stills from "The Seeds of Simili",

a short film by Saskia Van Der Gucht & Matthias Kreuzburg filmed in Idanha-a-Helha, Portugal, 2024

Dear Saskia,

It is Tuesday, February 11th and I am in a theater space, sitting around a table with twenty-five other people when your email drops into my mailbox. Two days ago, you asked me if I wanted to write something about your short film The Seeds of Simili and there it is, the only thing I have to do is click the Url. I am curious but unable to leave the table or watch the work with attention.

During lunchbreak, fed up with all social chattering and networking, I withdraw from the group, and into a little corner with my noise-canceling headphones, in a half-dark theater space, I make a small cocoon and press play.

I feel a rush through my body, and I have to fight against the urge to PrintScreen the images or to write down every sentence you speak. They all matter equally. There is but the essence, and the rest happens inside my body, where energy moves and shakes between my head and tows. A short and internal earthquake emerges: tiny but sustained in time. I carry the work with me for several days like a stone in my pocket, a treasure found along the way, with which I am not sure yet what to do, except to carry it with me a little longer.

–

Over the past seven days, some of your images unexpectedly passed my mind. The tab with your movie has been open since that first screening as a continuous invitation. Its whispering softly asks me to return, as a siren song distracting each browse.

Today, I finally surrender to the siren song and watch The Seeds of Simili with the care and attention it deserves. The birds and the winds call for my attention, they demand me to become fully present with those mountains in front of me. They give me the time to land, there where you are.

Your camera slowly guides my eyes over the surface of a stone wall, yet it feels as if my hand brushes the surface. The light grey cement lines, holding stones of all kinds of sizes and form together in a distinct pattern, reassure me you are there. This slightly diagonally tracking shot immediately addresses your architectural interest that spins through your work. In between its lines, I can see the fish grate flooring you puzzled with glass wool, the plastic plug that became a skyscraper before your photo-camera, and the wall you build from vintage jewelry boxes. As I think of these boxes, a hand-painted wooden example appears on a desolate road, on a rock, as the ones the house is made out of. Your voice draws me in. It addresses me with a story I might have taken part in but seem to have forgotten.

–

You time and again question how to make a home? And your suggestion seems to slowly take shape over the works you make. The close-ups of the hands unpacking these beautiful seeds guided by your voice place the spectator on the opposite side of the wooden tabletop, our heads only a few inches apart. In the unfolding, I recognize this beautiful way how jewelers, like my grandfather, care(d) for the precious resources they are about to work with, by wrapping them with tissue paper in a very particular way. He used to carry those packages in the chest pocket of his shirt, unnoticeable for others. Your voice addresses how our ignorant consumption of resources nowadays lacks gratitude, or any sense of preciousness, but in turn became ignorant for what the earth grows and gives us.

With The Seeds of Simili you listened to the conversation of a place ‘in a language that is not your own’ (Robin Wall Kimmerer 2), the language of the winds, the mountains, the seeds, and those who live with and among them for many years, being it plants, birds or seeds. You question what we can learn from them.

In The Democracy of Species, botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer tells the wonderful story about the word Puhpowee she encountered in the writings of the Anishinaabe ethno-botanist Keewaydinoquay: “Puhpowee, she [Keewaydinoquay] explains, translates as ‘the force which causes mushrooms to push up from the earth overnight.’ As a biologist, I [Kimmerer] I was stunned that such a word existed”(3). You transmitted your listening to those languages and similarly to Kimmerer, you make painfully tangible how we unlearned the words and gestures of urgency, care, and preciousness that understand ‘a world of being, full of unseen energies that animate everything’ (Kimmerer 3). Both for you as for Kimmerer the only way to cultivate a home seems to be by taking ‘honorable harvest’ (Kimmerer 24) at heart.

You are both women with baskets to whom it matters how it is filled (Kimmerer 28) and who are eager to discover and implement the knowledge of traditional harvesters and sowers in a sustainable practice of building lifeways and homes.

At the heart of The Seeds of Simili, you invite me into a poetic, to become “inhabited by deep imaginings- visual and verbal, auditory and tactile – that we reinhabit in our own unique way” (Kearney xix). You share your twelve seeds for a home: clay, stone, wood, metal, water, apple, mirabelle, textile, lemon, bread, rosemary, and wind. I can taste each of these materials in the pauses between your words and sense how such a home would slowly unfold over time and across generations—through recipes that can only be passed down in the doing.

Due to your questioning at the beginning of the movie about how our world and living would change if nothing can be extracted but everything needs to be grown, it is as if you only suggest that kind of home, as if you plant the seed without knowing if it will take root or get lost in between the rocks. In doing so, you make palpable our scale and the serendipity of our existence, set against the shadow of a slower yet far more powerful geological timeframe—one in which we can, or perhaps should, be nothing more than humble.

The inclusion of bread reminds me of how, during wartime, sourdough starter was dried and carried along the road, telling stories of migration through its evolving taste when revived upon arrival. Your selection of materials is bound to the place where you resided while making this movie, yet it carries within it thousands of stories—of how these materials arrived there and how the environment, along with its inhabitants, has changed over the years.

Your unfolding home swells like a nest shaped by its surroundings. In The Poetics of Space, the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard compares the house to the nest. For him, a nest is a home built from the inside out, becoming “a swelling fruit, pressing against its limits” (121). In today’s world, the nest seems to have burst far beyond its boundaries. But can we begin again? Though you hesitate, The Seeds of Simili testifies to your understanding that a home—a nest—“is a precarious thing, and yet it sets us to daydreaming […]” (Bachelard 122). Not necessarily about security, as Bachelard suggests, but about a way of living that has long been forgotten or overshadowed by human greed and excess.

I feel compelled to write more about how The Seeds of Simili connects with Heidegger’s notions of the hut and Heimat—and yet, also alters them. But at this moment, I cannot quite articulate it sharply enough. So, I will leave you with one last quote from Bachelard, which, for me, encapsulates where our practices meet—especially in our shared love for everyday materials and speculative what if constellations:

“With a single poetic detail, the imagination confronts us with a new world. From then on, the detail takes precedence over the panorama, and a simple image, if it is new, will open up an entire world” (Bachelard 153).

I hope to write to you soon.

With love,

Leonie

Welcome to the land of Saskia Van der Gucht & Leonie Persyn. Here, we explore how planting and nurturing seeds into each other's practices can lead to a fruitful collaboration where the seeds act and react and nurturing is the work.

How
do
we
pack
our
words
and
our
seeds?

With care

In reaction to Leonie's letter, Saskia started researching carrier bags for the seeds of simili.

In reaction to Leonie's letter, Saskia started researching carrier bags for the seeds of simili.

While Saksia experiments with carrier bags,
Leonie plays around with certain aspects of 'The Seeds of Simili.'

A Parable of Paraboles