When Uncommon Fruits was still only a seed, I remember imagining together with Robida what this project could grow into, and how its ephemeral experiences might ripen into an accessible archive of knowledge. Much of what happens around the orchard and the kitchen is inseparable from its context, which makes it difficult to transplant elsewhere. For example, the angle of a cut made on food or wood, or the dosing of an ingredient according to the seasons are always specific. These things are particular because of their entanglement with the surrounding circumstances, which are relative to place and time. Although written recipes attempt to transmit such worldly nuances in a disembodied manner, the best way to learn a skill is to practice in the presence of someone informed by experience.

Perhaps the aspiration to transmit know-how across spatial or temporal separation is ultimately unattainable. Yet, of all media, moving images seem best equipped to bridge the pedagogical gap between an eager learner and a distant practitioner. It is not by accident that the contemporary phenomenon of video tutorials has become so widespread: streaming platforms flood the internet with an abundance of video content, which allegedly can instruct anyone in doing anything. In order to learn something, you no longer have to directly relate to other people, but can voyeuristically gaze at their practice from a distance. My attitude toward this consequence of communication technologies is not so much contempt towards the corrosion of skill—though that can occur—but rather a growing fascination with the possibilities such translations enable. As Vilém Flusser once speculated, “if the ancients had reflected in video rather than in words, we would have video archives rather than libraries (...).” (1)

And so, little by little, a video archive has been assembled for Uncommon Fruits. The character of each piece varies according to the action being documented. At times, they resemble tutorials, as when Jože Krečič demonstrated how greenwood can be split by a sharp blade in Grafting / Innestare / Cepljenje, or when Alessia Beltrame made tangible the moment when salted vegetables release brine in Wild Fermentation / Fermentazione selvatica / Divja fermentacija. The editing in these and other cases privileges whatever was captured on site. Thus, all of the surrounding sounds compose a spontaneous atmosphere, reminiscent of the collective mood of the participants when their gestures were filmed.

Yet the videos in this archive are never fully didactic. Often the camera abandons the human perspective and moves close to the materials themselves. From such nearness, the frames create the impression that inert things also manipulate hands—like when the wood summons particular gestures in Would wood be a fruit? / Sarebbe il legno un frutto? / Bi les lahko bil sadež?, guided by Diogo Amaro and Madalena Vidigal. The visual displacement offered by the camera’s gaze unsettles the conventional idea that knowledge flows in one direction only—from human to human or from master to apprentice. Instead, this close perspective suggests that intelligence is also lodged in materiality itself—between the fibers of grain or amid fermenting juices. As human and other-than-human gestures unfold into a coherent process, the medium of video makes it clear that hands tactically know how to interpret, learn from and negotiate with matter, even if the solipsistic head may argue otherwise.

In this way, Uncommon Fruits becomes a way of resisting epistemicide, (2) or the erasure of embodied, vernacular and minor knowledges that Western modernity enforced through industrial technologies and cultural homogenization—which have also affected farming and alimentary habits. When Maria Gilda Primosig and Studio Erba (Philipp Kolmann and Suzanne Bernhardt) made Recipes exchange / Ricette di scambio / Recepti izmenjave, they shared fragments of local traditions embedded in their geographies. This not only allowed them to pass on what they already knew, but also gave them the creative opportunity to reinvent tradition—not as a modernist rupture with the past, but as an informed reinterpretation of situated knowledges. Similarly, when Italo Rucli showed us how to process the Pera / Hruška / Pear / Fermentinka gathered by Ola and Dora at Gregor’s Orchard, he explained that in the past fruits were never fully pressed, so the remaining juice could later ferment in order to be distilled. This led us to the idea of curing a bacteria colony until the juice became vinegar, which was later used to make oxymel for the Ways to Vinegar / Modi di aceto / Načini kisa workshop, guided by Studio Erba.

These moments, easily lost if not passed in presence from hand to hand, are now carried into an immaterial commons where they can be sowed remotely in order to germinate into future gestures.

This article was published originally in Robida 11 orchard/frutteto/sadovnjak.