Herbs Speak of Pain
On plants, language and dispossession in the documentary Foragers.
The Patagonian steppe has been a recurring scenario and motif in the construction of Argentina's national identity. Discursively uninhabited and inhospitable, the Patagonian desert has functioned as a symbol of conquest: man versus landscape, civilization versus savagery, pioneers extending the frontier of progress, tracing paper boundaries, defining territories with written treaties and white hands shaking, that are then violently executed on the land and its relations.
Native of the Patagonian province of Chubut, photographer Francisco Provedo has always been fascinated with the discourses that have defined the desert of the area. Francisco collects images: maps, archives, illustrations, renderings, satellite images, texts, old photographs —graphic languages that build an imaginary about the place where he grew up. The word 'desert' designates a biome with an arid climate, but “the word is invested with other things,” Francisco tells us, as he reveals how the images hide more than they show.
In this short film, the author approaches the Patagonian steppe from different angles, questioning the images and trying to establish links between words, names, imaginary and experience. He questions the discursive construction of the desert, the false idea of an empty place, and the motivations behind that imaginary that omits and nullifies the materiality and relationships of the real landscape. Francisco contrasts this with his own direct experience of the place and his own camera trap archives, which tell a different story in which the desert is alive and inhabited.
'Desert' confronts us with the consequences of the abstraction of language: the abysses that are dug between the name and what is named, the connections that are broken when the landscape is defined from ideas and concepts—and not from the corporeal experience or the relationships that shape it. What is the weight of naming and what is beyond the discourses? What possibilities are invoked by the names we give to the world? Francisco's short film chooses to give space to silence and observation, refusing to define the desert outside the bodies that inhabit it.