THE GARDENER, THE RUBBER TAPPER AND THE HERBALIST

2017-19, Santarém-BR / Berlin-DE. Video, color, audio, aprox. 20 min Full HD format. In addition to the video still in the process of finalization, the project comprises a lecture-performance and published essay.




Original essay, published in the end of 2018, for the book THE WORK OF WIND: LAND. With contributions by Rouzbeh Akhbari & Felix Kalmenson, d’bi.young anitafrika, Amy Balkin, Jesse Birch, D.T. Cochrane, Revital Cohen & Tuur Van Balen, Anna Feigenbaum, Macarena Gómez-Barris, Ilana Halperin, Tom Keefer, Barbara Marcel, Mimi Onuoha, Tomás Saraceno, Christine Shaw, Juliana Spahr, Adrienne Telford, Etienne Turpin, Allen S. Weiss, Tania Willard, and Eva Wilson. Design by Katharina Tauer. Edited by Christine Shaw & Etienne Turpin. Co-published by K. Verlag in partnership with the University of Toronto Mississauga. Funded in part through the Canada Council for the Arts’ New Chapter program.

The essay THE GARDENER, THE RUBBER TAPPER AND THE HERBALIST responds to Force 3–Gentle Breeze with a story that entangles a personal narrative, a history of cinema, and a rubber plantation, connecting the salons of Paris and the rainforests of the Amazon. As a text written in anticipation of a film-to-come, Marcel reveals other decolonial ways of inhabiting the garden through her work with the herbalists at Casa Chico Mendes in the city of Santarém.

Click here for more information about the book THE WORK OF WIND: LAND

The lecture-performance with the same title was presented for the discursive program, entitled “How on Earth?,” of the exhibition Verschwindende Vermächtnisse: Die Welt als Wald [Disappearing Legacies: The World as Forest] at Tieranatomisches Theater at Humboldt University, Berlin, in April 2018.

Filmed between the end of 2017 and the beginning of 2018 during a residency at Casa BICHO in Alter do Chão - Santarém, Pará-Brazil, in collaboration with the herbalists of the Casa de Chico Mendes in the neighborhood of Conquista, periphery of Santarém, the video is now in the final editing phase.





© 2021 Barbara Marcel