As I have mentioned before (1), all of the trees around me come from this region, which is quite unusual for contemporary fruticulture. By a telling contrast, the same kind of imported grape reaches the depths of the abysmal hillside just by the neighboring plot of land. Beyond the fence, the whole ecosystem has been reduced to propagate a single kind of fruit. Regardless of its overt excess, I do feel a strange affinity towards the diasporic displacement of the vineyard. Being a foreign soul in the Old World myself, I am familiar with its inexcusable presence and intolerable adaptability to this tiered land. However, I did not come here to denounce the forsaken fate of these vines – at least not directly. I am supposed, instead, to bear witness to the local specimens that resist the afflictions of monoculture: modest, stubborn and nostalgic fruit trees. Despite being a half-forgotten culture, these trees are anything but silent. In their discrete struggle, they slowly gather tongues to narrate untold tales.

The soil under my feet is located at Goriška Brda, in the northwest part of Slovenia. This region has a long lasting reputation for its fruits. It was here that many of the yields that reached the centers of the Austro-Hungarian empire were grown and such a sweet endowment can be traced back in history since Roman times. Today, this luscious legacy is an ambivalent affair: the affordances of the land give way to extensive vineyards, which populate the dry horizon like an uninterrupted graveyard, one tombstone after the other. Gregor’s orchard in Kojsko is an oasis amid wine-driven production to the extent that it resists the homogenization around it and holds to a culture of fruits – a residual witness to an agrarian past on the brink of extinction.

When Gregor inherited this modest plot from his father, he knew there was more to it than the surface showed. The orchard’s roots reach much deeper than the fertilized layer of substrate on which we step on. And yet, perhaps it was tempting to just sell this remote piece of the countryside to someone who would grow anonymous grapes on it. Today, mature land is profitably turned into abstract fields, which are promptly filled up with whatever crop can be liquidated faster by the demands of global capital. In this macabre process, the preexisting world goes to waste. Gregor’s gaze, however, was not blinded by the rampant logic of economic earnings. His sight could discern the value of experience embodied in the orchard: he simultaneously saw through the tree’s bark, into the genetic diversity these live specimens safeguarded, and around the tree’s bark, into the knowledges that grew from this abundant enclave.

It’s early spring now, and I am here in the orchard in order to document the gestures of Jože Krečič, a master grafter from the village of Podnanos. He is an old and skillful man. The exactness of his care owes itself to decades spent in the company of fruit trees. I do not understand the meaning of his words – we do not share the same tongue – but I diligently follow the language of his hands through the gaze of my lens. He splits a branch with a razor, cuts it into a sloping angle and inserts it into a slit made on a young whip. As I watch his attentive precision, I have the disarming sense that my register is doomed to be partial, despite my best intentions. It’s clear that the sensibility guiding his fingers cannot not be fully transmitted through either words or images. Ungraspable nuances lay in the angles of his cuts, in the timing and direction of his movements and in the way he anticipates the future growth of a branch. While witnessing his art, one cannot not help but wonder about the unsure fate of these trees. As new cultures overwrite old ones, some changes seem to be irreversible. Jože Krečič is the keeper of an eroding reality. He is always eager to attend to the orchard and his gestures are able to interpret every tree here. But when his hands fall silent, who will still understand a fruit tree’s sense?