BEFORE I KNEW YOU, ALREADY I WAS A FLOWER

HELLO, BEFORE I KNEW YOU, ALREADY I WAS A FLOWER, IS A QUOTE BY LUCE IRIGARAY AND A PIECE (OR TO BE PRECISE - CERTAIN TYPE OF BLOOMING) MADE BY SVETA GRIGORJEVA WITH RIINA AUSMA, PÄÄSU-LIIS KENS, LINDA VAHER, HELINA KARVAK, KRISTIINA VILIPÕLD. THIS IS US ON THE PICTURES AND VIDEOS. THESE ARE TRACES OF OUR TRANSFORMATION. TO BECOME WITH PLANTS AND TO BECOME FLOWERS, WHICH WE ALREADY WERE. HERE WE ARE SPENDING TIME WITH PLANTS, BEING NEAR THEM, MAKING LOVE TO THEM. DANCING WITH THEM. DANCING FOR THEM. NAPPING WITH THEM, LOOKING AT THEM. LOOK AT THEM.

THIS HERE IS AN ECHO OF THE METHODS OF OUR TRANSFORMATION. AS YOU ARE READING THIS, WE ARE STILL IN THE PROCESS OF TRANSFORMING. THIS PLACE IS NOT STATIC, IT IS LIVING. HERE YOU FIND TEXTS WE WERE / ARE READING, TOOLS WE WERE / ARE USING, PRACTICES WE WERE / ARE NOURISHING, COVID WE WERE AVOIDING. BUT STILL HAD. CARESSES WE WERE / ARE SHARING. INTIMACY WE WERE / ARE SEARCHING FOR. YOU ARE WELCOME TO READ ALL THE TEXTS, TO USE EVERY METHOD AND A TOOL WHICH WE FOUND TO BE FUNNY, NICE AND USEFUL IN BECOMING WITH PLANTS AND BECOMING FLOWERS (WHICH WE ALREADY WERE). YOU ARE WELCOME TO INVENT MORE - BLOOM!

THIS HERE IS A CERTAIN TYPE OF FEMALE SEPARATIST SPACE. IN A FEMINIST CONTEXT, THINKER AND PHILOSOPHER LUCE IRIGARAY HAS INQUIRED INTO THE ONTOLOGICAL STATUS OF WOMEN BEING FIGURATIVELY LINKED WITH PLANTS AND MADE AN EFFORT TO POSITIVELY REWORK THE NEGATIVE METAPHOR OF WOMAN-FLOWER. iN IRIGARAY´S POETIC WRITING, THE FIGURE OF FLOWER, SIMILARLY TO THAT OF LIPS, REFERS TO THE FEMININE SUBJECT AND THE CONCEPT OF FEMININE INTIMACY. SHE DISTINGUISHES BETWEEN BECOMING A FLOWER ON ONE´S OWN AND BEING FORCED TO BECOME A FLOWER AS A MODE OF MASCULINE APPROPRIATION OF FEMININITY: "YOU WANT TO MAKE ME INTO A FLOWER?", SHE ASKS. "BEFORE I KNEW YOU, I ALREADY WAS A FLOWER. MUST I FORGET THAT, TO BECOME YOUR FLOWER? THE ONE WHICH IS YOUR DESTINY FOR ME?", SHE ANSWERS AND ASKS. WE ASK: HOW CAN WE FOSTER (CORPOREALLY AND MORE) THIS WOMEN-FLOWER(ING). HOW CAN WE CULTIVATE A EMPOWERING CONCEPT OF WOMAN-FLOWER WHICH REPRESENTS FEMININITY SELF-AWARE OF ITS POTENTIAL, AGENCY, AND EROTIC POWERS.

Reclaiming Luce Irigaray

YOU MAY HAVE ALREADY NOTICED THAT IN THIS FEMALE SEPARATIST SPACE-PLACE WE LIE. A LOT. A LOT OF TIMES WE ALSO MOVE SLOW T(HERE). WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU PLACE YOURSELF ON THE PERIPHERY OF THE EVENTS, BECOMING THE NEGATIVE PEAK, THE UNSPECTACULAR? ONE MIGHT THINK IF ONE MOVES SLOW ENOUGH SHE/HE/IT/THEY MIGHT BECOME AN OBJECT. BUT IN FACT - IF ONE MOVES SLOW ENOUGH ONE MIGHT BECOME SPACE.

BED SHEETS ARE MADE OF PLANTS. BOOK SHEETS ARE MADE OF PLANTS. WE ARE MADE OF PLANTS. THEY LITERALLY BREATH US INTO BEING. WE NEED THEM. THEY DON´T NEED US. (WHO IS "US" AND WHO IS "THEM"?)

LATE NOTICE TRIGGER WARNING: YOU ARE ABOUT TO SEE A LOT OF COLOURS, A LOT OF FLOWERS, FLOWERY LINENS, AND WOMEN-FLOWERS.

A WEAK WEEK AT MASSIA

OK, STARTING FROM CLEAN SHEET

A SPACE YOU CAN REST YOUR EYES FROM ALL THE FLOWERS

A SPACE YOU CAN REST YOUR EYES FROM ALL THE FLOWERS

A SPACE YOU CAN REST YOUR EYES FROM ALL THE FLOWERS

A SPACE YOU CAN REST YOUR EYES FROM ALL THE FLOWERS

A SPACE YOU CAN REST YOUR EYES FROM ALL THE FLOWERS

A SPACE YOU CAN REST YOUR EYES FROM ALL THE FLOWERS

A SPACE YOU CAN REST YOUR EYES FROM ALL THE FLOWERS

A SPACE YOU CAN REST YOUR EYES FROM ALL THE FLOWERS

4.07-9.07 our female separatist space moved to Massia in order to practice actively vegetation. this practice consisted of reading together, watching performances and movies about mutating and morphing with plants and different approaches to plant-thinking. we were spending time with the nature and practicing eco-sexuality: caressing stones, penetrating sand, lap-dancing to waters, having tree-somes etc. we were actively passive and slow and practicing becoming landscape on our own choice and not because some dude wanted us to be the pretty background to his actions.

constantly moving and being moved by a question "what one might want and need me to be doing to and with them?"

A Kriya meditation for Cultivating your Inner Plant

"The vegetative or nutritive soul, existing in the Western imagination since the time of Aristotle and linked with growth and reproduction, was particularly associated with irritionality and women, resulting in their inferior position in political life. Elaine Miller explains that „western philosophers from Aristotle to Hegel have repeated the analogy of men to animals and women to plants by virtue of their (perceived) respective characteristics of activity and rationality, on the one hand, and passivity and lack of rationality, on the other“. This resulted in the association of women with flowers, both as a linguistic convention and an ontological conviction, linking femininity with a decorative status rather than any particular or political force. Hence, passivity, purity, and fragility were praised as female virtues, and, as such, flower-women were treated as objects of male desire."

Women have been out in the schizoid position of being simultaneously in history and not in history – just like plants – written out of history by male power. French feminists, Irigaray in particular, view feminine sexuality as either subordinate to the needs and desires of men (imagined sexuality by men) or autonomous and explorable only within radically separatist women´s discourse. In Irigaray´s words „To re-establish elementary social justices, to save the earth from total subjugation to male values (which often give priority to violence, power, money), we must restore this missing pillar of our culture“

Plant research by Monika Bakke

"Rather than a molecular
call for ‘becoming-plant,’ which I find personally a
bit romantic, the proposition would be to become
capable of dancing in their presence, not seeking to
transform into them or to imitate them, but rather
to present yourself to them, to dance for them and
because of them, to let them become a reason for
you to be in the world, for a while. (...) When I dance for plants, I make the plants
capable of making me do things that I wouldn’t do
otherwise. In the words of Vinciane Despret, plants
enable me to “gain a body that does more things, that
feels other events.” I am danced not only
by them but by what I allow them to make me
become. There is no imitation or even inspiration
in my experience. I just listen, and it moves me." (Loup)

cultivating our inner plant via Kriya meditation from Natasha Myers

want to get to know a plant in especially intimate way?
the quickest way to make love to a plant is to drink wine.
so what you do is: make a ritual of having a glass of wine. super important: ask for consent. dont worry, you will know if the plant wants you back and vice versa. if the plant says yes, then. drink it. not in order to get fuzzy or drunk but with the intention of making love to it (it being metamorphosed plant which wine is).
drink it slowly. see what happens. you can move, you can stay put.
if you want, put some music on or do it outside in the nature. don´t overdo it with the wine. nobody likes a sloppy lover.

Never forget this: your body does not end at the skin. Your contours are not
constrained by physical appearance. Your morphological imaginary is fluid and



changeable. Indeed, your tissues can absorb all kinds of fantasies. Your imagination generates more than mere mental images; its reach extends through

your entire sensorium. Simultaneously visual and kinesthetic, imaginings carry

an affective charge. They can excite your muscles, tissues, and fascia, heighten or
alter your
senses.


You can fold semiosis into sensation. Perceptual experiments can
rearticulate your sensorium. And by
imagining otherwise, and telling different
stories, you can open up new sensible worlds. (Natasha Myers)

Täna, 6. juuli 2022.

Ükskõik kui hästi on kõik planeeritud, alati midagi saab selle rikkuda. Eks lastega on see tõenäosus suurem.

Mul on tunne, et praegu oli mängus mitu kihti.

Üks kiht on koroona. Haige inimene peab eemale jääma. Aga praegu olin ma haige hooldaja, et teine olukord. Kui ma ise oleksin olnud haige, siis võib-olla ma poleks isegi pidanud ära minema. Kui ma oleksin öelnud, et ma ei suuda kuhugi minna, nii halb on olla.. poleks keegi ehk öelnud, et mine sõida koju. Poleks mul autot olnud, poleks keegi mind bussiga kuhugi saatnud. Mina siiski arvan, et kuna tegemist oli beebiga, siis oli lihtsam ta koju saata. Mina ju saan sõita. Ja emadele on eelduseks, et lapsed on kõige olulisemad.

Kas tal oleks parem olnud kodus või seal? Haige oleks ta olnud nii kodus kui seal. Mulle isiklikult tundus isegi, et rahulikum oleks seal olnud. Kodus on mul ju veel 2 last, kes ei lase kellelgi rahus olla.. Seepärast tundus mulle, et kui ma juba eos olin vastu võtnud otsuse, et ma tulen lapsega, siis tema võib ju rahulikult haige olla, aga ma saan ju raamatuid lugeda (rahus) ja vaadelda jne. See on ikkagi olla osa protsessist. Mina ju pole haige (ok, ma võin olla a-sümptomaatiline, aga seda võivad ju kõik olla..).

Kõige suurem kiht on minu jaoks kindlasti see ema kiht. Millegipärast alati emadest on mingi ettekujutus, kõik teavad, milline ema on, mida ema tohib teha ja mida ta ei tohi teha. Kuna ma olen üldse see aasta palju erinevaid asju teinud ja ka enda “ema”piire nihutanud ja noh, kui koguaeg keegi kommenteerib väikeste nunnude lausetega mida-ema-peaks-ei-peaks-tegema, siis no lõpuks ükskõik kui tugev sa oled, ikka hakkab mõjutama ju.

Aga ennekõike oli seekord meil tegelikult võimalus, võimalus leida lahendus, kuidas tegutseda keerulises olukorras. Kuidas vastu tulla, et me kõik saaksime eesmärgiga koos edasi liikuda. Covid on juba rohkem teada-haigus, paljud on vaktsineeritud ja paljud läbipõdenud. Me juba teame ka, et maskid ja distants aitaks, et meil oli võimalusi tegutseda.. Kindlasti puudub mul suurem hirm ka seetõttu, et tihti on lapsed haiged ja enamus ajast ma ise ei jää haigeks.

Nüüd, kus ma kodus olen, siis ma tegelikult mõistan kõigi hirme ja tegelikult saan aru, et see oli “õige” otsus, lihtsam otsus, aga taaskord pean kõrvale jääma (no ei jää, aga jään).

Umbes sama olukord oli mul u aasta tagasi kui kellegi teise laps jäi haigeks ja kuna me olime juba kohal, siis tuli otsustada, et kas lähme ära või jääme. Seekord jäime ja lõpptulemus oli, et keegi teine ei jäänud haigeks ja kõik oli chill.. (vb ei olnud covid, aga ega keegi ei tea). Võõraid inimesi ongi ebaaus panna olukorda, kus nad peaksid haigusega kokku puutuma. Aga samas… me peame selle haigusega õppima elama.

Ja minust on isekas mõelda, et ma tahan jääda. Me oleksime leidnud lahenduse ja ma oleksin saanud jääda. Paljud mu otsused on ekstreemsed kellelegi, aga ka nii saab. Aga kuskil on alati voice of reason, kes ütleb, et nii ei saa. Mulle meeldis, kuidas Sveta ütles, et Massiaru oleks saanud olla üks väheseid kohti, kus reaalselt oleks saanud proovida seda keerulist meetodit, aga siis kui see roosas-naine tuli oma realistliku maailmaga ja vaatega, et asjad-käivad-nii, siis no keegi ei taha olla olukorras kus ta friik peab olema. Võib-olla üksi olla friik oleks isegi ok, aga selles ema-rollis olles on väga keeruline olla see outcast. Sest sa niigid oled outcast.

One aspect of going to Massia was the fact that Kristiina was coming with a baby. We knew that working with a 8-month year old has a certain kind of error already written in the process and we were OK with that, but what unfortunately happened, was that baby Kiara Kirre was diagnosed with covid on our second day there. Even though we had a big meeting where we discussed their further stay - as Kristiina can participate from the distance, and even though their departure would be the easiest way out of this situation, we decided to "stay with the trouble" and somehow manage day-by-day with isolation and separate kitchen etc. But at the end the rest of the house was not OK with this, and Kristiina left with Kiara Kirre.

NEGOTIATING SITUATION FOR CA TWO HOURS

sometimes I wonder what it is
that nature tends to be called
mother earth
and that whether it is then...
a single mother?
it seems so
interesting - am I the child of this single mother then
one of many
and whether in this case we - humans -
are her most mischievous descendants
if mother earth had an opportunity
would it give us away
me and you - all of humanity -
for adoption?
or send us to father
but where is father anyway?
when will he come back
why haven't I seen him for so long
why I haven't seen him at all
maybe if everyone – humans - at least - kept on insisting on the father figure who is present
father
would maybe come back
from work from a bar from another woman from heaven from business meeting
from conducting scientific discoveries from starting a war
from ending the war from deciding about banning abortions
by the way
did earth even want to be a mother?
did someone ask her
maybe it was forced to birth us?

-

I don't really like the idea and
a metaphor for nature as a mother
I think that nature could maybe be thought of as a lover like annie and beth do
wouldn´t it be much better to
think nature as your kink?
with what joy would you throw your naked body into the waves of the seas
getting wet
like you've never been wet before
with what pleasure you would press your fingers into the moist soil
with what pleasure would you massage the sandy surface with your feet
with what glow you would rub yourself against the stony matter
would slide your fingers on the rough tree trunks and
maybe even dance a lap-dance to
some lushes bushes?
let's free mother from the earth
she never wanted to be it
and it´s also not a
she

The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, the plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling. (Audre Lorde)

After Kristiina and Kiara Kirre left we played around with eco-sexuality and also sent some ecosexts to Kristiina so she would not be so sad about departure. She also sent one ecosext back!

DON´T JUST CUT SOME, HAVE A TREE SOME

WATER MAKES ME WET!

ONLY ROCKS ARE HARD ENOUGH FOR ME!

LEAF TREES ALONE - MOAN!

watch us making a collective flower from 1h 30 min on at our rehearsal at Massia. this is a practice of becoming together a collective flower via moving collectively with no fixed direction and no fixed initiator. how slow do you have to move to feel all the parts of the čollective? with what you perceive the tiniest shifts in corporeal changes of the other(s)?

https://www.loom.com/share/d1641e975c614fcfa930c71135cda10b

fun fact: all of the pictures of field-flowers were made at Lasnamägi in the midst of concrete beton houses

BREATH IN

HOLD IT

HOLD IT

BREATH OUT

„At first it was the underwear. I wanted to become a tree because trees did not wear bras. Then it had to do with the spectre of violence. I loved the way in which trees coped with dark and lonely places while sunlessness decided curfew hours for me. I liked how trees thrived on things that were still freely available – water, air and sunlight; and no mortgage in spite of their lifelong occupation of land. (...) I felt repulsed by the mechanics of human historiography – think of the way in which a man´s quiet, possibly self-contented days are dismissed with a phrase like `an uneventful life`. Our dismissal of plant life comes from our inability to engage with nothing happening, with the Heraclitean `nature loves to hide`. Twentieth-century historians hadn´t been entirely able to escape from the domination of the „event“ on history. Only those who had caused abrupt roadblocks in the onward notion of time and event had made their way into history books. But there was nothing climactic, pathbending or life-changing in the life history of plants and trees. And hence banishment from history?“ (Sumana Roy)

constantly moving and being moved by a question "what one might want and need me to be doing to and with them?"

"the witch thinks about what it would be like to
fuck woods and not the government (...) fucking the trees is giving back the means of production to the trees" (Rebecca Tamás)

attunement to human and nonhuman relationships and the capacity to support them

In The Vegetarian, Kang depicts the ubiquity of misogyny and sexual violence. We are told at the outset—from a male perspective—that there is nothing extraordinary about Yeong-hye. And in many ways there isn’t, except for her powerful response to the systemic violence that she experiences both at the level of casual sexism and at the level of being preyed on sexually and assaulted physically by the men in her intimate life. She decides for ethical reasons that she wants to stop eating meat: she wants to stop participating in the metabolization of animal bodies. By the end of the novel, she stops eating altogether so that she is no longer participating in the metabolization of anybody. She just wants to photosynthesize: to be one of the plants with whom she identifies strongly, and with whom she is also—in her ordinariness and invisibility—identified and sexualized. Her desire to become a plant is a hyper-empathetic response to her understanding of how animals, plants, and women are treated alike in the context of carno-capitalism. (Catriona Sandilands)

entering into conspiratorial relationship with plants,vegetalizing our tissues and having tree-somes

In the Latin
vegēre, means
“to be active,” and applies (intransitively and transitively, actively and passively, singularly and plurally) to a range of persons, plants, and otherbeings, including the active first-person human singular: vegeō, I am lively, I am active,
I excite, I arouse.

"the witch understands that just because you stay very still
it doesn´t mean you aren´t listening
it doesn´t mean that you don´t exist
she understands that people like fast
so she impersonates a rock and doesn´t want to be liked
she impersonates a tree and fuck
she´s thinking like a tree
her mind gets green and grows and grows" (Rebecca Tamás)

"Vegetation flourishes, in these forays, because the process of thinking
like a plant reveals to us what we have chosen to forget in dominant
Western philosophical and scientific imaginations of our human selves
as primarily rational, self- organizing, and independent beings over and
above all others: a sense of our profound dependence on and location in
the conditions of our growth and decay, including the other beings with
whom we share these elements of liveliness. To vegetate, then, suggests
a thinking response to our plantiness." (Catriona Sandilands)

vegetating movement, vegetating through dancing

FOLLOW THE PLANTS!

When asked why feminism is such a driving force in current environmental humanities, Alaimo underscores feminism´s insights into "that dual sense of having been positioned as both a subject and an object: "That sense of theorizing and thinking even while being a material being" is key for being able to rethink the challenges we currently face, where "this distinction between human and what we call nature" no longer holds. (Hamilton and Neimanis)

Conspiracy derives from the Latin word 'conspirare', which literally means to breathe together

"Irigaray explicitly revises the identification of women with plants as it has been dug in by philosophers from Aristotle to Hegel. Joined under the concept of passivity, this union classically serves as the dumping ground for the negatives, all the privations that the subject that calls himself man fears to find in himself. Irigaray does not counter this history by arguing for equality through claiming that women too must uproot from the imagined stasis of natural origins and pull themselves erect into fellow dynamic political actors. Rather, she writes, woman´s so-called passivity would not be part of an active/passive pair of opposites but would signify a different economy, a different relation to nature. A matter, therefore, not of pure receptivity but of a movement of growth that never estranges itself from corporeal existence in a natural milieu. Irigaray thus works to transmute feminine sexual difference with the vegetal such that there would be overlap between, say the auto-affective gesture of at least two lips in contact blurring inside and outside, blurring visible and invisible, sight and touch, conceptual and sensible." (Lynn Turner)

in her short story "vaster than empires and more slow"
ursula le guin narrates that there are no individual plants and to
be a plant is to be as large
as to know the whole daylight and the whole night
all the winds and the lulls alltogether the winter stars and the summer stars
at the same time to have roots and no enemies to be whole no invasion no others