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Workshop Notes
workshop on 20121012 and 20121013. participants; Heath Bunting, An Mertens, guillaume neu-rinaudo, reg carremans, karin ulmer, lucia penninckx, els de greef, rasa alksnyte, nik gaffney, maja kuzmanovic.
Concept: Legal identity of trees in period of quick extinction
Day 1
Look at trees in Forest de Soignes / Verdronken Kinderen-Enfants Noyés
Different elements of identity we looked at:
- origin
- age
- gender
- position/postcode
- General parameters that create a 'normal' identity:
* minimal: name, date of birth, nationality ~ what's your name? where are you from? how old are you?
→ nationality is complex in general, and also for the tree
→ can nationality be replaced by citizenship? Or by 'family'/species the tree belongs to?
- functional: telephone, email, postal address, gender
- extra: health insurance number, debit card/bank account, tax number
- actual: website, facebook, linkedin, myspace…
- 'What can x do?'
→ create a 'corporation' around the tree?
A new legal persona is not necessarily a natural persona
Personhood can refer to
- a human being (material essence, person living on the street)
- a natural person (ID)
- an artificial person (corporation)
Personhood is defined by
- institutions
- a bureaucratical system
- data: if you have enough data you can find/create meaning → 'invocation' of persona
'Natural and articifial persons' are considered to be the property of a human being, any property can be
- kept
- passed on
- destroyed
→ we could wrap a corporation around the tree, insert some human dna-fragment in it…
→ if you don't have a birth certificate, you need a story
How do we proceed?
- “proto-personhood” for trees: 'law', relationships of management & property
- “philosophical”: why
- “physicality”: 'functionality', relationships to other people/things
A lot of trees have numbers, all trees have a owner in Belgium but with different status (forest, private property, city of bssls)
So maybe interesting to add the parameter of 'owner/user' to the series of tree-parameters and talk about 'lineage/species' instead of nationality
→ who owns it? Who has an interest in using it?
A tree is defined by lineage but also by 'the context': a tree in the city will be different, climbed, polluted, dependant on humans (candle stick prunage)…)
→ where do the seeds come from? where did it grow up?
We make a checklist and look at it from different perspectives
Perspective of a tree: does not want to be chopped off & wants the right to light, soil & water
Day 2
- looked at 'Oak du marais' in rue des Minimes, transplanted 6 years ago from somewhere else, serves as a 'bar', a meeting place, lighted by humans, hosts birds…
- look at trees in front of Walvis, planned to be chopped: platans, protest because they are the 2 only trees at that side of the Boulevard (between Yser & Porte de Ninove), and because they will be replaced by 3 new trees planted 3,5 m closer to the bar (effect: the terrace will be half as big)
- discussion on the 'arboresceal persona'
We create it and integrate it in our daily language, start taking it into account → method of 'invocation', it will start to exist
Look at the bigger picture: what if trees have legal identity & rights? How will we co-live with them: as separate entities or as chimera of tree/humans
→ a way to reconnect with trees, restore the natural-human relationship f.ex. in Lithuania it is unthinkeable to cut a tree
→ create a map of Brussels' forest?
→ see artificial arboreality as a business? what does it offer in terms of services (oxygen, fruit, fertile soil) - any shared good is value less in the dominant economic ideology of looking at the world → maybe think differently?
→ look into the 'personalities' of the trees
Nik reads Ecuador constitution that has integrated the rights for Nature in the law
→ we are the system: there is no authority imposing a system on us, we're the embodiment of a system, our 'identity' is a position of the system we occupy Heath's motivation: If we have rules to manage our identity, we can invent the rules to create identity
the human being can occupy most echological niches (of species that disappear)
Next phase: proof of concept, create prototypes
- Look at information & data that exist already
- question the frequency & absence of parameters, reconceptualize location, speed, appearance of the aboresceal persona
books/reading
- Compendium of Symb & ritual plants in Europe
- Guide to wild foods
- Mycelium running: how mushrooms can help save the world
- The revenge of Gaia
- The end of the wild
- Hildegard's healing plants
- A new green history of the world
- Deep Survival, Lawrence González