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AGROPOETICS Reader AGROPOETICS Reader Table of Contents Editorial Note 6 Elena Agudio & Marleen Boschen — Soil is an Inscribed Body. On Sovereignty and Agropoetics. - Curational Note 10 Lorenzo Sandoval/The Institute for Endotic Research — Reading Soil as Cultivation: Agropoetics Reader 24 Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui — Amo la Montaña (ensayo visual performativo) 29 Filipa César — Mapping Agropoetics of Liberation 39 Bouba Touré — À Présent, on n’Attend plus la Pluie 67 Mirelle, Jennifer, and Alex Ungprateeb Flynn — Women in Movement, the Patriarchy of Land 85 Marwa Arsanios — Who’s Afraid of Ideology? Ecofeminist Practices Between Internationalism and Globalism 91 Benji Akbulut — Carework as Commons 105 Marisol de la Cadena — Uncommoning Nature 113 Mijo Miquel — The Materiality of the Immaterial 123 Ayesha Hameed — Black Atlantis// The Plantationocene 139 Hervé Yamguen — L’agropoétique est une conscience 151 Maria Ptqk — El laboratorio a cielo abierto 155 Maria Puig de la Bellacasa — Encountering Bioinfrastructure: Ecological Struggles and the Sciences of Soil 161 Luis Berríos-Negrón — Breathtaking Greenhouse Parastructures 181 Huying Ng — Soil’s Metabolic Rift: Metabolizing Hope, Interrupting the Medium 201 INLAND — A Village Plan 215 Asuncíon Molinos Gordo — WAM (World Agriculture Museum) 221 Yemisi Aribisala — Dreams, the jurisdiction of the mouth, and non-conclusions on hunger 227 The Agropoetics Reader unfolds as a collection of texts that informed, Editorial Note grounded, and nourished SAVVY Contemporary’s Soil Is an Inscribed Body: On Sovereignty and Agropoetics’ (30th August - 6th October 2019), an exhibition and research project curated by Elena Agudio and Marleen Boschen. The project was conceived in the framework of The Invention of Science, SAVVY Contemporary’s 2019-2020 programme, devoted to questioning the presumed universality and objectivity of the scientific canon. In this context of reflections and cogitations about the epistemic violence perpetrated by the West against other forms of knowledges, Soil Is an Inscribed Body examined anti-colonial struggles of past and current land conflicts across the world in order to address the invasiveness of neo-agro-colonialism and its extractivist logics. Invited to contribute to the exhibition and to present an artistic position, The Institute of Endotic Research (TIER) proposed to edit a publication together with the curators. The path was longer than expected, the diverted tracks were not few, but here - for the use of readers and many other agropoets - you can find a materialisation of this collaboration. You can linger on a selection of sources that inspired this research and exhibition, retrace the discussions that appeared along the way of its realisation, and engage with the ideas that grounded and sprouted from the project. At the same time, interwoven, you also encounter texts and materials suggested by TIER in dialogue with the curators. The texts reveal manifold approaches: Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s opening piece introduces the application of her methodology of sociology of the image, where she works on decolonizing her own sight by analyzing the social text in everyday interchanges present in her context. Filipa César’s Mapping Agropoetics of Liberation, Marisol de la Cadena’s Uncommoning Nature, and Bouba Touré’s À présent, on n’attend plus la pluie depart from anti-colonial struggles and propose tactics for emancipation and sovereignty. Maria Puig de la Bellacasa and Huiying Ng engage with scientific methods and provide insight to alternative ways of imagining them. Marwa Arsanios’ and Bengi Akbulut’s essays give voices to feminist agendas of soil and commons, unfolding the concept of care and its central role for the reader. Hervé Yamguen’s and Yemisi Aribisala’s pieces open up to other worlds of poetic and dreamy structures. The text of María Ptqk is an exercise of decolonial feminist sci-fi, where pepper would be sent to the space as a trace to understand Earth existence and the human’s self annihilation. Ayesha Hameed’s contribution interweaves a visit to a former sugar plantation with the often violent movements of plants and peoples in the Plantationocene. Asunción Molinos Gordo’s project World Agricultural Museum poses an artistic commentary on the issues of agronomy and how it intersects 7 with contemporary artistic practices. Alex Ungprateeb Flynn’s conversation with members of the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil highlights the importance of intersectionality in land struggles. Both Luis Berríos-Negrón and Mijo Miquel delved into their current academic research, suggesting ways to bring into conversation greenhouses and multitudes, respectively. Our aim was to hint at the earlier stages of the project, to extend the thoughts and processes to the outside of the exhibition, and, for the reader, to take them into the world. Despite being far from covering the range of topics that the term agropoetics could evoke, we wish to present a variety of ways to express current struggles and practices revolving around issues of soil and extraction. We’d like you to think of this collection as a tool to open up discussions about these issues. We invite you to take the reader to whatever soils on which your feet may find ground. 8 Soil is an Inscribed Body. GROUNDING: BUILDING ON PLANETARY DEVASTATION The land, now, On Sovereignty and Agropoetics. (…) it is the storm becalmed. — Amílcar Cabral2 Curatorial note by Elena Agudio We begin with the recognition that the Earth is wretched. This is not a 1 metaphor. It is literally our ground. The Earth is wretched because its and Marleen Boschen soil– that thin layer of earth at the surface of the planet upon which we depend for life – is contaminated, eroded, drained, burnt, exploded, flooded and impoverished on a worldwide scale. — Shela Sheikh and Ros Gray3 Soil is and remains a space of struggle and conflict. Globally, the devastation of landscapes, consumption and exhaustion of natural “resources”, vanishing of species and ecosystems, and the proliferation of wars and cultural genocides have left their marks on the land for centuries. And yet, local communities across geographies and spaces are experimenting with forms of collectivisation, and autonomy as rejections of the capitalist and colonial model of agriculture. It has become clear that most of the discourses around the violence of anthropogenic land-use raised in the past decades do not account for the deep interconnections of patriarchal, racial, and neocolonial patterns of extraction and destruction of lifeworlds. In the face of terrestrial destruction, in which the Earth is both a skin of soil and the planet which we inhabit, contemporary experimental micro-economies of community subsistence farming put forward the power of food and land sovereignty as an affirmation “of the right of populations to decide what to eat and how to produce it,”4 to put it with Mariarosa Dalla Costa. Food is a common good rather than a commodity. Even when looking at soil or water as mere resources for the support of human life, threats of “peak soil” and water wars point to the states of exhaustion, contamination, and desertification inscribed into this thin layer of living matter. All conflicts in recent decades share “the aspect 1 This text was made public as a commentary and concept note to the exhibition of the same title at SAVVY Contemporary, 31.08.– 06.10.2019. 2 Amilcar Cabral, in the poem “Return”, in: Unity and Struggle. Speeches and Writings of Amilcar Cabral, (New York and London: Monthly Review Press, 1979): 4. 3 Ros Gray & Shela Sheikh, “The Wretched Earth”. Third Text, 32:2–3 (2018): 163. 4 Mariarosa Dalla Costa, “Food Sovereignty, Peasants, and Women”. Commoner June 21 (2008): http://www.commoner.org.uk/?p=42 11 of massive destruction of land and with it, resources for subsistence be Coloniality was and is always not only imposed on human beings, they grazing lands or lands for sustainable and diversified agriculture but also on the more-than-human, on plants and microbial life, and primarily intended for domestic consumption.”5 in the making of the binaries of “nature” and “culture”. It inscribes The earth has reached a tipping point. Maria Puig de la Bellacasa itself even into the soil through the decomposed traces of its past suggests that infrastructures often only become visible once they start and continuing brutality, bodies and bones left and kept, others to break down. On a planetary scale, soil becomes a bio-infrastructure removed and repatriated. The botanical sciences of classification necessary for the support of all life: “Today, the worrisome state of soil and plant modification emerged alongside the establishment of in many places has made of it a public matter of concern. We could say plantation economies, made possible by the transatlantic slave trade. that this global perspective alone reveals it as a vital infrastructure of Historian Londa Schiebinger suggests that botanical gardens were bios on Earth. A flow of catastrophic messages is making more visible set up as “experimental stations for agriculture and way stations for its vital importance.”6 Soil as an infrastructure, in this case literally a plant acclimatization for domestic and global trade;”8 they became structure from below, is the living ground for human and more-than- institutional test sites of “improvement”. There is a green thread from human life. It is both biological and geological; its materiality is a this colonisation of more-than-human vegetal life, its conversion