In 2021, journeying through Italy to escape locked-down Berlin, urban ethnographer Elisa T. Bertuzzo started to spot gardens, spread on vacant and unused lands from north to south of the country, on which migrants from Bangladesh have been successfully selecting seeds and growing “deshi” vegetables for more than a decade. Saplings, an ongoing collaboration with multimedia artist Doireann O’Malley, was launched shortly after with the aim to gather the stories of far-flung socio-ecological infrastructures, more-than-human cohabitation and planetary cyclicalities, told by these adaptive seeds. Through multimedia journaling and feminist practices, from storytelling to collecting and preserving seeds, the work troubles dehumanized and dehumanising representations of migration and “the migrant” in Italy’s and Europe’s public discourse, also asking: How to practice artistic research grounded in models for resource sharing, from collaborative video to intersectional networks, and which is its place in contemporary art discourse and knowledge production?
DOM
I would like you to go back to what could be called the inception of this project since it resonates well with the festival’s motto, “between land and sea.”
ETB
What is between land and sea? Islands, certainly. After researching for many years in Bangladesh, for me, it is also quite natural to think of mangrove forests like the Sundarban, covering the brackish water ecologies created by the encounter of the Ganges River and the Indian Ocean. Unfortunately, the most prominent connotation of “between land and sea” in the past years relates to the European Union’s anti-immigration policies though, responsible for at least 28.000 deaths and disappearances of migrants between the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean Sea since 2014. If a known fact, for me this became an obsession when Milton, who had been among the participants in a research project I conducted in Bangladesh, called me from the coastline of Libya in 2015. We agreed that I would call him every Sunday until he’d manage to sail off; the routine would keep him mentally sane, we hoped. I used alternately the phone number of his guardian-smuggler or of a man from Bangladesh who provisionally acted as an imam in a mosque close by the camp.
One of the first things Milton wanted to know was the Italian word for sea. “Mare”, I said. “Mare”, he repeated. For him, this was a sound of hope; for me, one of terror. Some months went by, and I discontinued our calls, panicking about the deaths at sea, which after the summer grew exponentially, and knowing I had to return to South Asia for my research. It wasn’t until half a year later that I heard his voice again. His colleagues and friends of two decades, vegetable sellers at the central market of Dhaka, had given me his Italian phone number. “Between land and sea” has continued to allude to dangerously fluctuating lives since Milton and I met in Cagliari. Yet, as Saplings progresses, other meanings are added.
In Ballarò, we talked with Bangladeshi sellers about karala (bitter gourd) and chichinga (snake gourd), vegetables which Milton might have traded in Kawran Bazar and now are regularly sold all spring, summer and autumn here, in Italy. Southwards, towards Agrigento, and eastwards, around Bagheria, the cultivation of these vegetables—developed from seeds that migrants initially carried along in their luggage—is growing every year. The Sea which some would like to be a divider, a frontier, a tomb, and lands which for decades have seen their inhabitants leaving, are ultimately vectors of new lives. Lives in between, witnessing a liminality that doesn’t as much divide as it connects, transports, transforms. I locate here one of the motifs that brought us together: both you and I have been fascinated with liminal zones, habitats of human and nonhuman fauna and flora that are not easily found mingling elsewhere.
DOM
This leads me to reflect on the concept of resistance, what resistance means for you as a white Italian researcher, and the subjects of your research. On their end, resistance to corrupt governance, exploitation and poverty, to societal expectations and roles, to capitalist expulsions, etc. But what does it mean to you to resist, and how do you “stay with the trouble” of conducting research that could be considered hopeless in terms of decolonial politics and practices? How do you engage with decolonial methodologies for working across geo-political divisions, avoiding systems of exploitation and creating trust with your counterparts?
ETB
You delineated it yourself: one cannot but stay with that trouble, because colonial and racist structures are all still in place—if not getting revived these days. As a feminist, in everyday life, my answer is to try and channel into political action and translocal solidarisations a certain degree of rage against the historical and contemporary violence which underlie these structures. But since you explicitly addressed the work of anthropological research, I will answer by paraphrasing the postcolonial scholar Gayatri C. Spivak. Spivak has widely spoken about the “homework” that scholars in the West need to do in order to unlearn white (and male) privilege. Engaging in fieldwork, as anthropologists do, adds to that indispensable work something material, embodied, and spatially situated, which to me is quite irreplaceable. I call it friction, which means that the bodily encounter can reveal the precariousness and inherent reciprocity of hospitality, subverting, if shortly, the hierarchy for the duration of the encounter.
Post- and decolonial critiques have had the effect of fostering self-reflection and bringing about practices—such as, for example, “giving back”, participation, and collaboration—which are now applied in both “academic” and “artistic” research. Apart from those, I try to carry out fieldwork as a learning and unlearning process that is relational, contextual and environmental, as well as voluntary. Knowledge as “accumulable”, as a commodity or asset to exchange (whether on the labour market or on different platforms), recedes into the background; cognition, including its shock effect, moves to the foreground. This leads to taking into stronger consideration the contexts and environments of cognition, as well as the relationships between humans and nonhumans which forge them. As a result, an ecological concept of relations can emerge. The aspect of voluntariness is actually very important. Not only do “researcher” and “researched” have the same right to their own complex, contradictory, performative identities. The “researched” can very well choose not to share anything with the “researcher”. This is, I think, a unique feature of fieldwork compared to homework.
Residency co-hosted by Aterraterra and Fondazione Studio Rizoma as a continuation of the institutional fellowship received in 2023.
Saplings, a residency of the two artists-researchers in early 2023, will offer an occasion to deepen that conversation and give material and visual form to imaginations of circulation, queer temporalities and disturbed/adaptive cyclicalities from, in and through planting together in aterraterra’s urban garden, captured via collaborative multi-media filming (hopefully) with members of the Bangladeshi community in Palermo. The residency will lay the foundation stone for the multi-sited project Concomitanze, an enquiry into the new relationships and unexpected events produced by migration in an age of global intra-relatings, climate change and ecological stress. Mobilising feminist and decolonial practices from storytelling to collecting and preserving seeds, from collaborative video to forging intersectional networks, Concomitanze will generate multi-vocal narrations troubling and countering the dehumanized and dehumanizing representations of “the migrant” in Italy’s, and Europe’s, media discourse.
Doireann O’Malley (born 1981 in Limerick, IE) is a multidisciplinary video artist based in Berlin. Their research-led practice experiments with collaborative methodologies, meditative and visualisation practices, writing, as well as theory, in an effort to manifest ecofeminist and queer futures. Characterised by a strong emphasis on new media, Virtual Reality, 3D and video installation, their work uses digital tools to critically reflect on the political implications of data economies, on the one hand, and explore the entangled experiences of gender embodiment in the virtual, real and theoretical domain, on the other.
Elisa T. Bertuzzo (born 1980 in Vicenza, Italy) is an ethnographer and urban studies scholar based in Berlin. In her academic and literary texts, teaching, as well as curatorial collaborations, her interest lies in the everyday life facets of solidarity, resistance and selforganisation (especially) among marginalised and migrant communities of South Asia. Research, for her, is part of the eco-feminist project to revalidate—and, where needed, reassess—epistemologies, practices of care, economies, as well as translocal solidarisations which have long been oppressed by extractivist, colonial and patriarchal logics.