Research Residency - Cheneni Gabes - in collaboration with Per Hüttner, Karine Bonneval and Soufia Ben Saïd , Oasis Gabes Cheneni
"Drinking the sap of a tree is perhaps the most intimate way to enter into conversation with it "
Media : performance , enquête de terrain
Themes : nourriture, transmission & héritage, vivant· mémoire & disparition
This project is a new stage in a research process initiated two years earlier by Per Hüttner and Karine Bonneval. At my invitation, we all came together in Tunisia, in Gabès, around the date palm and the traditional consumption of its fresh sap, legmi.
At the beginning of the residency, we sought to metaphorically connect three trees from the three continents that represented us. We also wanted to establish a physical connection with these specimens. What better way, then, than to drink the sap that flows through them and try to imagine a fluid flowing through us in turn? We thought of the birch, the maple, and the date palm.
In Tunisia, legmi can only be harvested under specific conditions. Unlike birch or maple sap, it cannot be preserved in its natural state, as it ferments very quickly. Its extraction itself relies on ancestral knowledge, learned and passed down from generation to generation; without this knowledge, the process could kill the palm.
It is this fragile and precious ancestral knowledge that the project seeks to listen to and document.
In an attempt to listen to the palm's sap, we equipped the tree with the “Pépipiaf” — a device that measures variations in the expansion of a branch — previously used by Per and Christine in other projects. The first tests, carried out in my studio-garden on ornamental palms, were conclusive.
The Chenini oasis is one of the few coastal oases in the Mediterranean basin. Today, it is already affected by freshwater scarcity, industrial pollution, and the progressive salinization of its soils. We met with farmers, members of oasis protection associations, and seed keepers working with traditional and locally adapted seeds.
Together with Soufia Ben Saiid, we experimented with the “archetypal constellation”: taking on roles alongside people we met on site, each embodying one of the elements that make up an oasis — groundwater, the palm, sap, soil, wind, roots, irrigation water, and so on — in order to explore the intergenerational traumas of the oasis, listen to them, and become aware of what they have endured.
It was a way of grounding ourselves more deeply in the oasis and of developing a better understanding of the date palm.
→ See also : A Forest Grows in My Head - Within Reach - What If Tomorrow the Mloukhia Were to Disappear?