Around and about the harvest

There is a lot to love about the harvest: the feelings of promise and plenty it conveys, all that warmth and ripeness, late summer sun, a sense of fulfilment and completion. All this makes harvest the perfect title for a book which is a collection, a retrospective, a chance to look back and appreciate what Beth and Vera have tended and nurtured in espace libre. Harvest is an invitation to enjoy what can be gathered from the work they have done.

But harvesting begs many questions too. Alongside all this ripeness and fulfilment, it also conjures up a sense of extraction, even theft - in the context of data or organs, harvest is as grim as the reaper, the harbinger of death. And isn't there something judgemental about the notion of reaping what is sown, what is earnt - the Ernte - and deserved? How readily the feeling of abundance slips into the celebration of surplus and accumulation, the harvest as integral to the history and the workings of capital, the protestant work ethic, at the heart of our logic of profit and growth, investment, speculation, stocks and shares. And further still, into the origins of farming, the enclosure of the land, the exploitation of the peasants and the soil.

At the start and the heart - the kern - of this history is corn. Breugel's painting of the corn harvest, one of the defining works of modern European art history, testifies to the importance of a crop that has shaped the landscapes and history of modernity. Breugel shows us the harvesters at work and at rest, and even play. He paints their enjoyment, but also their exhaustion: those still on their feet are burdened or bent double by their work, and one of them, the figure in the foreground, is completely crashed out, fast asleep. We like to think it was all good fun, and perhaps it was, when the work was done. But we also know that the harvest was not theirs to keep: already in the distance, anchored in the bay, we see the ships of the merchants, waiting to take the surplus away.

Oats and barley, wheat and rye were amongst the founder crops, the first plants, it is said, to be domesticated more than ten thousand years ago. Unlike perennials such as trees and vines, these plants are grown as annuals, planted in rows which are ploughed up at the end of the season. They live fast and die young, putting all their efforts and energy into the burst of fruition that ends their lives, and don't even remember how to seed themselves. Their harvesting is less a moment in a cycle than a result, the end of a line which leaves them cut and dried, the landscape even slashed and burnt. Elias Canetti sees the cornfield as "diminished and subjugated forest. It grows where forest stood before, and it never grows as high." It is for him the image of sameness, uniformity, even death: "The cornfield is a battlefield."

Since the harvest Breugel painted, wheat has been automated, globalised, turned into a become a highly bred, over-fed, mass produced commodity, our staple diet, the world's main crop, and vital to the global economy. Corn, of course, is not the only crop: there are old orchards in this region where the trees have lots of space and are allowed to grow old, and gracefully, and in the vineyards that are planted on south-facing slopes too steep to be harvested by machine, the grapes are also collected by hand, and collectively: the Läset, or lesen, of the grapes in particular retains an air of festivity. Such careful and communal readings of crops are, however, rare. Many of the old perennials, the fruit trees and the vines, are also grown along the lines of corn, mustered into uniform rows, strung up on wires, cultivated in great plantations stretched out across the landscape like grids or looms, and bound to the same logic of managed growth and maximised rewards, low investment and high yields.

Such conditions of production have influenced the arts scene too. The cultural landscape also its seasons, its main crops, its well-trained artists and clear-cut fields, its uniformities and monocultures too. Not to mention its keepers and collectors, its speculators and the houses and warehouses in which its goods are stored. And notions of achievement and success that are wholly shaped by the logic of profit, speculation, storage and collection. But we only have to look at espace libre work to see that there are alternatives, other ways of growing, cultivating, getting rewards and measuring success. After expanded cinema, expanded harvesting: gathering and collecting in free spaces.

This kind of harvesting takes many forms. It happens around and about, long before and in the margins of the dominance of corn. One example is what anthropologists - at least imaginative ones like Graeber and Wengrow - call play farming. By this, they don't mean farming for the fun of it, but rather something more akin to gardening. Where serious farmers "tended to form societies with hard boundaries, ethnic and, in some cases, also linguistic", many early communities treated farming as only one of many ways of gathering food. Seeds were sown, crops were grown and gathered, and animals too were enclosed, fermé. But all this was part of a varied diet of activities, much of which had more to do with foraging than farming. For such "playful farmers" - Graeber and Wingrow highlight the Nambikwara people in Brazil, but find them everywhere - the harvest was not the main activity around which their calendars and lives revolved. "Well into the twentieth century, they spent the raining season in riverside gardens, clearing gardens and orchards to grow a panoply of crops... Cultivation was a relaxed affair, with little effort spent on keeping different species apart. And as the dry season commenced, these tangled house gardens were abandoned... The entire group dispersed into small nomadic bands to hunt and forage, only to begin the whole process again the following year, often in a different location."

For such communities, there was neither a clean historical break nor an everyday distinction between hunting-gathering activity and the growing of annual crops like corn. Farming was important, but not central to their lives. They were certainly not focussed on a main crop with a single harvest time. Harvesting was rather something that happened all year round: there were many things to be eaten, always something to be cut or dug or picked, by no means all of it deliberate.

Such ways of life might seem to be even more remote to us than Breugel's peasants. In fact, however, they have never gone away. They plant seeds and eat their own fruit, even if it's only a few chillies from a plant in a windowsill pot, and they also eat fruit from the hedgerows, take mushrooms from the forests, and collect the potatoes that have been left behind on the fields once the farm's own hands have left. Other kinds of gathering happen too: people sort through goods thrown off the supermarket shelves for being surplus to requirements or out of date, and take the best of what gets lost or left by market traders when they pack their stalls away. Some have no choice, others do it for fun. They too bring a harvest in, but not one they have tried to grow: these are more like accidental gatherings of whatever happens to be there. It's not the fruit of their labour, but what lies around and can be found. Perhaps what has been overlooked, left behind. And this, we know from Agnes Varda, is a kind of harvesting that really lends itself to artistic work. It's how she made her film, Les glaneuses et la glaneuse. All its elements are gleaned, including the paintings of gleaners she finds on show, in store, and even in a brocante, and the stories she hears from the offseason oyster gatherers or the people picking grapes from abandoned vines, and the links that are made when one thing, like the man collecting vegetables from the street, lead to another, such as his student refugees. It is a kind of accidental, unobtrusive, selective kind of harvesting.

The English title of Varda's film the Gleaners and I loses Varda's reference to the shift from gleaning as a mass, collective activity, to the solitary and sporadic work of the occasional person you see lifting potatoes in the Seeland's fields. Until the early twentieth century, gleaning was crucial not only to the survival of the poorest members of rural communities, but also to the harvest itself: the gleaners came after the main work had been done, clearing the fields of what would otherwise have been debris, gathering straw for bedding and enough corn to give a sack or two of flour. The German term is Ährenlesen: the gleaners were collecting ears. Gleaning was not a free-for-all: there were often rules about who could do it and when it could be done. In some places it could only begin when the last sheaf had been taken from a cut wheat field; in others, the church bells were rung to signal that the gleaning could commence. Often this late harvest, this second combing of the field, was overseen by young women designated gleaning queens.

Like gleaning, playful farming and gathering wild oats in bags are not without their rhythms and constraints: they too have their rules and limitations, and operate within specific social structures and economies. So too do the harvesters of espace libre in their work on the fringe of the city's collections, on the edges of the market, at the bottom of the hill on which the vineyards grow: haphazard harvests, generous gatherings of incidental, accidental, scattered crops, nothing in rows, no fenced fields, no sterile hybrids, plenty of room for experiment and variety. Gathered here is not confined to a deliberately cultivated crop, but all sorts of produce from all sorts of growth. Readings, experiences, afterthoughts. Anecdotes, recollections, second thoughts. See what you can find, what you can gather from what is gathered here, what you want to take away.

Sadie Plant

References

Elias Cannetti, Crowds and Power, translated by Carol Stewart, Gollancz, 1962

David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, Penguin Books, 2021

Agens Varda, Les glaneurs et la glaneuse, France, 2000 available online at

https://archive.org/details/the-gleaners-and-i-agnes-varda-2000