"Il y a dans ma tête une abeille qui parle bas" (English Version)

 

“Il y a dans ma tête une abeille qui parle bas”. Johanna Caplliure

“Poème: Il y a sur la nuit trois champignons qui sont la lune. Aussi brusquement que chante le coucou d'une horloge, ils se disposent autrement à minuit chaque mois. Il y a dans le jardin des fleurs rares qui sont des petits hommes couchés et qui s'éveillent tous les matins. Il y a dans ma chambre obscure une navette lumineuse qui rode, puis deux des aérostats phosphorescents! c'est les reflets d'un miroir. Il y a dans ma tête une abeille qui parle bas”. Max Jacob

It never occurs to us to think that nature is inside us. We are active and reactive nature. We have the power and the counter-power to turn our existence into a unique event of saving and destroying potentials, a fact without guarantors or heroes in the struggle to dominate the ruling forces. We are the poison and the antidote for our afflictions. We think in terms of isolated departments, never of the unit. The obvious lack of a holistic view turns our life on Earth into a jigsaw puzzle, and this is putting an end to a large part of that unit which provides energy to our lives. However, we have to be careful with the euphoria of desiring the whole: Le tout seul n’est qu’un trou (whole is a hole).[1] Life forms emerge and submerge in a dance of waves we cannot discern within the immensity of existence, an ocean life that is always foundering.

Nature’s needs do not use the sting described by Simone Weil to bite the excessive condition of the natural man, whose ambition was to find shelter or a piece of meat, not even the desire to have an existence that is mortgaged by a job, a home or a life that does not belong to us, as she also argued on the voluntary oppression to inhabit the Capital. The thorn has been driven into reason and it inoculates the most heartless form of desire—destruction in order to achieve possession and control over life. All this because, along the journey of Progress, we have lost sight of the question “who are we?” Without this question on the horizon, all meaning collapses and life lacks “the nature of life”: to live.

It is well established that the desire to know and dominate nature through turning it into man’s vassal, has led to the loss of a global vision of the world, to an unbalance between the sources, the consumption and the resources of energy, and to a deviation from the crucial issue: “the nature of nature”. Because (n)ulle science naturelle n’a voulu connaître son origine culturelle. Nulle science physique n’a voulu reconnaître sa nature humaine[2]. What has found a place within academic settings, has met its most painful outcome in the industries, states and governments, namely, the immunity to the nature of our nature. There is a bee whispering in my head - Elle me parle tout bas.[3] It dances. I, too, know how to zigzag in a relational dance. They call it “social subconscious”, “collective subconscious”: life forms emerge and submerge, and, even if it is in our dreams, we know how to sting.

Now it’s nature—our own nature—that comes out of our dreams and puts us in the urgency of taking a stand in life. Let’s wonder what we are, like Johan Grimonprez does, as if listening to Schöndinger with a turn towards the common. We must go from the certitude of our nature into action, fight for safeguarding a sustainable system, a system of systems, a complex system that is capable of striking a balance between the natural needs and the human needs.

If the enigma of existence lies in the impossibility of dictating a specific future, of generating one single, safe reality, and if any inquiry into a glimpsed expectation is that of the end, then, why not transplant ideas, cultivate communities, get rid of parasites and, if we still have the strength, gather the best nectar. These ways of caring for the system of systems have been brought to light by environmentalists, naturists, scientists, activists, gardening guerrillas, scholars of permaculture, of deep ecology or radical ecology, economists, mycologists or engineers—why not—as well as artists and fiction writers.

The importance of the impact a soft buzzing can have on the rest of the planet is what the work of Johan Grimonprez offers us. The tail movement produced by On Radical Ecology and Tender Gardening is that of a buzzing readying for assemblage. Therefore, we are not talking of the “butterfly effect” that shatters predictions with a flap of the wings, but of an agitated movement that swarms the multitude outside markets, states, institutions, and even the beliefs which have been laid down as the logical basis for our lives.

On Radical Ecology and Tender Gardening is a “WeTube-o-theque”. In other words, it is a free, shared bank of knowledge, where knowledge is compiled by a ‘we’ and for a ‘we’ in Youtube. Grimonprez’s selection of materials in this “WeTube-o-theque” is constructed in the form of a Vlog, with six categories that establish the base for a new radical ecology, for current ways of sustainability and for caring for the man/nature relationships: 0.1-Biotecture, 0.2-Guerrilla Gardening, 0.3-Transition World, 0.4-Radical Ecology, 0.5-Off the Grid, 0.6-Education. The video material comes from different sources. They are independent or TV documentaries, fragments of international news, talks recorded at symposia or conferences, animated cartoons and videos from environmental and activist organisations. Therefore, it is a plural archive offering an irrefutable panoply of information for knowledge, debate and eco-guerrilla. Furthermore, it offers a multiple apprehension of the real. And this is what can be found in the construction of a “WeTube-o-theque”, an operation involving a multiplicity of images, codes, knowledge and actions as possibilities, and possibilities as powers. The power of a ‘we’. The emerging and submerging of life forms, sometimes manifest and sometimes hidden, but always in nature. There is dancing in the darkness of the beehive. What we call “swarm intelligence”, the action of swarming or the strength of anonymity is nothing other than a multitude swarming with a noise that is undecipherable for the ruling apparatus. Les agencements sont pasionnels, ce sont des compositions de désir[4]. Desires that make us dream of a bee inside our head. Grimonprez’s dream of a social network fabric linked to a new radical culture, committed to a real, conscious multiplicity of the attentions for the survival of a ‘we’. Inside my head, a bee whispers to me and tells me that the swarm is relaxing in the garden.

Buckminster Fuller
on 'Spaceship Earth':
Everything I Know Sessions
Philadelphia, USA
1975, 2 min

In the Open: Art & Architecture
in Public Spaces — Deborah Gans
& Matthew Coolidge
BOMBLive!
2010, 4 min 25 sec

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[1] “The whole by itself, without its parts, is nothing but a hole (whole is a hole)”. E. Morin, La Méthode: La nature de la nature, Paris, Éditions de Seuil, 1981, p.126.

[2] Since “no natural science has ever wanted to know its cultural origin. No physical science has ever wanted to admit its human nature”. Ibid, p.11.

[3] “It speaks to me very softly”.

[4]  “Assemblages are passionate, they are compositions of desire”. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., Mille plateaux, Paris, Gallimard, 1980, p.497.