Past Papers

vi. Past Papers

My life as a tree

Marissa Stoffer

The second in a series of excerpts from student papers, this article is extracted from Marissa Stoffers’ dissertation, submitted for the Masters in Painting at the Royal College of Art, class of 2020. We are grateful to Marissa for sharing her work. If you have a past paper you would like to share, please contact us at herbologynews@gmail.com.

It is -20°C, January, Finland. I am numb but my mind feels clear after so many thoughts. Ctrl-Alt-Delete. Refresh. I walk... Like the frozen forest I am standing in, I am frozen— literally and creatively. I have come here to make art, or at least think about art for the first time in a year.

As an artist, I have come to question the very act of making, the materials I use, and the energy consumed for those materials. I believe it is important to unpick how we relate to the world around us because this affects how we live and act— our politics, our beliefs and ultimately our individual and collective impact. This is the ‘human-dominated, geological epoch’ (Crutzen, 2002)— the Anthropocene; a time that stretches further back than we think. If you search the internet for ‘world’s biggest environmental problems’, the top four categories are: deforestation, soil retrogression/degradation, human overpopulation, and extinction. The Western world has been in a coma of consumerism since the industrial era.

But anthropocentrism and the mechanisation of the mind and body began much earlier than this. For several hundred years the dominant orthodoxy has implicitly assumed that inanimate things are fundamentally devoid of mental qualities. This view has become integrated into our science, our literature, and our arts. Ultimately it has incorporated itself into our deepest social values, and thus become reflected in our collective actions. We treat nature as an impersonal thing or collection of things, without spontaneity, without intrinsic value, without rights of any kind. Natural resources, plant and animal species have been exploited for maximal shortterm human benefit. These are mindless entities, deserving of no particular respect or moral consideration. They exist to be collected, manipulated, dissected, and remade. (Skrbina, 2017:265) And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on earth.” Genesis 1:281 This is the problem. I will argue that the answer is kinship. It is biodiversity, heterogeneous, multi-faceted and inclusive. It is weird, dreamy, and refers to the mythological— yet it is practical and ecological. It evokes the Animistic.

The concept of Animism engages philosophical concepts of the soul and what it means to be alive. It is derived from the Latin word anima, meaning breath, life or spirit. As a term, it is wide-reaching and varies depending on culture and environment, but what remains coherent across cultures, is that Animism is both a concept and a way of relating to the world (Swancutt, 2019). It involves attributing sentience to animate and inanimate objects, including animals, the environment, plants, spirits, or even technological items such as computers, cars and robots. Western popularisation of the term was engineered by anthropologist Edward B. Tylor in his most noted work, Primitive Culture (1871), but Tylor borrowed it from eighteenth-century chemist George Ernst Stahl, who proposed ‘that spirits or souls of living things or beings control physical processes in the body’ (Swancutt, 2019).

Tylor’s objective was to shift the meaning of Animism to encompass what he called ‘the groundwork of the Philosophy of Religion’ (ibid.). His concepts were inscribed into an evolutionary schema, ranging from the primitive to the civilised— in which few civilisations were deemed to have evolved, while the rest of the world’s people remained Animist ‘tribes very low in the scale of humanity’ (Tylor, cited in Swancutt, 2019). Thus, Animism was effectively consigned as a relic of an archaic past, whilst the rational subject and the scientist were placed at the top of the evolutionary ladder. This anti-Animistic schema was incorporated into psychology when Freud recruited Animism to describe a stage where children ‘project their inner world onto the outer world, seeing it as alive’ (ibid.) Tylor’s attempt to describe a hierarchy of human evolution points to colonial and Christian history. It reduced Animism into a naive understanding of the world, destroying the complexity and significance of some of its core elements, and marginalising human relationships with the ‘other’.

However, Animism has recently been making a comeback in anthropology, philosophy, art, and ecological thinking. The old Animism of Tylor et al. is now seen as a failed epistemology based on misguided interpretations of terms such as ‘spirits’ and ‘souls’, which become inappropriate when reconsidering Animist cultures through the prism of personhood (Hall, ???). Through this new lens, Animism is a sophisticated way of ‘both being in the world and of knowing the world; it is a relational epistemology and a relational ontology’ (ibid.). Academics of New-Animism, such as Harvey (2005) describe Animists as ‘people who recognise that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in a relationship with others.’ All life is relational, and we should not collapse our intimate alterities into identities. Others and otherness keep us open to change, open to becoming, never finally fixed in being. Alterities resist entropy and encourage creativity through relationality, sociality.

Animism is neither monist nor dualist, it is only just beginning when you get beyond counting one, two... At its best it is thoroughly, gloriously, unashamedly, rampantly pluralist. (Harvey, 2012)

What is often left out in the context of indigenous ontologies and cosmologies in the West is pre-Christian history, a time we do not often refer to or learn about. Perhaps this is because our history lessons focus on the modernisation of the West; its empires, and wars— a selective glorification of conquering, heroism, and modernity. However, it is important to recognise Europe was populated by its own indigenous peoples who were pagan; polytheistic, Animistic, and totemistic communities. After the rise of the Roman Empire and the spread of monotheism, Europe's small countryside communities lost their attachments to nature, with pagan communities obliterated or assimilated into the Christian world. This is when the last of the nature-believers perished and, no doubt, any writings or art were destroyed— much like during the Reformation.

It is 37°C, July, Amazon Jungle, Peru. We wait till dark before we can start. I enter the house and lay down on a mattress on the floor and wait for night to fall. The smell of pure tobacco consumes the air, and the ceremony begins. The two men conducting the ritual sing songs they say come from the plants, whilst using instruments made from vegetation and seeds… I go up and drink a cup of thick bitter liquid. Time passes. I feel a tingle in my fingertips. It crackles, slowly reaching across the rest of my body. I am both cold and warm, wet and dry. My eyes are closed, the sound of chanting travels and drips off the wooden beams of the thatched roof. I do not understand the words, but the songs help me navigate this journey as I weave through a wakeful dream. I hear the jungle, the insects humming like a machine; it is metallic, futuristic, familiar… I sink further and deeper into the recesses of my unconscious mind, surpassing geometry, and physical form. I have entered through a door into another world. I look around and I see plants everywhere, but their forms are individual, animated into beings of their own. Not human, not plant, but blurred between the boundaries of the two, this is the best I can describe it as there are no words to translate what I see. I am welcomed by them…

It is worth mentioning that the West used to be Animistic, and still is in some communities. Hall (2011:110) posits that surviving texts from pre- Christian Europe illustrate that pagans ‘recognised plants as kin and as persons’. Rather than backgrounding plants and asserting human superiority, pagan material from a variety of traditions— Old Norse, ancient Greek, Anglo Saxon, Celtic and Karelian —represent plants as relational, volitional, autonomous, and living beings. This broad idea of kinship is inherent in the interpenetrating principle of human bodies and tree bodies that can be found in pagan Europe, often passed through oral tradition. The shared substance of human and plant can be found in the Poetic Edda. The Seeress’s Prophecy relates that the first human beings were formed from the early green plants of the Earth. Odin, Hönir, and Lódur used the wood of the ash and the elm to create the first humans. Here plants turn into humans, but in pagan Greek myths, the metamorphosis is reversed; Daphne turns into a laurel, Minthe into mint, and Hyacinthus into a flower. Unlike Christian origin stories, where all beings are made by an all-powerful, male, human-like god, Animist origin stories illustrate the shared substance of all living beings, and that this metamorphosis between life and death is interchangeable, like a loop. Every living being on Earth originates from stardust. Created by explosions in other galaxies; of particles of dead stars which float through us to this present day and will do so for the rest of our lives. Quite simply, plants, rocks, humans, and animals have the same genealogical ancestry. Broken into elements, we could say that all beings on Earth are kin. Mother is earth and Father is stardust.

Respectful pagan-plant relationships weren’t purely based on sacred ideas, but on connection and relatedness. In the old times, elders believed trees talked to each other, but the mechanisation of science deemed plants deaf and mute (Kimmerer, 2020:19). Although trees have been our evolutionary allies, providing us with fire, shelter, tools, and transport, the Western world has biopoliticised these into products of consumption and capitalist economies, to the point of unsustainable environmental crisis. The Cartesian paradigm locates capitalism outside of nature. Over the last 200 years, this outlook has resulted in the ‘Capitalocene’ (Moore, 2016:6), in which capitalism has become a way of organising nature. Haraway (2016:102) believes that environmental justice requires inventive thinking rather than cynicism. Artists have always questioned reality, time, life, and death. This impulse to hold time still, to conserve and resolve is as poignant as the desire ‘to animate, to recreate life, to gain access to the forces of creation’ (Franke, 2010:39). Stories allow artists to convey questions which can only be expressed through some sort of symbolism, exposing the boundaries between reality and fiction. As we are socialised into adulthood, we are taught not to believe in ‘childish’ anecdotes, to replace the weird and the dreamy with the objective and rational. These boundaries can only be un-done through re-enchantment, reanimation, re-mobilisation, and metamorphosis— transforming a mute, cold, object-based world into one of different points of view, which can illustrate kinship.

I have been searching for artists who look at this connection, and as I look at my own practice, I wonder how I might form these relationships within my own work. I remember I went through an early phase of painting figures emerging from wood, or wood grain projected onto bodies (see image). This mimetic and morphological figuration blurs the boundaries of inside and outside, body and environment, difference and form, mind and physical space. Through principles of kinship, connection to nature becomes part of connecting to home no matter where you are. Back to nature does not always mean you find yourself; you often lose yourself. But it is a process of being lost and found all at the same time. In the gallery or in the studio, we step out of the world, but in a forest, we step into a world. Céleste Boursier-Mougenot explored human-plant relations, plant agency, and perception in his work Rêvolutions, exhibited in 2015, at the Venice Biennale (see image). He presented a kinetic installation of three roaming Scotch Pine trees. The trees, paradoxically displayed inside, were each on a wheeled base linked to a complex electronic system of sap-flow sensors which, via lowvoltage electrical currents, enabled the trees to move around, choosing their preferred place in relation to light, temperature, and humidity (Aloi, 2018:79). Boursier-Mougenot created a ‘posthumanist utopia in which cyborgian apparatuses enable different plant/human relations to arise’ (Aloi, 2018:80). What is interesting to me is how the artist foregrounded the tree’s agency, which we do not usually encounter. Despite the trees being the same age and of similar size, they preferred different places to position, whilst sometimes meeting (but it is unclear if this is incidental). Ultimately, it points towards plant personhood; ‘decision making, active involvement in processes of self-sustenance, and perhaps even character’ (Aloi, 2018:79).

New-Animistic principles are beginning to be incorporated into the rights of nature movement whereby ‘legal personhood’ has been granted to nature. Ecuador has already recognised the personhood of ‘Pachamama’ (Mother Nature), in part based on the philosophical writings of The Natural Contract (Serres,1990). The Natural Contract in legal reality extends its jurisdiction to a multispecies population where both humans and nonhumans have equal rights as persons (Biemann, cited in Fischer, 2016). This ‘radical re-storying’ has taken root in popular culture, with increased attention being paid to plants (but specifically trees) in literature, science, philosophy, and art. Wohlleben’s (2016) book, The Hidden Life of Trees, for example, uses imagistic and Animistic language to convert the scientific processes of how trees live into concepts we can relate to and understand.

I wonder if, in the spirit of kinship, community, and social action to sustain life of all kinds, we can combine our indigenous knowledge of the living, animated Earth with our modern ways— if we can develop a language that combines science with imagination, bridge the gap to a deeper understanding of the Earth and our kinship.

Images: Marissa Stoffer. Alice. 2010. Oil on panel, 140cm x 110cm. Céleste Boursier-Mougenot. Rêvolutions. 2015. Installation. A project for the French Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale. Source: https://www.designboom.com/art/celesteboursier-mougenot-venice-art-biennalefrench-pavilion-05-06-2015/

References Aloi, G. (2018) Why Look at Plants?: The Botanical Emergence in Contemporary Art: 5 (Critical Plant Studies). Leiden: BRILL publications Crutzen, P. J. (2002) ‘Geology of Mankind’, in Nature, 415 (23) Fischer, P., ed. (2016) About Trees: Kat. Zentrum Paul Klee Bern. Snoeck Verlagsgesellschaft Franke, A. (2010) Animism (Vol. 1). Berlin: Sternberg Press Hall, M. (2011) Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany. Albany: State University of New York Press Haraway, D.J. (2016) Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Durham, NC: Duke University Press Harvey, G. (2005) Animism: Respecting the Living World. London: Hurst & Company, 2005), Preface. XI. Harvey, G. (2012) ‘Animist Manifesto’, in PAN: Philosophy, Activism, Nature, 9: 2-4 Kimmerer, R.W. (2020) Braiding Sweet Grass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. London: Penguin Books Moore, J. W. (2016) Anthropocene or Capitalocene? Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. Oakland: PM Press Skrbina, D. (2017) Panpsychism in the West. Cambridge: MIT Press Swancutt, K. (2019) ‘Animism', in The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Anthropology. Online. Wohlleben, P. (2016) The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate— Discoveries from a Secret World. London: William Collins