traversée 2
Traversée: crossing. From Middle English traversen , from Old French traverser , from Latin trans (across) + versus (turned), perfect passive participle of Latin vertere (to turn). traverse (n.): ‘act of passing through a gate, crossing a bridge, etc.’, mid-14c., from Old French travers , from traverser (see traverse (v.) Meaning ‘a passage by which one may traverse’ is recorded from 1670s. Military fortification sense of ‘barrier, barricade’ is recorded from 1590s. Flora and fauna species have correlations to policies regarding immigration, migrants: Latin migrare ‘to move from one place to another’; alien belonging to a foreign country or nation; an invasive species or an organism that is not indigenous, or native, to a particular area; an animal or plant living or growing in a region to which it has migrated.
As a gardener and artist exploring the buried socio-political history of gardens, Traversée crossing , is based on my response to readings and research in poetry, politics and the history of plants and herbariums. I started my hunt for the history and origin of plants some 25 years ago, The history and the journeys of these plants tell us as much about culture, politics and the monetisation of humans, as it does about home, place, memory, identity. 1 the artichoke: in Arabic al-qarshuf equals thistle; in Italian: articiocco , French: artichaut , English: artichoke. The Saracen of Syria and Palestine introduced artichokes to Italy. The artichoke is spoken of as a garden plant in Sicily by Homer, Hesiod, Pliny the Elder. It was mentioned in Carthage (now Tunisia) and then taken to Cordoba in Andalusia by the Moors. It travelled from Naples to Florence in 1466, and to Avignon 1532, and then to the English court of Henry VIII. The Spanish took it to United States in the nineteenth century. 2 the Columbian Exchange. The exchange of diseases, ideas, food crops and enslaved peoples as commodities between the New and the Old Worlds from 1492 to the present. It describes Europe’s, and later America’s fight for the control of territory, and what those territories had under the ground, above the ground. Gardens, flowers and trees are a cultural history of place, of land clearings, of transplanting, of writing out a people’s history and culture of changing the landscape of a newly acquired territory. Botany has long held a relationship to both exploitation and acts of resistance, and how plant life has and may intervene in the rejuvenation of contaminated environments. We have long been aware of nature’s role in determining the course of history — we see it through nature’s ever-shifting response to human intervention. £
Anne O’Callaghan
A society without strangers would be impoverished; to live only among ourselves, constantly inbreeding, never facing an outsider to make us question again and again our certainties and rules, would inevitably lead to atrophy. The experience of encountering a stranger – like the experience of suffering– is important and creative, provided we know when to step back. — Elie Wiesel
The distance between Syria and Germany is about 3,700 kilometres. For refugees fleeing civil war, the journey can take weeks, even months. No one travels thousands of miles, carrying children if not for HOPE. —Anne O’Callaghan
Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places. — Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
23 on site review 47 :: standing still
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