What to do? This question confronts us with the possibility and relevance of not doing, it forces us to think about what we would not want or should not do. As we often say, our work is based on promoting and sustaining long-term spaces and processes of collective creation with organizations, groups and individuals with the intention of interweaving cultural practices and representations of the territory in broader social processes and with an impact on forms of relationship and collective organization. From the outset, our participation in Artizen is structured as a residency of a few weeks in which we are invited to carry out an artistic intervention in the Feroviarilor park during the days of August 12, 13 and 14. This event is part of a much broader movement driven by various social and cultural groups in the city of Cluj-Napoca with the aim of recovering the park. In this sense, it will be up to them to sustain their presence in the park, take care of the process and involve the neighbors in it. We think that trying to involve in our project the people who inhabit (literally or figuratively) the park or other action groups, could be nothing more than a sham and an undesirable form of instrumentalization. On the other hand, it seemed appropriate to us that what we did had some kind of circulation beyond the three days of the event; something that could perhaps contribute to the debate around public space and the construction of the city, in general, and the Feroviarilor park, in particular.
This is how the idea of making a herbarium arose. A small publication inspired by the illustrated botany books that, since the late seventeenth century, built the modern scientific discourse on plants. The emergence and rise of the natural sciences is parallel to that of other disciplines such as urbanism, disciplines that are constituted by and in turn constitute in that historical period the underlying conditions of truth that delimit what can be thought or not and what is acceptable or not.
Thus,
Weeds
, which is how we have titled this small herbarium-project, is not only about plants, but about the ways in which we categorize things; in other words, the ways in which we identify something as the same or as the other and normalize or not a series of objects, discourses, places, practices, subjects… Ultimately, what is at stake in Feroviarilor is the production of normalized bodies and spaces, of good and bad weeds—just like in any other urban space, although perhaps in this one more evidently due to its wild condition and the informal and unregulated uses that already occur in it—. A clear example of this are the groups of young Roma people who are occasionally in the park: the spatial segregation of the Roma population in many European cities is well known—and Cluj does not seem to be an exception—and how their mere presence in public spaces, especially that of young people, is perceived as an indicator of insecurity by many people; the same happens if we think about the homeless people who camp in the park and the way in which hygienist regulations such as the civic law in Barcelona veiledly sought to expel them from certain spaces in the city.
On the other hand, Weeds refers to the knowledge about the vulgar names of plants and their properties—like that of our local guide, Tudor Gomoiescu—a popular and vernacular knowledge, still today in some cases transmitted orally between generations. It is a knowledge typical of rural cultures of subsistence—dedicated to the mere reproduction of life—prior to the cultures of progress—dedicated to production and accumulation—. It is precisely the capitalist need to optimize agricultural production that intensifies the processes of selection of those plant species that are most profitable in terms of surplus value production—until reaching the manipulation of life itself with transgenic plants—and the introduction of herbicides to eliminate those plants considered unproductive. The agri-food industry destroys the ecosystemic links that maintained rural communities based on forms of non-intensive agriculture and a sustainable use of natural resources. On the other hand, the discrediting of popular knowledge—for example, the knowledge of the medicinal properties of plants, often preserved and used by women—is an integral part of the processes of proletarianization of the peasantry. Institutions such as the University appear in the Middle Ages with the fundamental objective of monopolizing control over the accreditation of knowledge and the empowerment for the exercise of trades such as medicine.
Since the Renaissance—and even before if we think of the medieval herbals—the books of plants combine instrumental knowledge and aesthetic enjoyment: the description of the plants—which can only be considered scientific from a certain historical moment—is accompanied by beautiful and delicate illustrations. Jan Kops, who was director of agriculture of the Netherlands, published in 1800 the first issue of the botanical magazine
Flora Batava
, which would be published until 1934. Kops chose this name in reference to the garden of Agnes Block—art collector and horticulturist—from which numerous artists painted their plants and flowers with no other pretension beyond the pleasure of the everyday. Our small herbarium of plants that can be found in the Feroviarilor park includes some of the corresponding illustrations published in the magazine
Next weekend we will present the publication, if we arrive on time to finish writing the texts, translate them into Romanian, Hungarian, Catalan and English and layout it all. We hope to survive to tell about it here.