AMAREBE ACT 1/TRACING MOVEMENTS
A lecture performance in 6 parts
PART 1: INTRODUCTION/THE SPECIMEN
I want to tell you the story of a plant.
The story of a very small water lily.
It will be difficult to tell this story because this plant is in constant movement and is constantly transforming. It is difficult to know where to start and in which form to present it to you in order for me to plainly say: Here is Amarebe.
Although this plant is native to the Bugarama Plain in South West Rwanda the cast of characters and the list of places involved in this story are overwhelmingly situated in Europe. This is the story of how a system narrates itself.
Here is one iteration of Amarebe. But this is not Amarebe. This is a scan of a dried herbarium specimen. We are at Mainz University in Germany, West Europe.
A specimen is an individual animal, plant, mineral or other, used as an example of its species for scientific study or display.
The difference between a plant and a specimen is that a plant produces glucose, oxygen and decaying matter. It belongs to a reciprocal system.
Photosynthesis – the ability of plants to combine the energy of the sun with water and bacteria to create their own source of food. This process has shaped the chemical composition of the Earth and made it breathable for all animals, insects and other plants.
We are animals called humans. We do not photosynthesize. For food we take from other organisms like animals, insects and plants. Eugenics is a medical tactic based on the concept of race used to prohibit the reproduction of one population to inhibit the domination of another. It is the belief that some humans, like animals, insects and plants can also be specimens, can be dried or kept in cages.
We are at the Mainz University Herbarium. This specific specimen is classified as the holotype.
A holotype is a single specimen designated by an author to represent and define a new species at the time of its original description. It serves as the permanent reference point for that organism.
We are at Mainz University in Germany, Western Europe. The word university comes from the Latin for “the whole of everything.” It is where humans exchange money for a higher education. In Europe higher education is delivered by universities and colleges because they deliver abstract and ideological training as opposed to teaching a craft or trade which is considered a lower form of education. To think is to live!
Yes yes I know the correct sentence is I think therefore I am. Cogito ergo sum. Descartes loved Latin. Probably for the same reasons why he campaigned for the division of the mind from the body, the human from the animal. Just like Latin, his philosophy was used to maintain a strict gender, class and racial divide. Botany, the scientific study of plants, is the product of Latin, Cartesian dualism and the expansionist desires of empires in the 18th century.
We are at Mainz University in Germany, Western Europe. Here this water lily is called Nymphaea thermarum – according to a system of classification invented by a Swedish man named Carl Linnaeus. Nymphaea refers to the accepted genus of this plant – the genus of the water lily – and thermarum refers to where the plant is known to grow, in hot springs.
In documents which show the entire classification of this water lily within the Linnaean system, it is written down as Nymphaea thermarum Eb. Fisch. This epithet is supposed to refer to the author of the first description of this species. Eb. Fisch. Refers to Eberhard Fischer. According to the Linnaean system, Nymphaea thermarum belongs to the kingdom of plants, Plantae in Latin. The epithet for Plantae is Haeckel. Ernst Haeckel is known for his illustrations of microscopic organisms and all kinds of living things that pop up all over Pinterest and museum exhibitions. He was a horrible little man whose writings on evolution inspired nazi eugenics. Nonetheless, his 1866 contribution to plant evolution remains the reference for the classification of plants.
This is Eberhard Fischer. He encountered the plant in 1987 during an expedition along the Albertine Rift, a geological formation that spans parts of Uganda, The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda, Burundi and Tanzania. In 2008, Fischer returned to the Bugarama Plain and took some plants with him. He reported that the plants’ natural habitat was decaying and decided that it was no longer suitable for them.
Unlike Carl Linnaeus and other humans, this plant is not named as an individual but as an abstract whole, a species. Because although humans can be dried or kept in cages, they are individuals. Individuals recognize themselves with the denominator “I.” In Europe, humans think of themselves as individual “I”s not only separate from one another but from the rest of their environment.
We are at Mainz University in Germany, Western Europe in the presence of the holotype, the original name-bearing specimen of this water lily. In this form, Nymphaea thermarum does not produce glucose, oxygen or decaying matter but it is very valuable. As Nymphaea thermarum, this water lily produces an academic reference. Through this system of classification, it becomes the abstract of a living network. In this abstract form it can be activated at will as the foundations of cultural production.
Cultural production is the process of creating, distributing and consuming cultural goods. Cultural goods are objects shaped by economic, social and technological forces. They include nature documentaries, news and magazine articles and museum exhibitions.
Because it uses the universal Latin and is taught in a university, Botany, the scientific study of plants, is not a cultural production.
PART 2: THE SUPPLY CHAIN
We are in Kew Gardens in Surrey, England. Kew Gardens is one of the largest botanical gardens in the world and is managed by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. In 2008, Eberhard Fischer went back to Rwanda and took live plants and seeds of Amarebe to the botanical gardens of Bonn University in Germany. After arriving in Bonn, just some kilometers from Mainz, some plants were sent to Kew.
We are in Kew Gardens in Surrey England where David Attenborough shot a documentary highlighting the importance of the scientific work at play in the Kew greenhouses. In the water lily room, Attenborough introduces the subject at hand as the smallest, rarest water lily in the world. Attenborough goes on: it is extinct in the wild – these are some of the only remaining specimens. Attenborough calls forth his witness for the defense: Carlos Magdalena whom Attenborough calls “the messiah of plants.” Magdalena, says Attenborough, is the only person who was able to make the seeds germinate, bloom and procreate.
This was not entirely true. Well-funded gardens across Europe figured out how to propagate the plant and eventually a nursery opened in Germany where seedlings can be purchased for €500 a piece. Specimens are exhibited as rarities across Europe. One of them was eventually stolen. News stories are written. Reports are made. Possessing and processing Amarebe, incorporating it into a collection becomes prestigious, valuable.
Nymphaea thermarum specimens are shared liberally across European institutions: three in The Netherlands and four in the Czech Republic.
Still no projects to re-introduce the plant arise. Botanical institutions show no interest in funding in situ conservation efforts. The plant is classified as ornamental, too rare to have been of any medicinal or practical use. The plant is classified as a living museum species, a specimen within which is abstracted an entire species.
Amarebe is incorporated into a system of value, it becomes a commodity. It can be consumed through a screen, with a streaming subscription or through a garden, with a day-ticket.
I introduced Attenborough’s documentary earlier because it is a product and in it we can identify the elements of a supply chain. A supply chain is a system that manufactures raw material into a commodity.
SUPPLY CHAIN MODEL
Capital accumulates at the end of the supply chain, where Amarebe is transformed into Nymphaea thermarum.
Nymphaea thermarum has been successfully propagated artificially since 2010. Yet there have been no efforts to repatriate any of these specimens to Rwanda. This is mostly explained by strict re-introduction protocols to prevent the invasions of so-called alien organisms into the native habitat.
It is worth noting that such concerns are far less when specimens are being extracted from that same habitat. But perhaps they are right. After all, Nymphaea thermarum is not Amarebe. The conservation process has made a double, a copy that cannot survive in the wild. Botany is not a cultural production. But it does produce something. Something that can be consumed in a specific form and in a specific place.
PART 3: AMAREBE
We are in the Bugarama plain in Western Rwanda. Ones of the names to describe this water lily is Amarebe.
Throughout the resources I have had access to I have found only one article in which the research team mentioned communicating with people who lived in the area where the plant was found. Only one that concerned itself with Indigenous or current use names for the plant, its history, significance or cultural value. According to this article, locals reported seeing Amarebe, encountering it, using it for medicine and to feed their cattle. Like in every other source, these people are referred to as locals. Locals are people native to the place one is talking about.
Although they are humans and individuals, we do not know their names They are not offered a reference, they appear in news and academic articles as a nameless collective, one which is not sovereign of its knowledge.
AMAREBE
We are in the Bugarama plain in Western Rwanda. At approximately 1100m altitude. Here, spoken languages include Kinyarwanda, Swahili, French and English. Although Kinyarwanda is the national language, English is used as the language of instruction from primary school through university and is used as the primary language for government and business. French was imposed during the Belgian colonization of Rwanda and remained the language of administration until 2008 when the country transitioned to English. It is still spoken by older generations and is prevalent in cultural production post WW1 including stamps.
AMAREBE
The stamps I have here are from a collector from central France. I was able to acquire 183 stamps from his collection. Although I am dealing with someone else’s archive and a collection that no doubt follows a its own logic that is neither neutral nor my own, I am interested in the stories told here. I am interested in what gets named and for what purpose. Here we have three commemorative stamps. This one was printed for a series on F.D. Roosevelt’s death. An iris is printed next to him. His name and his date of birth and death appear next to the latin name of the flower. This one was printed to celebrate Sir Rowland Hill who standardized the stamp. To commemorate him a stamp is printed inside of this stamp. I don’t think you’ll be able to see but that smaller stamp reads Congo Belge at the corner of his name. Should we commemorate the standardization of the movement with the standardization of the living?
I found only one Rwandan figure commemorated in this collection in the form of a portrait. This is a stamp commemorating the first president of Rwanda, Grégoire Kayibanda. But his name does not appear here. Only the name of the stamp manufacturer. In this collection too, people are abstracted into form.
AMAREBE
Kinyarwanda is a language like English and Latin. For writing, it uses the Latin alphabet which was imposed by missionaries during the colonization of Rwanda by Germany and subsequently, Belgium. The Latin script was used to try to standardize Kinyarwanda and to separate it from sister Bantu languages. Unlike English and Latin, Kinyarwanda is a tonal language – it relies heavily on intonation, pronunciation and context for meaning making. The Latin script inaccurately represents Kinyarwanda because it cannot account for these nuances. It is a phonetic writing system which co-evolved with the languages it was used to document. The Latin script is a cultural production.
AMAREBE
Latin as a writing system allows us to do this:
Botany the scientific study of plants is not a mode of cultural production
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Science and culture co produce systems of planetary measurement
PART 4: THE PLURALITY OF PLANTS
Plants are not like Latin or like Europeans. They are not made up of constitutive elements that add up to a meaningful whole, nor are they individuals.
A plant is a fallacy.
The English noun “plant” comes from the Latin planta which means “sprout, shoot, cutting.”
This Latin noun is thought to be derived from the verb plantare, “to drive in with the feet” or “to level the earth.”
We often consider a single plant a root and a stem. You and I might be inclined to consider that a flower is a plant. Flowers, however are only the reproductive organs of the plant. Plants are not only plural, they can also self-procreate. Amarebe is a plant which has this ability. That is the reason why it was transported to the United States, North America.
We are at the Arnold Arboretum the herbarium associated with Harvard University in Cambridge, USA. Here, experiments on the genetic patterning of Amarebe take place. From the Arnold Arboretum, seeds were shared with the Whitehead Institute and the Missouri botanical gardens.
A plant is a fallacy because it is plural in the sense that it belongs to a network but also because it can create its own offspring, it multiplies itself. Plants radically oppose our understandings of the self but also of sex. Sex as the origin of the self.
And yet plantare… “to level the earth.”
In 1966 Andrea Prader introduced a clinical scale called the “orchidometer.” This scale was used to measure the development of testicles in human children. Prader identified 25 different types of testicular morphology. But instead of considering these variations as proof of the diversity of the biological body he documented them as pathologies.
To level the earth.
PART 5: Slicing the earth
The line and the arrow are crucial symbols in systems used to measure planetary phenomena.
A meridian is used to describe both a system of geographic measurement and, in the practice of acupuncture and Chinese medicine, a line which passes through the body and is said to carry the flow of vital energy. Both concepts are implicated in specific belief systems. The prime meridian, the line which determines the point of longitude 0 is set to cut from each pole through the Royal Observatory of Greenwich in the United Kingdom. This is but one system of measurement which positions Western Europe at the center, as the reference against which all else is compared. It is a tool for geographic fiction.
Here a passage by Paul B. Preciado:
“the South does not exist. The South is a political fiction constructed
by colonial prejudice. The South is an invention of modern colonial
cartography: the combined effects of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and
the growth of industrial capitalism, still in quest of new territories to
use for the extraction of raw material. The direct consequence of the
invention of the South was the construction of a modern Western
fiction of the North. The North doesn’t exist either.
The South is not a place, but rather the effect of the relation-
ships between power, knowledge and space. Colonial modernity is
inventing a geography and a chronology: the South is primitive and
past. The North is progress and future. The South is the result of a
racial and sexual system of social classification, a binary epistemology
that opposes high and low, mind and body, head and feet, rationality
and emotion, theory and practice. The South is a sexualized,
racialized myth. In Western epistemology, the South is an animal,
feminine, infantile, a fag. The South is potentially sick, weak, stupid,
incapable, lazy, poor. The South is always represented as lacking
sovereignty, lacking knowledge and wealth, and consequently, by
nature indebted to the North. At the same time, the South is the
place where capitalist extraction is taking place: the place where the North captures energy, meaning, enjoyment and added value. The South is the skin and the uterus. Oil and coffee. Meat and gold. The South is
the mine and the cesspool. Heart and anus.
The North
always presents itself as healthier, stronger, more intelligent, cleaner,
more productive, wealthier. The North is the soul and the phallus.
Sperm and currency. Machine and software. It’s the place of memory
and profit. The North is the museum, the archive, the bank.
PART 6: DANCE
As I mentioned at the beginning of this talk, telling the story of this plant is hard because I have had access to a fabrication that involves the assemblage of so many systems of knowledge. I encountered this plant through so many mediations. The way I have presented it to you today is only possible because of an extremely intricate choreography.
Choreography is the notation of movement in dance. It is either written or drawn to symbolize bodies in motion, often with a beginning and an end. Choreography is interesting because it implies a repetition. Dance is put to script, like speech is put to script, to make a reference, something to compare to, and something to repeat. Choreography cuts across time, it is both that which anticipates movement, and that which documents it. But movement, that which we perceive as entirely time-based, is transformation. And a reference is also a point of departure.
INTERLUDE SEEING AND BELIEVING
Can you imagine something you’ve never seen before?
What have you seen before?
What can you confidently say you believe in because you have seen it?
If you have not seen it, can you imagine it?
Even as the visual takes precedence over all other modes of experiencing the world, our experiences of the visual are increasingly mediated through countless reproductions, reiterations, refabulations. The ability of these copies of copies to circulate is central to the cultural production of global capitalism. Meanwhile the borders of nations are inscribed in the bodies of entire populations deemed undesirable. Achille Mbembe said that Europe’s borders begin wherever there is a threat of migration.
What is allowed, invited or forced to pass through these mobile and malleable borders is that which is insured or insurable. That which gives the promise of an accumulation of value without debt.
In this sense, all movement is abstracted into the language of supply and demand.
DANCE
Do you want to know about how plants dance?
If you imagine a line drawn across my chest (like a parallel to the Equator) right below my arms you can imagine that I look like Nymphaea thermarum
I have roots and a stem and leaves floating on the water.
But this is what I think Amarebe would dance like
And this is not scientifically backed yet
Slave 2 the $
END