# 17
The challenge of weed as a metaphor for broader societal issues
THE INFINITE LAWN: You can throw the intruder in a place where it cannot re-root or scatter seed. When one starts to uproot a weed, immediately another one springs up a little further away, and another, and another. In short, that patch of turf that seemed to require only a few trimmings turns out to be a lawless jungle.
Nothing left but weeds? Worse still: the bad weeds are so thickly interspersed with the good ones
that you can’t get your hands in the middle and pull. It seems that a complicit understanding has been created between the seed and wild herbs, an easing of the barriers imposed by inequalities of birth, a resigned tolerance to degradation. Some wild herbs, in and of themselves, do not have an evil or insidious air at all.
Italo Calvino, Palomar, 1983Invitations to contemplate these words and play with your thoughts
What if everything is entangled
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Let’s talk botany. The contemporary world, by orchestrating the material conditions of movement, facilitates our transplantations. Flowerpots, nurseries, greenhouses, open country. Is it only coincidence that modernism was from start to finish a tribute to the root? It was radical. In the course of …
Let’s talk botany. The contemporary world, by orchestrating the material conditions of movement, facilitates our transplantations. Flowerpots, nurseries, greenhouses, open country. Is it only coincidence that modernism was from start to finish a tribute to the root? It was radical. In the course of the twentieth century, artistic (and political) manifestos appealed for a return to the origin of art or of society, to their purification, with the aim of rediscovering their essence. It was a matter of cutting off useless branches, subtracting, eliminating, rebooting the world from a single master principle that was presented as the foundation of a liberating new language. Let us wager that our own century’s modernity will be invented precisely in opposition to all radicalism, dismissing both the bad solution of re-enrooting in identities as well as the standardization of imaginations decreed by economic globalization. For contemporary creators are already laying the foundations for a radicant art - […] To be radicant means setting one’s roots in motion, staging them in heterogeneous contexts and formats, denying them the power to completely define one’s identity, translating ideas, transcoding images, transplanting behaviors, exchanging rather than imposing.
Nicolas Bourriaud, The Radicant, 2009Invitations to contemplate these words and play with your thoughts
What if we tell a different history
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Well, where does the Danube has its origin?
It seems that, against the age-old controversies between specialists, it stems from the source of the river Breg, but the water that irrigates the meadow from which the Breg rises comes from a pipe, planted straight into the ground.
An old woman who l …
