Names and Plants: Intersections between Art and Ethnography.

Abstract (English)

The central hypothesis of this work is the existence of a proportional link between the variety of popular names for plants and a given community's capacity to preserve the environment. This hypothesis is supported, on one hand, by an ethnographic approach to the Quilombo do Camulengo, in the interior of Bahia, Chapada Diamantina, Brazil. On the other hand, it utilizes an artistic approach, specifically landscape photography, through which ways to express both the feelings of the researcher-artist and the importance of a denser relationship between humans and non-humans are investigated. This proposal thus addresses the relationship between art and science (especially optical physics, botany, and anthropology), based on the reconstruction of a creative process and specifically supported by macro photography. In this way, in the process of photographing plants in Bahia, the benefit of educating visual intuition (and attention) when composing the image as an object is analyzed.
Drosera aliciae, popularly known in Brazil as "orvalhinha" (and possibly also as "cobra-de-vidro" — a name to be verified in field research), is a carnivorous plant that plays a crucial role as a bioindicator of water quality in ecosystems. Alongside it, Cladonia cristatella (often referred to by older biologists and farmers as "crown moss" or "horn moss") is a lichen that helps us understand the health of environments, growing on moist surfaces and commonly seen as insignificant patches on trees.
The expeditions expand knowledge about plants, fungi, and the various names attributed by small farmers in the region. Confirming our hypothesis, such naming is essential. In Camulengo, bioindicator species of water and air purity are already perceived. Indeed, popular knowledge anticipates scientific certainties discovered much later, based on intuition and collective practice; and the expansion of our vocabulary and understanding of what constitutes a healthy environment may also depend on poetic exercises that strengthen the connection between people and the environment — the subject of the research “Landscapes as People: a metaphysics of plants in photography,” currently underway in the doctoral program in Visual Arts at UFBA.
Finally, it is understood that linking the environmental crisis to the social relationships that enable the current production of the world (Anthropocene and Capitalocene) is necessary. Consequently, the diversity of names assigned to these plants in the life world, reflecting different cultures and relationships with nature, may be seen as intertwined with the need to sensitize a progressively lethargic society to the historically embedded relationships it is part of. Thus, art has the responsibility of visually translating this awareness of the urgency to keep the world alive.