Intimations of the Ecological Turn
To question the stakes of temporal scales in the ecological turn, I started from a double observation, a double issue, identified in The Climate of History in a Planetary Age by historian Dipesh Chakrabarty.Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age. Chicago, London: University of Chicago Press, 2021. The first point is the question of temporal collision. Already in the first thesis, from the “Four Theses” chapter, Chakrabarty points out that anthropogenic explanations of climate change have led to the collapse of the distinction between human and natural history.Ibid., 26. Climate and environment are no longer the background to human actions, nor are they simply interacting with humans. On the contrary, historically and collectively, humans have become a force of nature in the geological sense, a planetary geological agent. In this way, the geological has found its way into everyday life. We are even in a reality where the “present” of human history has become intertwined with the long “present” of geological and biological time scales. With the Anthropocene and the climate crisis, for the first time, we have to hold together the globe’s history and the planet’s history, the recorded history and the deep history, the history of capital and the history of the species, despite their incommensurable temporalities. The challenge now is to think simultaneously in several registers, to mix chronologies—a combination that stretches the very idea of historical understanding. It’s a “collision,” a “running up against one another”Ibid., 49., of the history of the Earth system, the history of life and the history of industrial civilization? All of them have different scales, speeds and timetables.Chakrabarty points out that some calendars are compatible with human times, while others involve calculations. In short, “the climate crisis requires us to move back and forth between thinking on these different scales all at once”.Ibid., 56.
Temporal collisions, which involve scales both human and non-human, bring me to my second point: the question of the non-human. This calls for a shift away from centering the human. Chakrabarty emphasizes the need to reconsider the place of human beings within the interconnected histories of the living and non-living on a global and planetary scale. The pluriverse, as discussed by SchmittCarl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth: In the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum. Translated by G. L. Ulman, New York: Telos, 2003., should no longer revolve solely around human beings. Humans should be positioned on equal footing with all other creatures, rather than being in the foreground.Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, 90. Chakrabarty urges us to extend the political realm beyond the human. To achieve this, the challenge is to present a different narrative, one in which humans are merely parts, and even small parts, not always responsible. Drawing inspiration from Earth System Sciences, Chakrabarty explores the history of the planet, which, unlike the human-centric construct of the globe, decenters humans. The protagonist of this narrative is life in general, with the focus on habitability, rather than sustainability.
“Habitability does not reference humans. Its central concern is life—complex, multicellular life, in general […]. The question at the center of the habitability problem is not what life is or how it is managed in the interest of power but rather what makes a planet friendly to the continuous existence of complex life. […] The immediately relevant point is that humans are not central to the problem of habitability, but habitability is central to human existence.”Ibid., 83.
The planet’s history opens up perspectives on humans without placing them at the center of the narrative. Human lives are intricately connected to the planet’s geochemical processes. According to Chakrabarty, we have two tasks ahead of us: extending our concern for justice to all non-human beings (not just a few species) and making the vast time scales of geobiology relatable to human history.
The challenge here is to develop a narrative that, on one hand, encompasses various temporal regimes and, on the other hand, shifts the focus away from humans by integrating the non-human on the level of sensibility and affect. Chakrabarty hopes that such a history could generate new perspectives for resolving conflicts and contribute directly or indirectly to their reduction. It could be seen as a “negative universal history” that allows the particular to express both resistance and its imbrication with the totality:
“[T]hat which is nonidentical to totality has to be able to express itself through resisting its complete incorporation into the totality even as it is so incorporated […]. Similarly, […] the nonhuman should be able to make itself heard without having to be anthropomorphized or without having to speak the language of humans.”Ibid., 47‑48.
This story would not start with the Earth seen from the sky, but with fragments: it would not follow the dominant and overbearing narrative, nor would it merge the interconnected but distinct stories of different actors. This story, which, he suggests, may still be in the stage of ethical guidance, would nonetheless be able to extend a gesture to a “we” that could transcend the human.Ibid., 48.
To address this dual challenge and perform this gesture, I propose to explore more-than-human narratives, from an ecofeminist perspective.Concerning the more-than-human turn, see Sarah Whatmore, “Materialist Returns: Practising Cultural Geography in and for a more-than-human World”. Cultural Geographies 13, No. 4 (2006), 600-609; Jamie Lorimer, “Moving Image Methodologies for more-than-human Geographies”. Cultural Geographies 17, No. 2 (2010), 237-258. My goal will be to demonstrate that these various stories, which begin from below, disrupt the grand overarching History, and that narrative provides valuable tools for understanding the intricate and multi-faceted temporalities of the ecological crisis. First, I will follow the ideas of ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood to illustrate how a decentered epistemology can be implemented through such narratives that involve not only humans but also non-human animals, plants, microbes, and even minerals or artifacts. Then, I will showcase how these narratives not only connect diverse temporal scales but also reveal a more-than-human agency. Drawing on a field study, I will emphasize the narrative dimension of a Soviet sanatorium ruin in the town of Tskaltubo, Georgia.
1. A Narrative Epistemology of Decentering
Learning to See From Below
To decenter ourselves from our human perspective and that of global history, I suggest learning to see from below with ecofeminist Val Plumwood (1938–2008). Plumwood was an Australian philosopher, a pioneer in environmental philosophy, and an environmental activist. Among the places significant to her are Kakadu National Park, where she narrowly escaped a saltwater crocodile in 1985, and the forested mountain south of Canberra, where she built her stone house and from which she took her own name—Plumwood, after the species that is emblematic of the local forest ecosystem. Her relationship with places and environments testifies to the fact that non-humans and territories are at the heart of her thinking. Indeed, the philosopher develops her thoughts from her situation: she articulates lived experience and critical thought, life and theory.Regarding the articulation of the personal and the theoretical, Sara Ahmed’s work is also highly instructive: “Theory itself is often assumed to be abstract: something is more theoretical the more abstract it is, the more it is abstracted from everyday life. To abstract is to drag away, detach, pull away, or divert. We might then have to drag theory back, to bring theory back to life.” Sarah Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016, 16. This is particularly evident in her essay The Eye of the Crocodile, written after her accident with the crocodile. This experience will have a crucial influence on her work:
“Some events can completely change your life and your work, although sometimes the extent of this change is not evident until much later. They can lead you to see the world in a completely different way, and you can never again see it as you did before. You have been to the limit, and seen the stars change their course.”Val Plumwood, The Eye of the Crocodile. Canberra: Australian National University Press, 2013, 11.
This concrete approach, which is characteristic of ecofeminismEmilie Hache, ed., Reclaim: Anthologie de textes écoféministes. Paris: Cambourakis, 2016. but can also be found in Chakrabarty’s work, has both a didactic and critical dimension. It enables us to develop an empirical mode of knowledge, drawing on sensation and embodied experience, rather than relying on a priori assumptions. The goal is to move away from an objectifying and inert epistemology.
In subscribing to standpoint theory and, specifically, Donna J. Haraway’s situated knowledges, Donna J. Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective”. Feminist Studies 14, No. 3 (1988), 575-599. Plumwood rejects the idea of a universal, omniscient point of view, referred to as the “God trick.” Situated knowledges instead strive to disengage from a perspective that claims to see everything from nowhere. Instead, they unfold in four ways that avoid this fallacy.Julie Beauté, “Vers des esthétiques situées”. In La Beauté d’une ville. Paris: Pavillon de l’Arsenal, Wildproject, 2021.
Firstly, knowledge is rooted in a particular embodiment. This means that corporality plays a decisive role in contextual and relational knowledge. Plumwood emphasizes the embodied dimension of our earthly existence and thinks from the adventures of her own body.
Secondly, knowledge is based on a degree of partiality. In her text “Journey to the Heart of Stone,” Plumwood highlights that stones confront us with the limits of our knowledge. As human observers, we can never fully understand the complexity of the rock forms we see. We can only discern a few general outlines.Val Plumwood, “Journey to the Heart of Stone”. In Culture, Creativity and Environment, 17-36, Leiden: Brill, 2017, 33. Therefore, knowledge must be limited and located, and only a partial perspective can provide an objective vision. This counters any claims of a falsely omniscient point of view.
Thirdly, the act of bearing knowledge entails responsibility. Being aware of one’s own position helps to defuse presumptions of innocence and holds one accountable for their actions and writings. Plumwood consistently reflects on and exercises caution regarding her role as a white philosopher working with Aborigines.Val Plumwood, “Decolonising Relationships with Nature”. Philosophy Activism Nature, No. 2. (2002), 7-30.
Lastly, situated knowledges require a critical practice of objectivity. This involves constantly questioning, deconstructing, and reconstructing knowledge and its methodologies. By doing so, they challenge the dualism between the object of knowledge and the knowing subject. They encourage us to recognize the agency of knowledge objects, from which we can learn. Plumwood’s work consistently reflects this concern, as she constantly interrogates her own philosophical practice and seeks wisdom from both human and non-human teachers who do not publish academic books.
Following Haraway’s lead, Plumwood seeks to decenter her gaze by learning to see from elsewhere and from below, by equipping herself with optical instruments shaped by minority viewpoints.For a more detailed analysis of the connections between Plumwood’s thought and Subaltern studies, see Julie Beauté, “De la critique des dualismes de Val Plumwood aux histoires subalternes enchevêtrées”. Diacronie. Studi di Storia Contemporana 4, No. 44 (2020). She thus promotes embodied and political concepts of rationality,Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. London: Routledge, 1993. and encourages the restoration of speech, action and meaning to silenced people—including the earth and its stones, considered as the most insignificant members of the earth community. Such a program of decentering can, she argues, not only give us a more modest sense of our human role, one that cultivates more self-reflection and gratitude, but also lead to an expansion of our sensitivities beyond the conventional boundaries of the human, towards inhuman elements of the world.Val Plumwood, “Journey to the Heart of Stone”, 20. Plumwood calls for a radical transformation of culture, so that it is able to deploy a profound and practical knowledge, an ecological knowledge, in a context of political and ecological crises.Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. London, New York: Routledge, 2002.
Talking-With: For a Dialogical Framework
Against the reductionism and mechanistic worldview of dominant culture, Plumwood proposes a philosophical animism and an enriched materialism. She invites us to engage with and perceive nature as an active force.Val Plumwood, “Nature in the Active Voice”. In The Handbook of Contemporary Animism, 109-127, London, New York: Routledge, 2014. This project entails recognizing that the world is filled with vibrant, intentional matter. Non-human entities, in particular, should not be seen as inert matter, mere resources, or insignificant tools.Val Plumwood, “Journey to the Heart of Stone”, 20. On the contrary, Plumwood emphasizes the inherent value of all beings and their essential role in the interconnectedness of their environment. She advocates for shifting them from the background to the foreground of our attention, from silence to speech, and from the absence of spirit to intentional agency.Ibid., 35. In doing so, Plumwood challenges the accusation of anthropomorphism by dismissing it as reductionist jargon. She argues that intentional language should not be limited to the human sphere. Instead of clinging to this narrow perspective, we should cultivate a broader sensitivity to the agency and contributions of non-human elements and agents:
“Opportunities for re-animating matter include making room for seeing much of what has been presented as meaningless accident actually as creative non-human agency. In re-animating, we become open to hearing sound as voice, seeing movement as action, adaptation as intelligence and dialogue, coincidence and chaos as the creativity of matter. The difference here is intentionality, the ability to use an intentional vocabulary. Above all, it is permission to depict nature in the active voice, the domain of agency.”Val Plumwood, “Nature in the Active Voice”, 123‑24.
The world’s reanimation, then, requires us to prioritize “speaking-with” rather than “speaking-of” (speaking-about), in order to avoid the possibility of misunderstanding and epistemic injustices towards intentional beings. Indeed, Plumwood criticizes the reassertion of authority and privilege in discourse, as well as the dualism opposing the agent who knows and the object of knowledge. She invites us to move from monologue to dialogue, from domination to negotiation:
“This is the rationality of monologue, termed monological because it recognizes the Other only in one-way terms, in a mode where the Others must always hear and adapt to the One, and never the other way around. Monological relationships block mutual adaptation and its corollaries: negotiation, accommodation, communication and attention to the Other’s needs, limits and agency.”Val Plumwood, “Decolonising Relationships with Nature”, 18.
She thus contrasts the rationality of monologue, which consists of a unilateral, centric relationship, with the mutual adaptation of dialogue, which is based on accommodation, negotiation, communication, and attention. Against a monological freedom—an instrumental, egocentric, irresponsible and meaningless freedomVal Plumwood, “Journey to the Heart of Stone”, 27.—she calls for the reinvention of ways of dialoguing with people, things and places. In Environmental Culture, she even argues that, in the present circumstances, it is both rational and urgent to replace the monological, hierarchical and mechanistic models that have characterized our dysfunctional partnership with nature, with models based on reciprocity. These could indeed enable us to restart this partnership on healthier foundations.Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture, 11‑12.
This dialogic speaking-with has profound consequences for the way we name things. Plumwood invites us to name or rename in a careful, attentive, dialogical way. She promotes a “deep naming”, a practice that connects names with narratives.Val Plumwood, “Decolonising Relationships with Nature”. Deep naming is not merely an act of labeling. It is a way of forging a meaningful relationship with the land by recognizing its agency and communicative presence. In contrast to colonizing practices that impose names in an anthropocentric, Eurocentric way, deep naming seeks out the spirit of the place—a term that, for Plumwood refers not to a mystical essence but to the land’s capacity for narrative depth, memory, and relational significance. To seek a place’s name is to ask for revelation, to listen attentively to its stories, and to recognize its voice within a broader ecological and cultural dialogue. Deep naming thus links together different forms of knowledge, allowing both humans and non-humans to co-create meaning. It is with this in mind that Plumwood changed her own name to place her identity in dialogue with the place where she lived: a plum wood. This act of renaming is not merely personal but a project of reconciliation, decolonization, and cultural convergence, one that remythologizes the land and restores a more reciprocal relationship.
Listening Through Storytelling
Plumwood’s ecofeminist way of thinking is part of a communicative paradigm that relies on narrative methods for naming and narrating human and non-human lives.
“An alternative paradigm of ownership and belonging is communicative, relying on narrative methods for naming and interpreting the land through telling its story in ways that show a deep and loving acquaintance with it and a history of dialogical interaction.”Ibid., 23.
To tell a story is to elaborate, through dialogue, a profound and shared knowledge, to reach the narrative richness of the world. Plumwood, for example, analyzes Aboriginal naming patterns, which are connected not only to the land community, but also to stories: “these striking stories function both to impress their meanings cunningly and irresistibly into the memory, and to bind together botanical, experiential, practical and philosophical knowledge.”Ibid., 28.Such stories give depth, meaning, and voice to the land and its inhabitants. The ability to connect dialogically with the more-than-human world is a source of narratives, allowing for a multitude of human and non-human narrative subjects on a talking earth, full of stories and mythical voices. Narrative is the means of constituting the moral identity of living beings. Plumwood thus explicitly honors the agency and creativity of the more-than-human world.
The epistemological choice of narrative favors a sentient mode of thought, in contact with experience, continuous with its milieu. This approach can also be found in the thought of SF writer Ursula K. Le Guin, for whom narrative is a means and a way of life:
“Narrative […] is a means, a way of living. It does not seek immortality, it does not seek to triumph over or escape from time […]. It asserts, affirms, participates in directional time, time experienced, time as meaningful.”Ursula K. Le Guin, “Some Thoughts on Narrative”. In: Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places, 37-45, New York: Grove Press, 1989, 39.
In another text from the same book, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”,Ursula K. Le Guin, “The carrier bag theory of fiction”. In: Dancing at the Edge of the World, 165-170. Le Guin reflects on the prehistoric tale that recounts the story of the mammoth hunters, leaving out that of the wild oat gatherers. The author refers to this tale of conflict, defeat, and violence as the “killer-story”: “we’ve heard it, we’ve all heard all about all the sticks spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things.”Ibid., 167. This heroic narrative, known as the “Story of the Ascent of Man the Hero,” resembles the trajectory of an arrow or spear. Its primary focus is on conflict, and it necessitates a hero. To challenge the dominance of the Grand Narrative, Le Guin advocates for a shift from the figure of the sword to that of the carrier bag. The carrier bag is a common container (a receptacle for holding things), used for collecting ordinary items (such as wild oats). This is the basis of the carrier bag theory, which is rooted in life stories.
Similar to Le Guin’s life stories, Plumwood’s “eco-writing” project challenges the prevailing narrative, which is dominated by the rationality of scientific reductionism and views the material world as terra nullius. For Plumwood, the important task of cultural change ahead of us primarily involves writing, with the aim of incorporating elements from science and art, philosophy and poetry, reason and emotion, to acknowledge beings as active and receptive partners.Val Plumwood, “Journey to the Heart of Stone”, 34. This means recognizing that beings—human and non-human alike—are not inert objects or passive backdrops to human action, but rather participants in dynamic relationships, capable of affecting and being affected, of responding and engaging in ways that challenge the dualism between subject and object. The epistemic and political challenge here is to transform the theoretical framework for interpreting history, to unlearn the teachings of the Hero, along with the unteachers, the unmasters, the unconquerors, and the unwarriors. Stories explore alternative narrative possibilities: they immerse us in the network of the living, they create numerous encounters and unexpected gaps, they follow the trail of beings without severing the threads of thought, they enable us to embrace an ecological and decolonized perspective of space and time. Thus, we are in need of new stories and expanded dialogues, as emphasized by Deborah Bird Rose and Libby Robin in “The Ecological Humanities In Action.”Deborah Bird Rose and Libby Robin, “The ecological Humanities in Action: An Invitation”. Australian Humanities Review 31, No. 2 (2004). However, they caution us that the world already possesses its own stories, as all living things are expressive. Engaging in communication does not give us the authority to invent stories from scratch. Instead, our task is to “expand our epistemological repertoire” in order to be able to gather and tell stories aspiring to be truthful.
2. Medea’s More-Than-Human Stories
How can such narratives concretely hold together different temporal scales and make space for the non-human? Here, I attempt an illustration based on a field investigation carried out in September 2021 and July 2022 in the town of Tskaltubo. Tskaltubo is a former Soviet resort in Georgia, where baths and sanatoriums were abandoned following the fall of the USSR. The buildings are of ecological interest, as living species proliferate there. They are also socially and politically charged, as for 30 years, they housed displaced populations from Abkhazia, a separatist region of the country. Some families still live there today. My aim here is to highlight the temporal and narrative issues at stake in the more-than-human ruins of Tskaltubo’s landscape.For a more detailed analysis of the ecological dynamics at work at Tskaltubo, see, in French, Julie Beauté, “Medea. Pour une écologie des ruines”. Plan Libre, No. 205 (2023), 30-41. The present analysis takes the presentation of the framework from this text.
Beyond The Mortifying Gaze
Tskaltubo, named after the Kartvelian words for “water” and “hot,” is one of the Soviet Union’s most prestigious spa resorts.Stefan Applis, “New Perspectives for Tskaltubo”. Journal of Conflict Transformation, Caucasus Edition, 2020; Suzanne Harris-Brandts and David Sichinava, “The politics of Urban Recovery in a Soviet-Era Spa Resort Town: Heritage Tourism and Displaced Communities in Tskaltubo, Georgia” In Urban Recovery, 271-294, London: Routledge, 2021. In the 20th century, as balneotherapy developed and the city grew in popularity, numerous neoclassical and modernist sanatoriums were constructed. These sanatoriums, under the administration of the USSR, attracted a large number of visitors. The 1980s marked a period of economic and cultural prosperity, known as the “Golden Age.” However, the collapse of the USSR had a significant impact on the country’s political and economic functioning. Tourists stopped coming to Tskaltubo, and funding for the public baths and sanatoriums ceased, leading to their closure. The following year, ethnic conflicts erupted in the secessionist region of Abkhazia, resulting in the displacement of around 250,000 people. Approximately 10,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs) were welcomed to Tskaltubo and housed in the resort’s facilities. However, the sanatoriums-turned-shelters faced a lack of state resources and proved to be unsuitable and detrimental to health.As a result of this shift from a hygienic, therapeutic haven to a paradoxical humanitarian shelter of long-term emergency, the town has come to be characterized by a double image. On one hand, official advertising and restoration plans convey a touristic, spa image, presenting it as the spa capital of Eastern Europe. On the other hand, numerous blogs and YouTube channels accentuate the post-apocalyptic aspect of the place, shaping a perception of ruins. This has led to the development of unique forms of dark tourism and ruin porn. For further information on dark tourism and ruin porn, please refer to Annaclaudia Martini and Dorina Maria Buda, “Dark Tourism and Affect: Framing Places of Death and Disaster”. Current Issues in Tourism 23, No. 6 (2020), 679-6992; and Iyko Day, “Ruin Porn and the Colonial Imaginary”. Publications of the Modern Language Association 136, No. 1 (January 2021), 125-131.
After the transition from socialism to post-socialism, a liberal and capitalist element is being introduced to the story. The government seeks to restore the city’s spa image and revive the tourist infrastructure. To achieve this, they are pursuing a vertical urban planning approach characterized by top-down decision-making and a lack of transparency. Simultaneously, the restoration project, which has not yet commenced, appears to be rooted in nostalgic narratives of the Soviet era and a vision of heritage. This vision fixates on the architectural elements, seemingly disregarding the present and recent histories, and ignoring the changes that have occurred since the Golden Age. This is evident on the front page of the brochure from the Tourist Development Center, which features a young woman peacefully floating in a pool, accompanied by the words “Feel Immortality in Tskaltubo.” This striking image invokes the notion of mythical, rejuvenating, and timeless water. In Jeremy Till’s book Architecture Depends, he argues that the architectural discipline and profession are consumed by a deep fear of time.Jeremy Till, Architecture Depends. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009. Architects are so frightened by time that it becomes their enemy. Till identifies a range of strategies employed by architects to neutralize, deny, and erase time. In the context of Tskaltubo, how can we move away from this timeless vision—what I have elsewhere referred to as a “mortifying gaze”Julie Beauté, « Medea. Pour une écologie des ruines », 32.—promoted by the tourist and heritage narratives of the place?
In contrast to the official discourse, academic discourse takes a different approach. It critiques the urban planning of official history, which views space as empty and available to investors, and urges public authorities to consider that revitalizing the city’s economy involves displacing its occupants. On the other hand, academic discourse shifts the focus to social history, particularly the history of internally displaced persons (IDPs), which offers a completely different perspective.
In 2007, the government launched a resettlement program for displaced populations with the goal of emptying the sanatoriums. However, the apartments offered to IDPs are located in other towns, sometimes far away, and are often of poor quality. This resettlement policy is problematic because it disregards the dignity of the people involved and damages the community networks of already vulnerable populations. It is also inefficient, as vacant sanatoriums are not renovated, and many remain empty and continue to deteriorate. From October 2019, a new resettlement dynamic is launched with a different approach: buildings are constructed in Tskaltubo, south of the park. These completed dwellings, offered to Abkhazians, are cost-free and not remote, making them more acceptable to IDPs.
Academic discourse seeks to address the issue of neglecting the histories of displaced populations, while the vision of heritage tourism excludes and disregards IDPs, portraying their presence as an aberration. Drawing on Chakrabarty’s “History 2,”Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. academic discourse proposes an alternative history to the dominant, fixed history of heritage: a refuge heritage, a heritage from below.Suzanne Harris-Brandts and David Sichinava, “The politics of Urban Recovery in a Soviet-Era Spa Resort Town”. However, does academic history alone break free from the oppressive gaze? It certainly decenters by acknowledging the existence and lives of displaced people. But does it also consider the temporal dimension at play in architecture? My hypothesis is that to comprehend the complex strata and temporal scales of Tskaltubo, we must not only abandon the heritage vocabulary but also transcend a single history replacing another. The challenge here is not to propose a new history but to pluralize stories, incorporating living narratives. That is what I have endeavored to do, by collecting the stories of one sanatorium in particular, in order to draw up its material biography.
Medea’s Life
Among the multitude of sanatoriums, I chose to focus on Medea. This contingent choice must surely have depended on the magisterial allure of the facade, the name “Medea” which intrigued me, the impressive invasion of plants inside and outside the building, or even my mood of the moment. Spending several hours a day at Medea, I met inhabitants, policemen and young people who hang around at the end of the day. By chance, I attended several photo shoots of wealthy Georgians. The great columns of Medea are often used as backdrops for wedding videos or Georgian rap videos. I also got to know the dogs, cows, wasps, mosquitoes, fleas, impressive plants, stones and garbage.
By developing “arts of attention,”Anna L. Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015, 17. I sought to free myself from a dominant, all-encompassing point of view, which would see everything from nowhere. I based my approach on situated aesthetics,Julia Beauté, “Vers des esthétiques situées”. in order to decentralize my gaze, seeking out the point of view of human and non-human agents, as well as that of Medea herself. In particular, the challenge was to achieve a phenomenological reversal by thinking from, with and like Medea. Thinking from Medea means learning to look from elsewhere, and attempting to escape the overhanging vision of heritage by establishing new regimes of attention. Thinking with Medea, then, means anchoring my point of view in a corporeal experience and making Medea a partner in the investigation. Within this framework, architecture becomes an agent of knowledge production, with whom I have to think. Finally, thinking like Medea means tracking down her particular point of view and reflecting on her own sensitivity. As Medea has no eyes, ears or hands, and no sensitive organs comparable to our own, we need to consider other modes of sensibility. As we have seen, the narrative appears to be an effective tool for this, capable of expanding our epistemic repertoire and deploying a dialogic approach.
How can we tell the story of the building without reducing it to the architects’ biography or to official history? How can we bring out the stories that run through and shape it? I propose to pull Medea’s own biographical strings, within a material biography that centers the narrative on concrete transformations and even temporalities. This dialogical biography seeks to mingle facts with stories, to mix temporalities: those of the legend of Medea, that Corinthian magician, i.e., Georgian, that powerful and disquieting woman of mythology; those of Medea’s history, built to house USSR medical personnel, then turned into a Collective Center and evacuated in recent years; those of the human and non-human voices that populate the place. This material biography could have taken the form of Wajdi Mouawad’s novel Anima.Wajdi Mouawad, Anima. Babel. Arles: Actes Sud, 2015. This detective novel has the unusual feature of changing narrators at each chapter—the narrators being, in fact, animals who witness the various scenes. In this way, I could have explored, through a more-than-human fiction, Medea’s different points of view, the different agents at different scales. This fictive novel will surely never see the light of day, but to get away from the mortifying gaze, I nevertheless propose in my work a material biography through the back door.
Dreaming Herbariums
My investigation focused on the practice of herborization and the creation of herbariums. Indeed, plants play an active role in Medea’s transformations and provide unique perspectives on the building. They act as narrative subjects, opening the way to multiple narratives. With plants, as Native American biologist Robin Wall Kimmerer points out:
“It is an intertwining of science, spirit, and story—old stories and new ones that can be medicine for our broken relationship with earth, a pharmacopoeia of healing stories that allow us to imagine a different relationship, in which people and land are good medicine for each other.”Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2015, x.
This field philosophy, which resembles field witch-philosophy,Starhawk, Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex and Politics. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989. involves three tasks and modalities: collecting, connecting, and fabulating.
Collecting flora is first an art of attention, aiming to create new constellations of meaning in situ.Romain Bertrand, Le Détail du monde: L’art perdu de la description de la nature. Paris: Points, 2022. Herbariums therefore enable us to overcome the dualistic aporia between theory and practice, as collecting becomes a place for questioning the nature of the herbarium itself. Practice is immediately theory, and theory is practiced. Herborizing is a situated technique that involves a gendered body selecting specific plant specimens while engaging in dialogue with them. Herbariums reject monological, univocal approaches to plants, suggesting that collecting is more akin to a carrier bag than a slicing blade.
Connecting materials refers to the materiality of herbariums, which lay out collected plants after drying. The physicality of the plants is tangible, their temporal evolution is multisensory, and their deterioration is inevitable. They vividly demonstrate the vulnerability of thought. Moreover, herbariums establish proximities, creating human and non-human connections between the herbalist and their predecessors, the herbalist and the plants, the pages and the herbs, and life and death. They also blur the line between caring description and plants being uprooted. In a strange form of post-mortem or even trans-mortem care, they encourage us to question the place of biotic and abiotic materials and, more broadly, to develop ambiguous material cosmologies.
Finally, fabulating refers to the fact that discursive practices permeate these herbariums. They call for discourses that present, comment on, and narrate them. Herbariums are even invaded by the stories and dreams of naturalists, herbalists, and non-humans. To move away from fixative categories that label and immobilize specimens, dates, and places, I envision herbariums that rely on fabulation. One approach is to transcend the binomial nomenclatures of colonial scienceKathleen Cruz Gutierrez, “What’s in a Latin Name?: Cycas Wadei and the Politics of Nomenclature”. Philippine Journal of Systematic Biology 12, No. 2 (2018), 24-35. and imagine relational, narrative, and speculative taxonomies.
As I worked on creating a herbarium in one of the rooms known as “the greenhouse” (where plants are grown indoors on a large scale), I couldn’t help but notice the strong presence of Artemis in this collection. Two species in particular seemed to dominate: ragweed (Ambrosia Artemissiifolia) and annual mugwort (Artemisia annua), both of which were beautiful and fragrant little weeds. This observation led me down a path of dreams and legends, causing me to recall the story of Medea. It’s worth noting that her name can be traced back to the Indo-European root “med-”, which is also found in the Latin word medicina, meaning medicine. According to mythology, Medea disguises herself as a priestess of Artemis in order to seek revenge on Jason’s father, whom Pelias had overthrown. Medea tricks Pelias’ four daughters by offering them a cauldron filled with magic herbs, ultimately resulting in Pelias’ demise. These stories intertwined with the history of the sanatorium and Soviet medical workers, the etymology of the name “Medea,” the remains of Sovietism and capitalism, the taxonomy of the weeds found on the grounds, and the legends that inhabit our imaginations.
Fabulative herbariums hold the promise of drawing attention to the unique qualities of all beings. They enable us to listen to both humans and non-humans on their own terms. Rather than imposing a fixed, human-centered framework onto plants and their histories, fabulative herbariums invite us to attune ourselves to the ways in which different beings express themselves—through their forms, lifecycles, interactions, and mythologies. This approach resists the tendency to reduce non-humans to static objects of study and instead fosters a dynamic, relational understanding that acknowledges their agency, presence, and capacity to shape narratives. Through their stories, we can engage in new ways of thinking, relating, and healing. As Kimmerer points out, “we cannot meaningfully proceed with healing, with restoration, without ‘re-story-ation.’ In other words, our relationship with the land cannot heal until we hear its stories.”Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, 9. With herbalist fabulations, our focus shifts from solely thinking about plants to thinking with them. We move away from mere observation and towards feeling the world as they experience it, and writing about it from their perspective. Plants have stories to tell, and it is our responsibility to listen and learn from them. Fabulist herbariums transcend time, narratives, dreams, and naturalists, healers, and witches. They encompass the stories of dried specimens, sanatoriums, and herbariums. These fabulations allow us to break free from an “ecology of pinning” that seeks to categorize and preserve through labeling and organizing. Instead, they enable us to explore an “ecology of evasions” that celebrates the unexpected transformations and temporal depth of matter. But that is a story for another time.
Conclusion
At the end of this journey, I once again reflect on the concept of “negative universal history” proposed by Chakrabarty in “Four Theses.” This history allows the particular to express its resistance to and involvement in the totality.Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age, 47‑48.While I am cautious not to equate Medea with the planet, or to conflate distinct temporal issues, it appears to me that narratives enable precisely this articulation of the particular and the entirety across different scales. More-than-human narratives, in particular, gesture towards a collective “we,” without losing their own distinctiveness. Moreover, they have the ability to decenter the human and reconcile conflicting temporalities. Stories thus appear to equip us with means of transition, connection, and even translation, from one spatiotemporal scale to another.
