Working across video, photography, archival documents, and collective agricultural processes, Lisbon\/London-based artist Uriel Orlow explores the political economy of plants. In Soil Affinities<\/em>(2018\u200a\u2013\u200a19), Orlow delves into colonial history and its afterlives through the movement of agricultural plants from France to Mali and Senegal. His modular installations retrace terrestrial networks of plants and people in a shifting constellation of videos and photographs presented in wooden containers that recall the Ward wooden boxes used to transport \u201cuseful\u201d plants to French West Africa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Edible weeds congregate in one box: spectral images of fugitive plants growing from sidewalk cracks conjure the agrarian past of Aubervilliers, a northern suburb of Paris. In another, a detail of stained-glass window depicts the vegetal varieties established by the market gardeners displaced from the Marais district to Aubervilliers in the nineteenth century during Haussmann\u2019s renovation of Paris. An archival image of botanists at the Bois de Vincennes Colonial Test Garden indexes the development of colonial agriculture\u200a\u2014\u200aone of European imperialism\u2019s most durable legacies\u200a\u2014\u200awhich persists in Paris\u2019s sprawling Rungis wholesale market.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An image of researchers planting onion varieties at the Senegalese Agricultural Research Institute in Dakar is juxtaposed with community gardeners at Jardins Ouvriers des Vertus in Aubervilliers. Last September, the allotment lands were expropriated to make way for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games. Unless grassroots resistance prevails, the government\u2019s bulldozers will soon have razed everything. The rural roots of the immigrant and working-class neighbourhood will be buried beneath a new monument to global trade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Orlow unearths these stories, which the archives were never meant to tell. Narratives are taken apart and retold in a fragmented, non-linear counter-cartography that resists what Anna Laura Stoler terms France\u2019s colonial aphasia. Gardens are the territories on which colonialism feeds, but they are also the sites of resistant histories and situated knowledges that Orlow continues to examine in his ongoing research-based projects.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

An image theorist and independent curator, Gwynne Fulton holds a PhD in philosophy and art history from Concordia University. She is a contributor at Slought Foundation in Philadelphia. She has written for Esse arts + opinions<\/em>, Mosaic<\/em>, In\/Visible Culture<\/em>, Dazibao editions<\/em>, and ARP Books.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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