Uncommon Fruits is a project born from the collaboration between the extended Robida collective (Topolò, Benečija) and Zavod Cepika (Kojsko, Goriška Brda) that investigates two different landscapes through the lens of fruit trees: one, Goriška Brda, characterised by an almost-monoculture of vine and the other, the one surrounding Topolò, by abandonment.
Ripening is the slow labour of time made visible, when what was once hard, green, or unfinished turns toward fullness. This fullness does not arrive all at once but through subtle shifts of colour, texture, and taste — a patient conversation between inner transformation and the world’s rhythms. To ripen is to carry within oneself the memory of germination and the promise of decay, holding them both in a fragile balance. Ripening asks: how do we recognise the moment of readiness, the threshold between potential and excess, between not-yet and already-too-late?
Photo: Gregor Božič
Fruits Ode to an Apple
Pablo Neruda
You, apple,
are the object
of my praise.
I want to fill
my mouth
with your name.
I want to eat you whole.
You are always
fresh, like nothing
and nobody.
You have always
just fallen
from Paradise:
dawn’s
rosy cheek
full
and perfect!
Compared
to you
the fruits of the earth
are
so awkward:
bunchy grapes,
muted
mangos,
bony
plums, and submerged
figs.
You are pure balm,
fragrant bread,
the cheese
of all that flowers.
When we bite into
your round innocence
we too regress
for a moment
to the state
of the newborn:
there’s still some apple in us all.
I want
total abundance,
your family
multiplied.
I want
a city,
a republic,
a Mississippi River
of apples,
and I want to see
gathered on its banks
the world’s
entire
population
united and reunited
in the simplest act we know:
I want us to bite into an apple.
Ripening “Everything is gestation and then birthing. To let each impression and each embryo of a feeling come to completion, entirely in itself, in the dark, in the unsayable, the unconscious, beyond the reach of one’s own understanding, and with deep humility and patience to wait for the hour when a new clarity is born: this alone is what it means to live as an artist: in understanding as in creating.
In this there is no measuring with time, a year doesn’t matter, and ten years are nothing. Being an artist means: not numbering and counting, but ripening like a tree, which doesn’t force its sap, and stands confidently in the storms of spring, not afraid that afterward summer may not come. It does come. But it comes only to those who are patient, who are there as if eternity lay before them, so unconcernedly silent and vast. I learn it every day of my life, learn it with pain I am grateful for: patience is everything!”
Reiner Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet (1929)
Sunlight “A superabundance of energy comes from the sun: “solar energy is the source of life’s exuberant development. The origin and essence of our wealth are given in the radiation of the sun, which dispenses energy – wealth – without any return. The sun gives without ever receiving.” Be like the sun! – this is basically Bataille’s motto for the possible future of the political economy adjusted to the planetary scale and balanced with the ecological whole. If we want our economies to be commensurate with our environments, we have to become solar. Bataille’s general economy is paradoxically rational: what it suggests is that we recognize the limits of growth and think through strategies of nonproductive expenditure as self-conscious activity. We should stop being greedy and stop striving for individual growth, which results in planetary energy restoring its balance in an uncontrolled and catastrophic way. Nonproductive expenditure must be taken seriously and organized as an economy of gifts without reciprocation – a glorious economy.”
Oxana Timofeeva, Solar Politics (2022, Polity Press)
