CONTACT ZONE, 2011

Contact Zone took the form of an investigative garden, where botany became a metaphor used to question the notion of roots in a culture by investigating the routes taken in the conscious appropriation of different cultural signs adapted and re-imagined as one’s own. It is comprised of two parts.

Species included were: banana, chilli, Portuguese cabbage, potato, sweet potato, cabbage, carrot, beans, corn, wheat, passion fruit, orange, aubergine, fig, broad bean, almond and sugar cane. Each plant was self-referential to a specific cuisine of a specific country, although sometimes these overlapped. Each of them embodied a particular sign from a particular culture as imagined by each individual.

The grouping of plants in this garden portrays inclusiveness, so pertinent within hybridity. Different ‘signifiers’ from different cultures were brought together into a particular space and were re-imagined as a whole. Simultaneously we are aware that each plant is constrained within individual containers and these come to represent differentiation/exclusion in hybridity. The containers force each plant to retain their otherness. Although the plants share the same space, the containers segregate them by preserving their distinct origins.

Seventeen sound files, each referring to one of the species were included in this installation. This component reflected upon the routes taken in the appropriation of these vegetables and fruits into one’s culture. A small story was written for each of the plants, based on research into the history of each species.

The botanical sphere can intimately translate the concerns of hybridity, migration, routes and how information can become constructed and imagined over the years. If the sound files account for inclusiveness by the way different species were adapted into different cultures it simultaneously accounts for separation.

Work commissioned by Laboratório de Artes Creativas, Lagos.