By: Caroline Kreysel
I’ve always been a collector; I am unable to leave a beach without taking some shells and every autumn I bring a few pinecones home. I do this because it would be too hard to let go of the versions of myself that I become in different places or because there are certain experiences that photos can’t grasp.
I took this habit along to our fieldtrip to Chapecó in the state of Santa Catarina in Southern Brazil. It was an exciting trip, a dip into a world I had only read about and our first experiences conducting fieldwork. We interviewed people involved with the agricultural complex around soybeans. The conversations were insightful and, luckily, recorded. Nevertheless, a few things that I remember now, sitting at my desk at VU, would have slipped my mind had I not curated a little collection of fieldwork-related items.
Caroline’s archive of planting and growing: In the left middle the earth clump, to the right, folded and lengthy, the Citronella leaf.
There is for example a clump of earth that I took from the agroforest of UFFS. In the middle of eucalyptus forests and maize plantations, a professor grows an agroforest, an elaborate system of plants that sustain each other, enrich the soil and produce food for people. As opposed to plantations where we observed traces of erosion and crumbling drought, the colour of this soil was dark red and brown, it felt moist and soft when I picked it up. It reminded me of the firm yet slightly sticky feeling it caused under my feet.
Or look at the dried Citronella leaf. Not a native to Brazil but nevertheless a welcome ingredient for natural repellent. Nathaly and I used this on our first visit to the garden to protect us from the borrachudos. Borrachudos are black flies, that fly close to the ground and cause itchy bites. They are a native of the Atlantic rainforest, but human activity increased their numbers in many places. Particularly, the declining quality of waters that receive residues of the meat industry are an appealing living space for borrachudos and other mosquitoes. As their natural habitats are increasingly destroyed, they find new spaces to dwell in and new skin to sting through. In this landscape where everything is geared towards producing food and feed, humans themselves become food.
These material memories allow me to perceive the places we visited in different ways. However, the act of collecting them also reproduced my positionality and a culturally conditioned desire to preserve. I tried to fix in time what is inherently unstable and in motion. I selected what seemed worthy to preserve, which to me were the plants I encountered, the shapes that escaped the plantation complex and the things those people plant who want to create a living outside of intensive agricultural production.
Walking these sites of research, deliberately feeling, smelling, listening and sensing the more-than-human worlds I want to understand, was also a starting point to develop ways of doing fieldwork that can incorporate the complexities of environmental realities into research practice and writing. I learned to define my positionality in more-than-human worlds, and I am curious how fieldwork practice that centres on the material and the multisensorial can help tell new stories about the histories of the places we inhabit and draw attention to the unintended consequences of human choices and the many agencies that interpret and navigate the landscapes we live in.
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