EACH SEED that we plant can lead to exchange

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 toes. 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 growing seeds into each other's practices can lead to a fruitful collaboration where the seeds act and react and nurturing is the work.

After receiving your letter I've been thinking of ways to translate the seeds into materials and gathered objects throughout my house.

A wall in a toolshed also came to mind, what if these materials are tools to build something else?

A parable of paraboles
visualizing a possible relation between The Seeds of Simili

I've been wondering if I could ask someone else to write about 'the seeds of Simili', a short film I've made in collaboration with Matthias Kreuzburg, filmed in Idanha-a-Velha, Portugal in the summer of 2024.

Your question about what kind of soil do seeds need in order to grow stayed with me.
I once came across the sentence "Despite all our accomplishments, we owe our existance to a six inch layer of top soil and the fact that it rains." apparently it was Paul Harvey, a U.S radiohost, who said this on a 1970's show called 'The Rest of the Story'.

This image can grow smaller again if it becomes too big compared to everything else

Hi Leonie,

I hope you are well.
I made some changes to our shared corner of the internet here. I tried to make the design of the introduction a bit calmer and changed 'nurturing' into 'growing' as the last sentence mentions nurturing as well.

I changed the captions over the images from descriptive to a dialogue between you and me as we discussed the last time we talked.

I've added dates to show the passage of time and they also help group certain images together.

Your voice and mine have a different font, mine is the default one (it does not mention a name) and yours is the one you chose for your first letter, called 'DejaVuSansMono', it's the second to last, so nine clicks on the font button.

These other post-it like notes could be a temporary tool and we can delete them later.

Dear Saskia,

Although I took on the voice of a dramaturg in my previous letter on your work, I nevertheless needed some poetic and visual imagery of my experience to get a grip on how to move on. I took the freedom to work with some images or phrases from 'The Seeds of Simili'.

So, while you have been experimenting with tools and carrier bags, I have been drawing parabolas, writing a poem, and making some photographs in an attempt to understand how the seeds relate to one another, why that door fascinates me some much and what it is that moves me in your work.

In the grid of the paraboles I found the corner of a door, that resembles the door to my atelier

She told me a story about a sower, and I could feel the wind on my skin as it came through the front door. It didn’t need the three steps as it could pass through the slightest crack. Every time I tried to retell her story, I could describe it no better than: c’était doux comme un souffle. A long and sustained whistle, slowly rising and falling in tone, resounded in my body in the most unexpected moments.

The wind came home and amplified the song silently hummed by the hillside. For years, she listened to that lullaby when she couldn’t fall asleep; it was what made this place her home.

Mornings arrived, and evenings lingered.
I forgot about her story and the song.

At least for a while.

Weeks later, I found some seeds in the hallway and helped them find ground.

And if I multiplied that door, it became the floor plan of an atrium

Dear Saskia,

Your work with carrier bags made me wonder how we not only pack our seeds, but also our words, and that packing always needs to be done with care.

In the Roman Empire, the atrium was a place where food was packed to be preserved, where it was stirred with care, where it fermented, and was stocked for the time being.

It was a space both private and public, yet intimate and soothing.

Dear Saskia,

Your experiments constantly bring to mind Ursula K. Le Guin's book 'The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction'. Maybe we should (re)read it together one day?

P.S.: How wonderful does she look, smoking the pipe?

Ursula K. Le Guin (Photo: Media / Getty Image)

Dear Saskia,

After a well-deserved holiday break, we recently had some calls on the first steps we took in this collaboration. We questioned its form and discussed several formats before finding this way of interacting. It wasn't easy to find a form that allowed for an efficient and honest way of working and communicating.

During the short period of time between June and October we already touched upon an essence of what it means to collaborate. We learned to express our expectations and needs.

I am happy you found the courage to address how you struggled with how my drawings make use of the seeds of simili and the visualization of parabole. I want to repeat here that for me it was nothing more than a way to get a grip on things, a detour to find what more or else I could bring to the table.

I think it is time now for me to find the courage to dive into my own artistic practice and let my artistic voice exist on its own next to my dramaturgical one. So, in the upcoming month, I will on the one hand return to the original letter and to my own research title 'What if a Spoon Could Hum?

What if a spoon could hum?
Would it stir?
Would it scoop?

What if a spoon could hum?
Would it spill the tea of a Royal banquet or transmit the warmth of all hands by which it has been held?

What if a spoon could hum?
Would I sense it?
Would I hear it?
Would I feel it?
Would I taste it?
Would I hum along?

What if a spoon could hum?
Would you sense it.
Would you hear it?
Would you feel it?
Would you taste it?
Would we hum along?

What if a spoon could hum?
Would it tell a story about how the hand meets the mouth?
Would it function as a pitchfork for the engagement of bodies and objects in intimate and tactile stories of living together?

What if a spoon could hum?
Would it invite us to listen?
Would it whisper or scream on the top of its lungs?

What if a spoon could hum?
What stories would it share about those who used it before you, about the sensations of their tongues, or about the times they attempted to balance it on their nose?

What if a spoon could hum?
Would it resound how it used to be part of a tree or rather reproduce the hammering of the blacksmith and the burning fire?

What if a spoon could hum?
Would it stir?
Would it scoop?

What if a spoon could hum?
Would we scoop or stir along, or use it like we do today?

If a spoon could hum
Imagine you're listening,

Self-portrait with spoons

Dear Saskia,

For a few months now, I have been wondering how an honorable harvest of energy could take shape.

You introduced me to this wonderful work of Valentina Schlegel when I was talking about how spoons used to be made of shells.

Her approach helped me find courage.

Dear Saskia,

Now that I re-read these words, there is a strange serendipity at work: Schlegel talks about the closed garden, a place where she received friends and guests. Her garden was private yet public, intimate and soothing, just like the atrium. It was a (work)space that mediated between inner spaces and the world.

I would love to re-read it, I actually have two copies of it at home; the small purple edition gifted by a friend. And loose copies on yellow paper advised by a teacher of mine. So you're not the first person to link my work with hers, yet it makes me happy you do too.

Did you ever read 'The Dispossessed'?

image of blue bag from childhood, thoughs on softness and protection

http://atticus.loganmillswalters.com/post/182250709294/ursula-k-le-guins-daily-schedule