killing me softly
Synopsis
Fractal images of tunnels, conveyor belts, streets, mountain slopes, scattered across the screen; it is hard to discern whether it is a digitized image of a vision or whether the vision itself is being perceived as it surfaces. The image moves inward and outward and overlaps with fragments of video archives. Something touches the skin; it could be mist or the gentle brush of a bug, leaf, or petal. White brushes in, and you hear distant sounds of laughter, splashes, frogs, and footsteps. Someone is talking on a telephone line. The sound of footsteps grows louder and more indiscernible at the same time, as it begins to transition into the distant sound of a drumbeat. If each pore of acacia leaves could communicate in sounds and images, what would they look like? How have plants tamed and nudged lives in ways unnoticeable, but only emergent through technical metaphors?
… the hand that comes from behind, and plants itself on your shoulder, … one must pay for the pleasure one has in stealing.
- Jean Genet during his last interview 1985
He talks of evil’s shadow, and the roses. He talks of his confusion of assuming within him the role of both victim and criminal. Stealing has always exerted a strange pull on me, something that lured my attention, tempting in the way it seemed to open multiple conditions of possibility. But as he confesses in a video recording of an interview, one must pay for the pleasure in stealing, though one realizes this only after having already committed too many crimes, after having been among the victims too many times, whether by force or by choice.
The weight of the hand, the cost of stolen pleasure, scales upward into the architecture of the state. While dispossession has increasingly become a bloodless keyword in seminars and workshops, its origin remains a physical enforcement. The emergence of property was rather a violent enclosure than a matter of choice, accessible only to those with the tools of knowledge. Yet unlike those endowed with agency, there are also “things”—the abject, the circulated, the trafficked—that illuminate a different mode of theft. These movements operate in realms beyond the reach of the state, as remnants circulating across mountains and oceans shape the very conditions under which agency comes into being.
This project looks at the diasporic and migratory aspects of plants circulated and trafficked through the ecological rupture by mass produced interventions, seeking to juxtapose memories of seemingly distant affective techniques, specifically mourning and grief, with documented acts of extraction and theft. It interprets this juxtaposition as a particular temporal fix, wherein the simultaneity of opposing desires produces a mode of humility through reluctance of action and the possibility of cross-species collaboration.
However, instead of further indulging conceptual abstraction into this inquiry, I would impose a particular significance on the ethnography of things and for the sake of situating practices on ground, and above sea level, as part of communication technologies. A hand held sized camcorder follows Acacia confusa (相思樹, kesyu), a species embedded in Taiwan’s ecological and colonial histories, documenting the affective attachments and everyday practices that gather around this tree. It appears in Indigenous defensive ecologies, in Japanese colonial afforestation projects for charcoal and fuel production, and in contemporary attempts of afforestation across mountainsides, roadside corridors, and domestic gardens.
Alongside industrial construction sites, institutional experimental forests and botanical gardens, amateur botanists collect seeds, field notes, soil samples, and family stories, creating what may be understood as barefoot archives. Some of these materials are being donated to institutions outside the territory that are perceived to offer durable infrastructures of preservation and commodity value. These transfers resonate with longer histories of academic botanical influence in East Asia, including figures such as Philipp Franz von Siebold, and with broader patterns through which scientific authority travels and settles.
Archival institutions shape the trajectories of domestic flora and how community based initiatives participate in similar classificatory practices while seeking to cultivate alternative forms of care. Central to this inquiry is the fictive dimension of memory that occurs after extraction and theft, approached as a practice that stabilizes self and place within conditions of geopolitical uncertainty and ecological strain. We conceptualize this stabilizing labor as an economics of inhabitation, referring to the collective work required to make environments sufficiently reliable to dwell in, particularly around psychoactive plants whose ontological status shifts across herbal medicine, spiritual practice, and biotechnical research.
Methodologically, the footage attends to light and kaleidoscopic effects, to the contrast and movement of contours within light, and to the intimacy and textures of relationships encountered within chains of networks: among women, among humans and plants, and among events that required careful attention and a preparedness to act in real time. These materials are assembled into forms of letters and intimate exchanges that trace plant families across backyard gardens, herbarium collections, afforestation zones, and domestic interiors. By placing moving images alongside archival photographs and fragments of conversation, the project renders visible the ways classificatory regimes and affective attachments participate in the political life of this tree. The resulting form moves between ethnography, botanical history, and spatial inquiry.
