Drift: Yann Gross and the artificial empire of the palm tree

Madrid,

Some may remember Yann Gross as deserving – in 2008, almost twenty years ago – of the PHotoESPAÑA Discoveries Award for his portfolio Horizonvillein which he recreated the ways of life in an industrial area of Switzerland, his country. We will also find him in the edition of this festival that is now beginning, since he will be part of the collective “Volver aimagina” at the Círculo de Bellas Artes, and he also stars in an individual in Madrid: La Casa Encendida exhibits the initial and final chapters of his project Driftwhich links ethnography and botany and raises the long-term consequences of the circulation of plants to countries where they do not originate.

Gross, who usually works in collaboration with native communities and has done so this time as well, analyzes how, in the context of past colonial empires, plant species (in addition to narratives and images) traveled between geographical areas and modified landscapes. This author points out that what was often considered progress led to consequences that did not imply progress: transformations of environments and questionable material conditions.

The starting point of his proposal lies in the call box by Nathaniel Ward, invented in the first half of the 19th century by that British doctor in order to transport live botanical species over long distances, ensuring their survival. In the exhibition we will see a similar artifact that houses a palm tree, of course alive, native to Asia and preserved for its new artificial environment; Also of Asian origin are the hemp palm trees that have proliferated in the Alps due to their particular resistance to cold, to the point of becoming an invasive species that displaces the local flora.

We will see testimonies of this expansion in the photographic series Fortunenamed in allusion to the Scottish botanist who introduced that variety, the Trachycarpus fortuneiin Europe, sending it from the mountains of China. Although, as we said, its introduction occurred in the 19th century, its massive plantation in the Swiss canton of Ticino did not arrive until the 1960s and with the intention of attracting tourism with tropical panoramic views; First it occurred in walks and gardens, later in the undergrowth and at higher altitudes.

The result has been a hybrid alpine-tropical landscape in which native biodiversity has been lost, as shown in the images taken by Gross using multispectral techniques used by forestry scholars.

Finally, the artist presents Elaeisa multichannel video in which inhabitants of the Amazon turn their faces watching the viewer as he moves in front of them. They watch us; They are also monitored.

These are members of indigenous and quilomba communities who reside on lands now artificially populated by oil palm trees native to Africa and destined for the production of biofuels. In order to recover these areas for local crops, they carry out exhaustive monitoring of whoever steps in their localities so that new extensions are not taken for exploitation and rebel against the actions of private security groups.

While we contemplate their frontal faces, we will be able to hear statements by Lula da Silva and Dilma Rouseff, theoretical defenders of these populations, praising the potential of these biofuels for the improvement of the region, in the State of Pará. The development story is thus confronted with its dubious perception on the ground.

In this exhibition and in the hands of Yann Gross, relocated Asian and African palm trees become metaphors for our desire for growth, at the cost of deacclimatizing what is rooted, and for the artificiality that we can come to appreciate in the environments from which we expect greater natural authenticity. The imbalances he points out reveal past contradictions and perhaps fait accomplis.