Guest blog: “Does she belong here?” – Nicoleta Cîrlig

Does she belong there? An introspection into the concept of nature from the point of view of a child who grew up in an agrarian country’s capital city
drawing on Manuela Infante’s Estado Vegetal

The idea that nature is a construct and that it might be a scary medium, as I paraphrase how Manuela Infante expressed herself during the conversation with Liesbeth Groot Nibbelink on the 18^th of November, 2020, did not come to my mind for a very long time. On the contrary, I believe to have thought this briefly and then forget it as my interaction with nature was and still is very limited. The parks I walked in, the forests I observed, were all, more or less, reshaped by humans and adapted to our own aesthetic standards. The only thing I was scared of when passing through the aforementioned mediums, was the presence of another human being. Nature to me was a refuge. But Manuela’s dramaturgical introspection has made me think of my experience of observing other people’s experiences of confronting and taming nature. Of being thankful for rain, sun, or snow.

Growing up in an agrarian country, the common narrative I was part of since I was a child was the importance of taking care of nature as it is our home and food provider. Even though I was born in the capital city, we were thought to cherish it almost religiously. I looked at bread and saw an ear of wheat, I looked at tomatoes and imagined the amount of rain it needed to grow. The sun, the rain, the ground, the insects, everything was interconnected and everything was intra-acting. What I failed to acknowledge as a child, was the human actor involved in the care-taking and grooming of nature. Yes, nature was a resource and was something that I cherished, but nothing that I saw was as idyllic as I have made it up in my mind to be. In instances of visiting the countryside, I would observe the struggles farmers had with nature, the intrusiveness of plants which would do more harm than good to the food resources the farmers were growing, the amount of work that went into keeping a garden groomed and unthreatened. In an agrarian country, our relationship with food and nature dictates and shapes one another and results in behaviors towards other elements of nature. The need for food means that some plants survive and others have to die so the human can benefit from growing and getting nourished by the plant they are growing. It means that land is going to be manipulated to fit human needs and it means that human is going to resist to the non-human and make room only for parts of it which fit into intra-active needs. Humans and nature then threaten each other with their existence and fight for domination. More often than not, human dominates nature and is capable of disastrous outcomes which are inherently born from the human need to dominate, but nonetheless, one must have a thought exercise and imagine what it would be like to not “fight” and try to tame.  As a child of an agrarian country that gets rapidly depopulated, the picture below will maybe paint a picture of what it would be like to let nature take over.

Exercising imagination through dramaturgy

It is interesting to observe how we as humans adapt everything to our own needs. We shape spaces, we engineer entire forests and we manipulate the land to the extent of destroying it. We fall into extremes and we abide by economical and political human-centric ideologies. What we must do, is incorporate both and make kin with each other. Human and non-human should co-exist and shape each other through our existence.

I am looking at the plants I have in my room and I remember being a teenager who rejected the idea of indoor plants. “Plants look more beautiful in their natural habitat and in our house, they look just ugly. Does she belong there? ”, I would ask myself. But then, I stop and think: it is all about looking at all the perspectives. Nothing is or must be binary. Imagining a world where plants take over is an effective exercise of exaggeration which I believe Infante is making us all go through. An exercise that might make us think of reaching for more of a balance between human and nonhuman and rethink the concept of nature we are used to within our cultures.

I believe nature has lost its naturalness since humans came into existence, and since our political relationships started dictating our ways of viewing the world. Gardens are going to be shaped, plants are going to live inside our houses as we live in a shared space – the planet. And with this, the old woman’s voice from Estado Vegetal resonates in my mind What do you mean it is not my home? What do you mean you were here before me?

*Image credits: The pictures are taken in the village Temeleuți, Florești district, R. of Moldova.