through the practice of Natural History during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and some examples of how palm trees were filled with meaning by this process. I’ve split the word “history” to focus on the idea of “story” because this brief recount does not follow any historiographical framework; thus, it is not akin to an overarching reconstruction of events. 2. Garden Cities is where I relate some of the events 4 As per object-oriented ontologist Timothy Morton’s (1968–) definition, hyperobjects are things distributed in time and space scales that are massive in relation to humans. The concept involves other aspects like viscosity, being non- local, and a type of filtering into—everyday—life, among other things. Global warming (as he calls it) is a hyperobject, one of the reasons being the inability of humans to correctly interpret the time scale in which it happens. 10 and the context for the introduction of palm trees in northern climates during the mid-nineteenth century. Palm trees, having been built up as alluring symbols of the tropics, arrived in Europe charged with imaginaries. 3. Palm trees in Porto is a brief narration of how palms became part of this city’s landscape, also around the mid-1800s. I approached this part of the research with the idea and fancy of finding the “first palm tree of Porto.” 4. City Gardens explores the concept of “city” using the examples of two alternative urban forms that share some formal qualities between them, but most importantly, consider their placement and their relation to the natural world from their foundation. Lastly, 5. The Mountain as a Screen is a type of afterword where I reflect on this project’s broader questions, the process of making it, and our present contingency. Methodology The methodology for this project is based on two seemingly conflicting ideas: a structured form of engagement that delineates the differences between “objectives,” “strategies,” and “tactics” to create an adaptable yet clear plan.

Load more