The Up-Rooted
While in Schloss Solitude I started to develop a documentary project based on intimate conversations with fellow artists in the Solitude forest. We talked about art, life, but also about this condition that artists and people in this generation share: the nomadic life.
The eternal moving makes us wonder about roots and interconnections, about the concept of home, family and safety net. During this process I wrote this piece, inspired by a phrase that Olivia told me from a poem about having roots in the air.
The documentary is meant to be also a map, tracing artists’ personal spots in the forest.
This is what connected the uprooted, or better, the up-rooted.
There are those who grow and no matter how much they spread, they keep their roots well anchored in the earth. There are those who grow inwards, and to the outside they only show a handful of leaves. There are those who grow up with weak roots that break with the first storm. And there are those like me, we stretch like a rhizome in the air. The longer this aerial plant grows, the more it meets and intertwines with other plants with acrobatic roots. They are plants whose seed flew away, fell on a piece of fertile ground, and began to grow upwards and to the sides, until their roots also detached from the ground, and began to grow above the clouds. Delicate electromagnetic connections here and there feed the aerial plant, like wireless roots picking up nutritious signals.
The uprooted are a strange species of acrobatic beings, in constant mutation and expansion, they cut with autonomous pain the heavy roots that unite them to a single group of sage, to exchange the vital sage with other uprooted ones. At the end of their days, their blood is not of a unique type, but a river whose flow collects hundreds of rivers of diverse providences. The uprooted barter for books, bedding, clothes, food, language, memories. Sometimes they even swap skin to feel what the other uprooted one feels. They meet in the air and at the blowing of the first wind they move, sometimes scattered, sometimes together, sometimes in pairs, sometimes as a family, often alone. The uprooted can share the same wireless roots, and there is no need for another uprooted to ask for it, the uprooted share everything because they own nothing. Nothing belongs to them because they own the world. Their growth is anarchy in its purest form, there are no limits for the expansion of the uprooted, for the interconnections they generate, for the time of their lives, or for the time of their death. The lightness of their existence allows them to be everywhere, to learn everything, and at the same time, to be absent, to be lost, to become a cloud and to let the sunlight pass through them.
It can happen that ground plants grow so tall as to be able to intermix with the uprooted, the aerial plants celebrate this fact and often hug the branches of the plants with earth roots for decades or centuries, but there is always a time when both are unlinked by a slight change in the direction of the wind. Sometimes that entanglement becomes so tight that the aerial plant can generate a wireless root connected to the ground plant to return at times or to feed itself when it is time of drought on the other side of the globe. Other times they spend so much time entwined that the ground plant spreads its youngest branches around the aerial plant and convinces itself that it is becoming an aerial plant. Until the root pulls it towards the ground with such resistance that the tension ends up breaking the young branches and dismantling the tangle of leaves created between the aerial and the terrestrial plants.
The uprooted are not beings without roots, they are beings with roots that extend into the air. Their rhizomatic roots create an energy network that connects to the electromagnetism of the globe at specific points for nutrition and communication. Their celestial acrobatics create another kind of soil in the sky, one that draws the tips of the ground plants upward, toward the sun, toward the stars, toward the movement of the wind. They transmit the information of the world to terrestrial plants, they bring news for growth, they mix pollen, sage, colors. The uprooted are always ready to seed, collect, exchange, and depart, without ever abandoning.
Original spanish version: www.xehismo.wordpress.com
