(bush) Tea Plots - A Decolonial Patch
Title
(Bush) Tea Plots
Year
2019
Medium:
Glass vitrine
Coral stone base
Limestone
18th + 19th century
porcelain clay sherds
soil and wild botanicals
Dimensions:
40" x 28" x 28"
Credits:
Dondré Trotman (photography)
Kevin Talma (collaborator)
Ras Ils (collaborator
Collector:
Permanent Installation at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus, Barbados
“But from early, the planters gave the slaves plots of land on which to grow food to feed themselves in order to maximize profits. We suggest that this plot system, was, like the novel form in literature terms, the focus of resistance to the market system and market values. This culture created traditional values – use values. This folk culture became a source of cultural guerilla resistance to the plantation system.”
– Sylvia Wynter, Novel and History, Plot and Plantation (June 1971)
(Bush) Tea Plots – A Decolonial Patch confronts the historical imposition in Barbados of the monocrop–Saccharum officinarum (sugar cane)–while recognizing nature as a radical agent of resistance against the singular model of the plantation. Observing how the natural world is threatened and degraded, this work acknowledges the resilience of our regenerative biosphere and its inherent capacity for healing at the agricultural, botanical and psycho-spiritual levels. It comprises a glass planter showing the soil profile, allowing the viewer to appreciate the rhizosphere providing a nurturing environment in which a specially curated selection of medicinal plants with healing properties may flourish. It creates visibility of near extinct, covert Afro-spiritual, bush tea customs. Drinking bush tea was a ritual practiced by the enslaved. Tea was brewed from locally grown wild plants harvested in small plots, hedgerows, and gullies, and consumed for medicinal, spiritual and healing properties.
A living restorative plot, this collection of wild botanicals speaks to an increase in biodiversity on the island resurfacing in abandoned sugarcane fields since the decline of the sugar industry, offering a curative space collaboratively brought to life through art practice, landscape architecture, and botany. It acknowledges the historic use of wild botanicals grown on small plots of land by the enslaved as an apothecary or homemade curative space to treat illnesses. A QR code on the side of the planter links to my website with resources and information on the plants.
As this COVID-19 moment forces us to rethink sustainable futures in the context of small nations, how might we reconsider the potential of wild botanicals, often disregarded as roadside weeds to be sprayed with pesticides? The local slow food movement in Barbados, for example, is noticing a trend in some of our chefs who envision inventive ways to include some of these wild plants into their menus; organic farmers sell Amaranth, pussley and fat pork at Cheapside market. Is this an example of a post-plantation economy whereby historically fatigued landscapes might become sites of genesis and regeneration? Uncultivated botanical growth may offer counterpoints to plantations as fixed sites of trauma, violence, and exclusivity, allowing reconciliation with the land and the virtual slaughterhouse that lies below it.
Gratitude to Kevin Talma and Ras Ils for being such generous co-conspirators. Special thanks to Janot Mendler de Suarez and Pablo Suarez for facilitating the realisation of this project and to Dr. Sean Carrington, UWI, for sharing his wealth of knowledge on wild plants in Barbados and for donating the Wonder World / Kalanchoe pinnata to the project. Most of the other plants were nurtured by Ras Ils at Peg Farms, Easy Hall, St. Joseph, Barbados.
