Beware of Imposters (the secret life of flowers) - by Selena de Carvalho
ISLAND | ISSUE 159
Rural cemeteries are often sites of refuge. Less green ecology in much of the rest of the state. Found only in this haunted place, the graveside leek orchid, Prasophyllum taphanyx, is the last of its species.
Orchids are masters of queer ecology and interspecies relationships. This interspecies sexuality means orchids are sensitive to disturbance and do not proliferate in contexts that lack either their companion insects or mycorrhizal fungal partners. Holobionts, they comprise multiple discrete entities relationally enmeshed in complex life enabling ways.
In contemplating the fate of Prasophyllum taphanyx, I have collected stories, shared water, read letters written by artists, played a recorded archive of people singing the chorus ‘I never thought that I’d love somebody like you’ (from Chris Isaak’s 1989 song ‘Wicked Game’) and sat alongside this plant among other plants, lamenting the presence of weed killer and the tightly mown lawn. These actions form part of Beware of Imposters (the secret life of flowers), a participatory installation and series of ongoing engagements that seek to cultivate an anti-anthropogenic attention through enacting poetic gestures of witnessing, as a means of drawing attention to the ecological hauntings of this time.
Hauntings are not immaterial. They are an eternal feature of existing material conditions. ‘To live in Tasmania is to live the eye of the storm’ [1], to live amongst the largely unspoken ethnic cleansing that colonists embarked upon following their arrival and during the resulting Black War. The ongoing colonial engagement with land permeates expansive areas of cleared grazing land iconic to the midlands. In the absence of Indigenous care for country the land is drought thirsty and overgrazed and lacks ecological diversity. In recognising ecological hauntology [2], creative translation can be a potential pathway to attune oneself to survivors of and witnesses to decline, as well as a form of enacting care through critical, creative storying.
Within my creative practice I position myself as a witness, which can be defined as someone who is present, who has seen something happen, especially an accident or a crime. In law, a witness is someone who provides testimonial evidence, either oral or written, of what they know or claim to know. To witness is to make public, to hold oneself and be held accountable. This act of witnessing the witness (in this case, the endling orchid), archives experience, suspended in time. Moments witnessed are later opened up through creative translation in attempts to ‘speak’ for those that cannot speak, or those that speak but cannot be understood by human ears.
Ecological networks are not just transactional relationships but intimate conversations of exchange. In many instances, to evolve is to relate, to grow in relationship. According to American evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis [3], symbiosis, initially defined as ‘unlike organisms living together’ by German mycologist HA DeBary (1879), has swayed between perhaps more palatable anthropocentric/human-social interpretations of mutually helpful relations as opposed those that are perceived as unequal (by applying the kinds of stories ‘we humans’ like to hear). In the early 1900s, numerous Russian biologists and academics investigated symbiogenesis (the role of symbiosis in evolution); while, in contrast, American and French contemporaries investigating this field were thwarted and ridiculed. Margulis speculates that the feminine connotations of symbiosis and mutualism may have underpinned a perception that research on these topics was unimportant; hence the way the term symbiosis (as a synonym of mutualism) was obscured (not only its literal meaning but also the phenomenon’s instrumental role in evolution). Following Margulis, Donna Haraway puts forth the term ‘sympoesis’ as an evolution of the complex patterning first recognised as symbiosis [4]. Sympoesis, for Haraway, describes concepts of ‘making with’ as opposed to ‘self-making’, providing a terminology for the messiness of interconnectedness.
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Settler-colonial cultures often construct values of neatness, yield, aesthetics and order, which are privileged over biodiversity or ‘the mess of complexity’. Val Plumwood [5] identifies these values in the rural attitudes and behaviours that convey care and pride (such as ‘tidy peaceful landscapes’), which also recreate and extend ongoing acts of colonisation and ecological violence. In ‘The Cemetery Wars: Cemeteries, Biodiversity and the Sacred’, Plumwood describes how, in a neglected ‘messy’ end of untended graveyard, native grasslands and orchids re-emerge. This ‘cemetery’ could be any number of places: the side of a road, an abandoned lot. Neglect, or lack of domestic/agricultural interest, allows biodiversity to re/assemble.
The small midlands cemetery I’ve been visiting, for years now, is on the edge of a rural town, next to a highway. When I visit I am looking for the living orchid, Prasophyllum taphanyx, growing among the human dead. This pilgrimage, which itself has become a form of ritual for me, is surreal. I am looking repeatedly for something that may no longer have form. A ghost plant.
The space of death can be a threshold that allows for illumination as well as extinction. Decomposition and mortality (humans also compost) are inevitable contemplations in the cemetery. Death, decomposition and decay are integral in the composition of nutrient-rich ground (the soil biome), cultivating an environment in which life can re-emerge.
My interest in Beware of Imposters (the secret life of flowers) was to explore this death space through an anti-anthropocentric perspective, as a form of ritualised, participatory artwork. In stating this I recognise that it is impossible to deconstruct my ‘human’ modalities of perception, or umwelt. I align with and practise ‘decolonising methodologies’ [6], yet I recognise that I cannot deconstruct my own heritage or the culture within which I exist. I can, however, question and critically reflect, and in so doing recognise, appreciate and celebrate difference, as an ally or accomplice.
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Beware of Imposters (the secret life of flowers) takes its title from the prolific offerings of immortal plastic flowers that adorn gravesites the world over – a ritual that enacts the desire to connect, grieve and pay homage to loved ones passed, while also maintaining the tidy appearance of care, convenient for those who cannot visit frequently. Flowers become a symbolic language for connecting to ghosts; they represent the invisible labour of mourning. Perhaps these never-decaying flowers are all-too-fitting in this age of extinction and the mourning it will bring. Reverend Geff Sickland [7], however, bans plastic flowers from the cemetery he oversees. For him, the plastic bouquets miss the point of the metaphor of (real) flowers: ‘the beauty that weathers and decays’.
In the midlands cemetery, extinction, the ultimate death of a species, sits side by side with nostalgic pollution, resistant to cycles of decay and regeneration. Death of an entire species, the erasure of its web of relations and life world, is perhaps the ultimate haunting. If flowers enable links to ghosts, can a ghost flower that haunts through translation as an artwork enable us to consider trauma and loss with regard to the more-than-human world?
The orchid’s dilemma holds a potent irony and a poetic sadness. Its predicament could read like a metaphor for the current climate regime or an allegory for ‘the long emergency’ [8] in which vulnerability is intimately perceived and locally experienced yet it seems difficult to remain attentive to the complexity of interconnectivity and global climate risk. The life and death of these organisms are inextricably entangled with human-made territories, cycles of life and death, as well as human cycles of neglect and care.
To be attentive to something is to give it the gift of your time. In this present era, in which attention is so heavily co-opted and commodified, time takes on a new status that has dimension and, in many cases, capital. For Beware of Imposters (the secret life of flowers) I composed a format that was both durational and for one person only, with each participant spending 13 minutes within the assemblage. The experience is scored in a particular order. This score is a conceptual reflection on the orchid’s solitude. Attention is captivated; time is the medium.
As the participant passes through the doorway into the installation space, a movement-triggered sensor evokes a sound world delivered through headphones. This choreographed, ritualised (repeated) engagement does not vary, but the participants and their responses do. The audio begins with a voice, my voice, disclosing a narrative that blurs fact and fabulation, exploring notions of loss and tragedy, from small mistakes to larger misfortunes, a human subjective narrative of grief, expanding out across species, eras and disasters.
You just left the fuel cap on the roof of your car and drove away ... you are looking for someone you shared a moment with in a bar five hours ago ... your eight-year-old son lines up for ice cream in Disneyland and this is the last time you ever see each other ... your house, the house you grew up in, your home for decades, burns, taking your family and everything you have ever owned ... the place where your grandmother and her grandmother and her grandmother’s grandmothers were born is turned into a sewage plant ... a landmass, that ancient part of you that broke away during Gondwana and drifted south supposedly into the middle of nowhere, is a toxic dumping ground for nuclear waste ... the planet you have been orbiting for eternity explodes and you lose your way ...
In a dimly lit room is a burnt vanity table with a circular mirror, inviting the viewer to take a seat. The vanity is scattered with scruffy dried and fake flowers (collected from graveyard rubbish bins), jars of seeds (souvenired from a pepper tree in a Melbourne graveyard), an old dictionary and several other worn miscellanea that appear somewhat abandoned, not unlike a forgotten gravesite.
Projections mapped to these items punctuate the spoken narrative and animate the objects in situ: a bird flies from a pair of hands; a drive past a dilapidated house is projected onto the open book; a small fire burns in the ash tray; light refracts through a ball of blown glass. The vignettes build tone and establish a sense of environment but don’t directly visualise the spoken word. The world of the work feels private even though it is set within the public space of the gallery. There is only one person in the room, held by the intimacy of the whispering voice. In the mirror, when they look up, they see both themselves and a large-scale silk print in the background. This print reveals collaged images of the Prasophyllum taphanyx orchid. The palette is based on insects’ ultraviolet vision and interpretation of flowers. This use of colour is a form of code, a realm just out of reach of meaning [9]; it references one of the ways that insects involve themselves in the lives of plants and vice versa.
Beware of Imposters (the secret life of flowers) was presented as part of the large Tasmanian ‘gothic’ winter festival, Dark Mofo. Only a fixed number of people could access the work (due to the duration of the solo experience, the opening hours and the limit of the festival season). People rushed to see the work, at times lining up for hours. However, the public ‘success’ of the work in no way reflects success for the orchid. The booked-out vibe, or desire to experience the work, was absurd and ironic when coupled with the fact that we, humanity, are implicated in the highly marginalised, compromised living circumstances for this organism. This drew my attention to the dark reality of how scarcity can become a fetishised point of attraction/abstraction; especially (but not only) within the art world and historical museum compendium, there also exists a culture of poachers who seek out rare plants and animals for private collection.
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As a sort of conclusion to this project, I visited the Royal Hobart Botanical Gardens Seed Vault. The gardens have not had success in collecting seeds of Prasophyllum taphanyx, but, even if they had, they would also need to collect the orchid’s mycorrhizal fungal partners. Each companion in this tangle of holobionts requires different conditions for suspended animation. Seeds of orchids are frozen, while fungi require humid conditions to survive. Even though the seeds and fungi may persist, germination requires yet another balancing of elements. To proliferate, fungi need adequate and sometimes site-specific ‘food’ (nutritious products of decay). Without this, they may draw nutrients from the seed, effectively killing it. The seed, on the other hand, requires the fungi to wake it up, to germinate. When life world collaborators are separated as discrete entities, reductionist but ‘caring’ approaches are precarious, often failing. Maintaining these species becomes a care-full, multi-faceted, inter-species affair.
An endemic plant with no backup. The Svalbard Global Seed Vault and the Hobart Botanical Gardens fail, there is no compendium: no seeds are set, no pollen smeared, the tip of vanishing sharpens as finality and potentiality do battle against Roundup and neatness. Traces of the artwork and ecological world are woven into memory and technology; haunted melodies play in the bodies of participants and in the air, soil and stones of a rural graveyard. Soundwaves transmit a symbolic lament. Guided by the score, the audience is choreographed into becoming witnesses, a sympoetic assemblage of solidarity. ▼
NOTESGreg Lehman, Crystal Bone (A Published Event) 2017, p. 48.
The term ‘hauntology’ was coined in 1993 by French philosopher Jacques Derrida in his book Specters of Marx.
Lynn Margulis, ‘Words as battle cries — symbiogenesis and the new field of endocytobiology’, BioScience, vol. 40, iss. 9, 1990, pp. 673–77.
Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Duke University Press, 2016.
Val Plumwood, ‘The cemetery wars: Cemeteries, biodiversity and the sacred’, Local-Global: Identity, Security, Community, vol. 3, 2007, p. 54.
Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonising Methodology, Zed Books, 1999.
Patrick Barkham, ‘Should fake flowers be banned from cemeteries?’, The Guardian, 2011.
James H Kunstler, ‘The long emergency’, Rolling Stone, vol. 13, 2005.
Michael T Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses, Routledge, 1993.
CREDITSLead artist: Selena de Carvalho
Sound recording and composition: Joel Roberts
System design: Richie Cyngler
Singer: Rosie Grace
Funding support: Regional Arts Tasmania, ‘Hype’ Salamanca Art Centre, School of Fine Art, University of Tasmania
All images by Selena de Carvalho
This arts feature appeared in Island 159 in 2020. Order a print issue here.
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