Paper short abstract:

During the pandemic, I started a small collaborative map of the disseminated seeds of an oak tree that lives at my mother's garden. As an affective map of our relationship with trees, it might throw some light on my other current research: how to narrate our interconnectedness with rainforests.

Paper long abstract:

While this pandemic’s exacerbated differentiations, I started a small "interspecies ethnography" of an oak at my mother's garden, in which concepts such as "limit", and "scarcity" collapsed: thousands of seeds fell at its foot and buried their roots among other sprouts and rotting leaves. Infected by this excess, I germinated seeds, losing my own notions of useful time and purpose.

Just the month before I was writing a PhD proposal. My aim was to investigate how to audiovisually narrate our co-dependence of the Amazon rainforest, a (surely failed) response to the increasing of deforestation since the partially failed 2016 Peace Agreement. I sought to understand more deeply this systemic co-dependence and tell "Gaia stories" (Latour 2016, Haraway 2016). I wondered, however, if a non-linear way was necessary, given that narration in our Western tradition follows "linear" patterns. Is there no connection between this linearity and the ecological crisis?

That project also came to a halt with the pandemic. Now, with hundreds of sprouting oaks, I am starting a small collaborative project: whoever takes a small tree, creates a georeferenced record of where it is planted, and a story of a tree that he/she remembers especially. My aim is to create a map of the great oak, including all its sprouts/derivations; an affective map of our relationships with trees.

I do not know if these projects converge; perhaps this map is a non-linear device that can bring us emotionally closer to that forest we see so far away.