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Varda, Agnès. The Gleaners and I, 2000

Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel

Hello everyone. I'm delighted to have you join us for the first event related to the online public programmes of the Lafayette Anticipations Fondation.

This season, we are asking the question of how we transform the world by transforming our relationship with it, by restoring dignity to things that were no longer seen or not seen at all, and how our—sometimes very intimate—relationship with the world can be transformed through gestures, however small they may be, which are revolutions in themselves. 

That is why today, for our first event, I have the pleasure of speaking with Marguerite Humeau. Marguerite, Hello. 

It seemed very important to us to talk and exchange with you today as your practice has always explored the question of the living. We know that all your work, over the course of several years, has always dealt with, in one way or another, the mysteries of existence. And this also reminded us of the works currently being exhibited at the Foundation, such as Wil-O-Wisp, in which Rachel Rose explores the links between nature and women, and how women, at a certain time—the end of the 17th century—had an extremely intimate relationship with nature through, in particular, figures who were referred to as witches. These extremely intimate links described a collaboration between beings and this relationship was then undermined by a whole project that was far more related to the control of the land, its domestication, to the way in which we made the world a resource that we constantly use for our own production.

It’s a great pleasure for me to be able to discuss with you a very special project that you have been working on of late and which has enriched our public programme. I’m speaking of a video that you made during the confinement; a video about gleaning. 

Gleaning is this art of looking at things that were no longer seen, in this case other living beings, and, for you, the plants that surround you.

Our conversation will focus on how this video has developed from your work in recent years. How did the idea of gleaning come to you and how did the Weeds video come about?

Marguerite Humeau

I began to take an interest in the occult sciences and to really understand that this is the way that we were educated, even in school, and to realize that there is a discourse that is clearly supposed to be true because it was written and made official, but that there are a multitude of other discourses that were never written and that are part of oral traditions, for example, and that were also often held by women. 

Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel

That's what pushed you to contact Lucia Stuart, who is the main character in your video that we discover and who recounts this other form of knowledge that she set up and developed?

Marguerite Humeau

During the confinement, we were locked inside our domestic spaces. In London we had a bit more freedom, we were still allowed to go out for short periods, so I was able to walk around my neighbourhood. I started looking at the weeds around me and thinking about this idea of territory and living in an ultra-local way. I thought that this was also a question that preoccupies me—and I think will do so for the rest of my life—how today we can live in a way that is respectful of the planet, and what it really means to produce locally, to live locally. So, I imagined a line in my head, as if I had attached a wire between my brain or my body and the centre of the Earth, and that wire could scan everything it passed through, whether it was lava—or what I imagine to be some kind of magma at the centre of the Earth—then all the Earth’s crusts, all the bones, all the fossils of all the beings that have lived on Earth.

I thought of Lucia who is a forager, and therefore a professional gleaner, who is based in Kent in South East England, in a village on the coast, five minutes from the sea—this is very important because she has a great knowledge of seaweed and everything that grows on the beach. I called her and, at first, I wanted to discuss how she lives and if she could guide me in my quest during the confinement.

She’s really a character. For me she truly embodies this kind of figure of someone who has a certain knowledge that nobody else does, who is mystical. She has studied art and is very sensitive to the symbolic and aesthetic aspects of her profession. She has read a lot, she knows the history of our relationship with plants. She is also very committed—she talks about it in the video. For her, foraging her own food is a way of becoming totally autonomous and also of rebelling against waste, overproduction and industrial production.

My original idea was that if, in the most extreme case, the economic crisis that we are told is coming takes on gigantic proportions and no one has any money left to buy anything, and we have to survive with what we have around us, then I’m going to have to really learn to know what I can eat in my neighbourhood, because that might be the only source of sustenance. I came up with a semi-speculative scenario because we were going through something pretty extreme and I tried to push it even more.

When analysing weeds, in the end the soil is being analysed as well. There is an unbelievable book which I read at the very beginning of the confinement that opened me up to this world, La Fleur et le fusil by George Oxley, which talks a lot about the soil and what certain weeds tell us about the nature of the soil, since certain types of weeds grow from certain types of chemicals.

In all my projects—as we already mentioned at the beginning of the discussion—I resurrect or reactivate or design ecosystems that are built from different living beings that are often ghosts or forms of presence, made more or less physical in space through sculpture, a voice or sometimes simply an active substance such as black mamba venom for example. Finally, while editing the video, I realized that I had to see Lucia as one of the living beings of one of my ecosystems and that she holds knowledge that has not been archived or written down. The simple fact of filming her and recording her words and her image makes me think back to the beginnings of photography, the time when the photographic medium was used to prove the existence of ghosts—spiritualist photography—and I thought to myself, in the end, that’s exactly what I’m doing. It’s the first time I’ve used video as a medium to make a project, and right away I created a very strong connection in my head, thinking “Ah, actually, Lucia could be one of my sculptures.”

Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel

In fact, she invited you to completely rediscover the land around you. Gleaning is something that interested Agnès Varda a lot, she made a wonderful film about this. She also connected it to poverty, that is to say to an economic reality. 

I believe that today we are rediscovering how gleaning can be linked to profusion and is above all linked to love, to the attention that we humans can pay to the beings who are there, next to us all the time. The weeds which are everywhere in the interstices of urban space are a bit like the permanent calls of life trying to reintegrate itself into spaces where we have tried to control it in every way. If the COVID crisis has allowed one fundamental thing to emerge, it is the question of all those who were marginalised: we see it today with the question of racism, of the recognition of black populations in particular and of all non-white populations, as a real problem linked to the question of who is at the centre, who is on the margins, who is given dignity and who is not, who is not recognized as having a potential power of presence.

This COVID crisis, which has brought an entire civilization to its knees, which tells of our extreme fragility and our immense entanglement with a field of living beings much larger than ourselves, that is the subject you have come to work on with gleaning. This is something fundamental for you: to give a voice, a power, a presence back to these beings, the weeds in this case, that we have trouble recognizing.

Marguerite Humeau

There is a dominant model that is evident. In the end, it is as if the COVID crisis has drilled holes in the screed and it is exploding.

... and now the things that were on the edge of being bearable have clearly become unbearable, and all these beings… I have this image of the screed, because in the end, to come back to the weeds, it’s in those moments that they get out. It’s in those very places where they explode on the surface, where they can—that is what is happening on a much larger scale in all human ecosystems right now.

Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel

That’s also what you emphasize in the video in which you wonder why and who could have decided to call weeds “mauvaises herbes” (bad herbs), because in themselves they have a lot of potential, they have incredible properties, except that they are species that carve out freedom, that exist and place themselves in interstices where we don't expect them, where we've tried to dominate the world and its form. Maybe that is also a response to a model of the world that has tried to control, to give dignity to certain forms and certain ideas, to some people rather than others, and the others who are still trying to live are suddenly treated and described as bad. This reveals much of the mental landscape of our culture and what we inherit in the way of categorising the living as good and bad, the living which is entitled to some dignity and the other which is denied any kind of recognition.

This rediscovery of the land and the people around you was something you did a lot of during the confinement through long walks. What’s interesting about this is that it is also another rhythm: we all had to experience a rhythm that had become quite foreign to our lives, that is slowing down, which is a very new physical presence in urban space, that of the human body and no longer that of public transport, for example. And during these walks, you were able to rediscover a whole architecture that was present in London, and it’s as if you were relearning to see. Perhaps you can tell us about this practice of discovering and rediscovering architectural traces that have particularly interested or touched you. 

Marguerite Humeau

On the word “mauvaises herbes”, what I find interesting is that in English we say “weeds”, not “bad weed”. I also find it interesting in the context of this project to see that a term which, in one language—it does not matter which one—has no connotation, is translated into another language as “bad”. That’s why I gave the video that title, when something by its name alone carries judgement.

As the lockdown went on, I realized that I normally would have said it was spring, but when I started foraging I realized that when you start looking at nature—Lucia also taught me this: she says nature is her calendar, and that she can know exactly what time of the year it is, to the day sometimes, just by looking at the flowers and plants that are present—you understand that we decided that there would be four seasons but, in fact when you look at the plants, there really are micro-seasons.

In the very beginning I didn’t really understand what I was doing with architecture either, but as time went on I realized that eventually all the places I was interested in had been built by people who used architecture for much more obscure, not necessarily functional purposes. 

All the buildings that I went to see either had a link with ancient civilizations or had been built by people who had links with Egyptology, for example, with all the sciences of the afterlife, dealing with the relationship between life and death. 

Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel

Thank you very much Marguerite for this exchange and this conversation which allowed us to enter into your world and to understand the genesis of the piece that we will discover in a moment, Weeds, in which we can follow you in your quest, your investigation into the power of the living and these beings that constantly surround us.

I would also like to take the opportunity to announce that from September you will be the artist in residence at Lafayette Anticipations and that we will have the pleasure of discovering a new project that you will be able to carry out throughout the year through workshops and discussions, and which, in the same vein as Weeds, deals with the question of the garden. We therefore hope to discover next year this immense garden that you will be able to create within the Foundation in the heart of Paris and see how to give a place back to the living in a very urbanised space, how to live together and find new ways of making relationships.