Environmental justice and ecological justice
Environmental justice as a discourse focuses especially on certain communities that suffer from poverty, misrecognition and marginalization. They might be indigenous communities, communities of color, or communities resulting from colonial powers. It is typical that these communities have faced environmental injustice, and less environmental protection. In the environmental justice discourse, the focus is on the consequences of environmental politics and changes to human communities. This is almost opposite to the discursive practices of ecological justice where the concern is on the natural world with or without human presence. (Schlosberg, 2007, pp. 4-6.)
I won’t stress the separation of these two different approaches to justice and injustice. Instead, I’m leaning to their interconnectedness and how these justices are linked together into one inclusive discourse. The subject of justice regulates how we define social and economic equality and inequality. It is based on recognition. Lack of recognition can lead to devaluation at the individual, cultural, and global level. It will cause damage to oppressed individuals and communities. (Schlosberg, 2007, pp.13-16.)
Sahrawis suffer from a lack of recognition as a minority in Algeria, Western Sahara, and in Morocco. Morocco has succeeded in questioning the Sahrawis' right to the Western Sahara after they conquered the area and its natural resources 1975. Morocco took over the region when Spain gave up its colony. (Sleiman Labat & Niskanen, 2020a, p. 4; Sleiman Labat & Niskanen B, 2020b, p. 244) UN has never accepted the occupation (UN Resolution 380, 1975). The Sahrawi exile and their ending up in refugee camps in Algeria has led to the end of the Sahrawi traditional way of life. In the past, they were pastoralist nomads primarily in the Western Sahara region. Sahrawis have been stripped of their political rights to decide the fate of Western Sahara and its natural resources.
Misrecognition is often tied to institutional power that produces and constructs subordination, inequity, disrespected identities and communities. Recognition requires conditions where individuals and their communities are fully free of any threats. They must have political rights as well and be able to practice their cultural traditions. Extreme injustice happens when a whole community is excluded from the possession of political rights and are not able to protect the natural resources in their historical area against colonial and postcolonial powers. (Schlosberg, 2007, pp.13-16.) This is very much the current situation for the Sahrawis who as a group have also lost most of their traditional nomadic identity. There is no irrefutable evidence that the Sahrawis would have continued and expanded the mining operations that started by the Spanish colonizers in the Western Sahara. The Sahrawi history doesn’t have an answer for this dilemma.
PHOSfate Blue-Green Algae Garden -
gardens as places of resistance and resilience
My artistic research article discusses the resistance and resilience aspects of community and family gardens. I’m familiar with several family gardens in the refugee camps in the Algerian Sahara, and community gardens in Rome, Paris and Helsinki. Sometimes, gardens have been described in garden discourses as either a utopia or a heterotopia. Based on Foucault's theory, gardens can be considered crisis heterotopias, which Foucault names psychiatric hospitals, nursing homes and prisons (Foucault, 1997, p. 333).
The gardens in the refugee camps in the Sahara are in many ways utopias, but they are also utopias that have become reality. These gardens are political statements about the strength, resistance and resilience of the community in a geographical place where there is thought to be inevitable lack of resources and unavoidable marginalization. Not only do the gardens produce food for Sahrawi refugees, but they function as a research of horticultural practices in extreme conditions as well. These desert gardens are poetical places where the Sahrawis' oral knowledge of Sahara and its climate conditions are pronounced. They affect the design and practices of the very same gardens. Mohamed Sleiman Labat’s film Desert PhosFATE (2023) brings up the characteristics of Sahrawi story and storytelling focusing on family gardens. Sahrawi refugee camps in the South-western part of Algerian Sahara can also be considered a crisis heterotopia, as the Sahrawis enclosed within the refugee camps do not have the right to go out of the camps and neither back into them without a permission.
In Paris, I have gotten to know of the activities of the community gardens by visiting them and talking to the residents who take care of the gardens that they themselves have established. I belong to a community garden in the 11th arrondissement that was founded after the terrorist attack on the Bataclan theater in Paris. I lived right next to the theater when the attack happened in November 2015. 90 people died in the Bataclan theater and on our street (Niskanen, 2019, p. 109). The primary purpose of our garden is to recover from the trauma of the Paris terrorist attacks through social interaction and conversation.
I will connect these two different types of gardens together, the gardens in the refugee camps in the Sahara and the one in Paris, when I discuss the Helsinki Sandoponic Garden, that is named PHOSfate. It is a project by an artistic research group PhosFATE that Pekka Niskanen and Mohamed Sleiman Labat formed in 2018. At the time, I was based in Paris, and Mohamed Sleiman Labat in a Sahrawi refugee camp in the Hamada Desert in Sahara. The Helsinki Sandoponic Garden will be built for the Helsinki Biennial during the spring and summer 2023. PHOSfate garden of the biennial is about phosphorus and its impact on the Sahrawi, but also about environmental challenges, climate change and sea eutrophication caused by phosphorus fertilizers. Phosphate mining is the reason why Sahrawis have lost their nomadic way of life, and phosphate mining has reshaped the Baltic Sea ecosystem as well. The fertilizers made of phosphate rock in Western Sahara end up in the Baltic Sea.
This research text focuses on three different gardens located far from each other. I will combine them in my reading with an attitude that emphasizes consequences of climate change, adaptation to it as well as ecological and environmental resistance. I will name ecological and environmental resistance to refer to a state of affairs where the prevailing concepts of ecological and environmental justice of the community and society are broken and challenged. The primary place of the resistance in these gardens is not just in art, but also on the environmental and horticultural level as well. When focusing on the importance of gardens, I will bring up the discourses of environmental justice and ecological justice.
The three gardens will be looked at as places of artistic activity and resistance. I will discuss how the practices of different discourses and disciplines change the perception of gardens as mere places of rational activity growing plants. Instead, I propose that the three gardens I highlight combine several levels of action and thinking that commit to poetics and the recognition of injustices. The wrong can be related to trauma, unrecognized identity, or to ecological and environmental wrong. Structural violence, environmental and ecological violence, and resistance against the violence are important manifestations in the gardens. Gardens can produce and reposition identities and social subjects, and cure traumas. Therefore, I will also highlight identity theory and politics when I discuss gardens. I will bring up Margaret Somers' thinking about narratives and identities and, at the same time, I will also focus on the relationship between trauma and identity. Trauma theories I will connect especially with our community garden in Paris. I will propose an interpretation of the shaping of identities as part of a traumatic experience of injustice when I discuss the community garden in Paris Jardin Truillot.
The Sahrawi gardens
In my artistic practice and thinking, the recognition of injustice is the central activism of gardens. It is possible to understand the Sahrawi hydroponic and sandoponic gardens in the Sahara refugee camps as a combination of both activism and art (Desert PhosFATE. 2023). The gardens also always express something familiar and unfamiliar at the same time. The familiar is related to the local place and position, and to the promise of future that every garden carries in itself until it is time for harvest. This familiar aspect also includes an understanding of the ecological and structural injustice that the Sahrawis are forced to experience in the refugee camps.
The unfamiliar is related to the power and future of gardens and to their expanded function outside the horticultural practice as art and activism. When the phenomenon will get more well known outside the refugee camps in the Western World, the unjust case of the Sahrawis will get more attention. They are resisting the idea and position of a passive victim, becoming active subjects instead. The unfamiliar is also represented in the new forms of gardens like the sandoponic garden that the Sahrawis started to develop few years ago in the Sahara refugee camp. The unfamiliar becomes familiar when the post-refugee gardening, art and activism are repeated as performatives at a certain time and place like in the Sahrawi refugee camps. This makes it possible to recognize the gardens as part of one’s own society and culture as well as part of the wider world around the camps. With the term post-refugee gardening, I refer to the change of lifestyle of the Sahrawis when they had given up their nomadic way of living and started to have gardens around 2000. Another condition for the term post-refugee gardening is when the Sahrawis' temporary living in refugee camps became permanent without possibility to move to an independent Western Sahara.
The extended field and practice of art and gardens means that the aesthetic level of them is just one among many. The political and social level of art and gardens emerges when different discourses affecting them are recognized. The meaningfulness of art and gardens can be seen in how they produce and affect the world. The knowledge about the existence of the Saharawi gardens brings up the discourses of colonialism, post-colonialism, injustice, and identity politics, in addition to several other discourses that are not controlled by those who manage and maintain the gardens.
The Sahrawi knowledge is still based on oral tradition, which has transmitted and saved the stories and events of Sahrawi history. Oral tradition highlights geographical areas and places and their poetical level. At the same time, desert knowledge about weather, seasons and plants is passed on. (Sleiman Labat & Niskanen, 2020a, p.4) New oral knowledge about horticulture is born in the Sahrawi gardens.
I claim that art in the gardens in the Sahrawi refugee camps is related to two important aspects. The first is the new identity of the Sahrawis that the gardens are producing. The second is the multisensory environment of the garden with its smells, scents, shadows, and sounds. They create a poetical space for discussions and dreaming. Sahrawis have developed a new relationship with plants. The herbs and vegetables in the gardens and also the plants kept inside the houses signify this relationship. The gardens are important spaces for the oral tradition now being enriched with new knowledge about the Sahrawi horticulture. At the same time, this shifts and changes the identities of the Sahrawi communities living in the Sahara refugee camps.
The first small scale family gardens started to emerge in the Sahrawi refugee camps in the Hamada Desert, southwest Algeria around 2002. Ever since, they have been increasing. The different garden models are strong expressions of resilience. They provide necessary food for the Sahrawis to survive. The international aid has been ongoing since the arrival of the Sahrawi to the refugee camps 1975. (Sleiman Labat & Niskanen, 2020b, p.243-244.)
The gardens of the refugee camps in the Sahara are signs of the transformative and adaptive way of life of the Sahrawis. The Sahrawi gardens are based on their knowledge of living in the Sahara desert, which is often simplified in Western discourses as one and the same place without local differences. The Sahrawi Pastoral Nomads are forced into the limited area of refugee camps in the Algerian Sahara. The camps and Morocco's decision to occupy most of Western Sahara have practically destroyed their former way of life. The UN resolutions against the occupation have not prevented Morocco from remaining permanently in the land of the Sahrawi nomads.
Land use and mining in particular produce threats against indigenous peoples and their Native lands. These are often considered direct attacks against indigenous cultures. Even though the Sahrawis are not an indigenous group of people, their position and identity are very similar to indigenous peoples. The Sahrawis are refugees because they lost their land and nomadic way of life especially for mining. Phosphate rock from Western Sahara has been taken out of the country for over forty years. The Bou Craa mine in Western Sahara is one of the main mines where Morocco is exporting phosphate rock outside the region. (Western Sahara Resource Watch Report, 2021.)
The takeover of lands is always a threat to prevailing cultural practices. The destruction of the lands of the indigenous people and nomads leads to the erosion of the traditional way of life and culture, which has sometimes been described as genocide (Schlosberg, 2007, p.72). This is also happening with the Sahrawis, whose knowledge of moving in the Sahara is disappearing due to the stationary way of life in the refugee camps. Although some of the desert knowledge benefits the Sahrawis’ horticulture, it is a completely new discourse, which at the same time participates in the production of a new Sahrawi identity.
Sandoponic Garden
Sand surrounds the Sahrawis in huge quantities, yet it’s seldom thought of as resource for food. Sand has mostly been considered lifeless and useless. It has produced dunes and other features typical of the desert. The Sahrawis have started to engage in organic farming and to develop new knowledge around it. The most important new garden model is the Sandoponic Garden, where plants grow in a controlled sand environment, designed to preserve as much water and biological nutrients in the desert as possible.
The Sandoponic garden experiment is led by Saharan agricultural engineer Taleb Brahim together with other experts in cultivation. The experiment is based on other garden models that have been developed in the refugee camps in Sahara during recent years, such as family gardens and hydroponic gardens. (Sleiman Labat, 2021b.) Gardens and agricultural knowledge have changed the food production for the Sahrawis. They have been dependent on international food aid since their arrival at the refugee camps in 1975. The gardens have the ability to change the diet of the Sahrawis and to help in providing more nutritionally balanced food with vegetables and herbs. (Sleiman Labat & Niskanen, 2020a, p.3, 8; Sleiman Labat & Niskanen, 2020b, p.244, 261.)
With sandoponic gardens, the Sahrawis are rethinking their relationship with sand as a medium in which they can grow plants. The sandoponic gardening model explores the potential of use of sand particles as a medium where to plant vegetables in the desert. The sandoponic gardens provide a solution to the challenging situation of water scarcity and other limitations in the refugee camps. (Sleiman Labat, 2021b.)
Sandoponic cultivation requires water and humidity control. There are only very limited resources of water in the refugee camps in the Sahara. Water also dissolves very quickly in the sandy soil and evaporates when the garden is exposed to direct sunlight. A Sandoponic garden can prevent these problems with the help of various control mechanisms such as straw and other covering materials. The Sandoponic Garden has only 50 centimeters of sand on a sloped surface that does not let water go through to the soil. The grains of sand should be relatively large, allowing water to flow to different parts of the garden. Excess water is collected at the lower end of the sloping surface of the garden and reused again. (Sleiman Labat, 2021b.)
The Sandoponic garden requires the use of organic fertilization from local sources, such as manure that is made into compost together with organic waste of the kitchen, like the food leftovers and vegetables peels. They are mixed with the ash and the manure of the animals, the green leaves of the trees and the residue of the crops in a process of anaerobic fermentation. Compost produces nutrient solution for the gardens like compost tea. (Sleiman Labat, 2021b.)
So far, there are only a few Sandoponic gardens in the Samara refugee camp in the Sahara. However, the new form of garden is a promising breakthrough, especially in the Samara camp, where the water shortage is a big problem.
The performativity of gardens
Not just any thing or phenomenon is possible in a certain time and place, because things and phenomena are always culturally determined and structured. (Butler, 2006, p.42; Pulkkinen & Rossi, 2006, p.10.) Only certain ways of obtaining food can become comprehensible categories in nomadic culture. Gardens are not part of a mobile and repeatedly changing nomadic lifestyle. Changes in the nomadic way of life often have occurred as a result of coercive forces related to colonialism. The emergence of a garden in the refugee camps of the Sahara Desert has, at first, been above all an exception compared to the previous way of life and to life as refugees.
The life of the Sahrawis in the refugee camps marks the end their nomadic pastoralism that previously remained unchanged for generations. New institutions such as schools, hospitals and cultural centers have been established as part of refugee camps. Above all, the gardens are the result of the development of the Sahrawi civil society and thus cannot be directly connected to the official policy of the refugee camps. The establishment and growth of the gardens has required to underline the possibility of horticultural practice in the Sahara Desert. This practice has been repeated for more than 20 years. That's why I connect the gardens to the idea of performativity.
When thinking about performativity, one must think about the counterpart of it, the pedagogical narrative. Remaining seemingly static and similar, it doesn’t give space for the possibility of retelling and repeating differently as does the performative. (Huddart, 2006, p.108–109, 121; Bhabha, 1994, p.145) The pedagogical implies normativity and continuity, while the performative involves a certain kind of restlessness and a constant movement away from what once was (Huddart, 2006, p.108). The phenomenon of family gardens in the Sahrawi refugee camps is at least a countermove against the pedagogical. The gardens could also be seen as a performative that became possible at certain place and time under particular conditions in the refugee camps.
In my thinking, I consider performative repeating, repeating differently, doing differently and acting differently in a certain place as a counterforce to the subjugation of individuals and groups by power. The emergence of all these "othernesses" is also influenced by mistakes and coincidences. A seed in the wrong place in the Sahara Desert can turn out to be the beginning of a basil garden. This has happened in the past in the Sahrawi’s Samara refugee camp in southwestern Algeria.
The Paris community garden
after the Bataclan terrorist attack 2015
One of the key functions of gardens has been to act as a place of rest and recovery. Gardens activate perceptions by producing multi-sensory experiences with scents, colors, shapes and textures. Michel Foucault has referred to gardens as crisis heterotopias, a category which also includes prisons. A terrorist attack can produce a kind of prison, and prison sentence, for the person who has gone through it. This experience must be dismantled as part of the community in order to the victim to be freed.
In Paris, community gardens are above all places for social interaction, discussion and thinking. Our post-Bataclan terrorist attack community garden in the 11th arrondissement in the Jardin Truillot works according to the same principle. The community garden in Paris was formed as a sign and a place of the traumas and survival after the Bataclan terrorist attack in November 13th2015.
After the Bataclan terrorist attack, the police and the national gendarmerie isolated my home and the area around it, a narrow street twenty meters from the Bataclan theatre. No outsiders were allowed to enter our street for ten days. Finnish media was trying to get access to my photographs of my isolated home street and a permission to enter my home. I refused to collaborate with them as we had faced a shock followed by trauma. After the November terrorist attack, blood, bullet marks, abandoned bloody clothes and objects belonging to the killed persons emerged in the writings as symbols of the traumatic event. They were in our street and in the streets of the neighborhood. The November terrorist attack affected a large number of people in Paris and must therefore be classified as a part of mass traumas (Howie. 2012, p.VI-VII).
Disintegration of the identity is a potential threat for an individual who has experienced a traumatic event. The texts that left around the Bataclan theater after the November terrorist attack 2015 were a kind of community bond that maintained the community’s coherence and continuity. Our community garden in Paris was established for the same purpose. After the terrorist attack, the residents of the 11th arrondissement had to build a new relationship with the surroundings of the Bataclan theater, the surrounding streets and the cafes that the terrorists had attacked, killing their customers. For many, the cafes had become non-places that had to be avoided because of fear and trauma.
From a poststructuralist point of view, the identity adopted by an individual is tied to a certain time and place. Identities are culturally and historically produced. They are shaped by everyday life as well as by the influence of diverse practices and experiences in a certain place. (Best & Kellner 1991, 19.) In social psychology, community identity is the experience of belonging to a group. In addition, social identity can determine the characteristics of people's identity in everyday existence. Individuals are often defined as members of a group (Pulkkinen, 1998, p.244.), such as post-Bataclan terrorist victims. The identity work after the terrorist attack had to be expanded to build a new relationship with the whole city of Paris outside the Bataclan neighborhood and the community garden. The work also had to be done with those social and cultural groups whose only understanding of the terrorist attack was mainly through the media.
The traumas and suffering of the Paris terrorist attack victims got marginalized under the global media spectacle. Media images and the media spectacle do not rise above the trauma to connect the traumatic experience to the perceptions, experiences and narratives that the individual or the community faces after a catastrophe. The person who has experienced trauma is quite often not able to relate their experiences and perceptions of the catastrophe to the surrounding reality in a satisfactory way. (Briere & Scott, 2008, p.4; Niskanen, 2017, p.7–8).
According to Luke Howie, the purpose of terrorism is to influence the group of people who have to witness terrorist attacks (Howie 2012, p.VI-VII). Terrorism is violence, and the purpose usually is to kill people. Howie's definition expands terrorism to include not only the victims and the target, but also the witnesses of the terrorist act. Becoming a witness is accidental. Distance does not protect anyone from terrorism and the trauma it produces (Howie, 2012, p.159).
PTSD, present self and past self
The suffering caused by psychological trauma has been recognized gradually. The subjects of research have been diverse: grotesque violence, witnessing its effects, terrorist attacks, witnessing death, and extreme human suffering. (Brewin, 2003, p.6) Post-traumatic stress disorder is indicated by the combination of letters PTSD, Post-traumatic stress disorder. It is related to the physical reaction caused by the traumatic event. It is not related to personal weakness or vulnerability. War, oppression, man-made disasters, life-threatening accidents, and terrorist attacks often produce post-traumatic stress disorder. (Brewin, 2003, p.1)
The American Psychiatric Association has defined objective criteria for the diagnosis of Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. They are related to the possibility of imminent death or serious injury, but also to events that may cause a strong feeling of fear or helplessness. (Brewin, 2003, p.6) According to the criteria, exposure to a traumatic event may have occurred if both of the following conditions fit the experience: The victim has seen or encountered a life-threatening event or was at risk of injury. At the same time, fear and terror have been associated with the event. According to a parallel and equal criterion, traumatization can follow if distressing memories of the event are constantly re-experienced. Images, thoughts or perceptions alone can cause flashbacks. This may happen in distressing dreams. The condition for both definitions is that the mental disorder lasts more than a month. (Brewin, 2003, p.7-8)
Post-trauma narrative
Being a victim of a terrorist attack is not an everyday event. The media, its spectacles and provocative headlines, distort the image of both refugees and victims of terrorist attacks. Being a refugee can be an ongoing crisis, and the same applies to victims of a terrorist attack. Stories related to the terrorist attacks are rare in the Finnish media, research and art. Stories about refugees are often one-sided. Therefore, the identification with the society of those who have experienced a terrorist attack or who have been forced to become a refugee is weak in Finland. A central element of an individual's identity is a narrative that supports the identity. A terrorist attack often permanently changes the identity and the personal narrative, placing the individual in a new position. This also often applies to refugees.
In trauma, the continuity of identity is threatened. For the traumatized, it is not immediately possible to integrate the events into the narrative of the individual or of the community. Identities are often determined precisely on the basis of belonging to a group or being excluded from it. In a terrorist attack, the previous boundaries that have protected the individual often collapse. It is possible that a threat of violence and destruction might emerge. The sense of security is replaced by fear, evidence and experience of the terror, and symbols of violence. These can be either individual or shared by the community that has experienced terror. (Briere & Scott, 2008, p.4–5; Niskanen, 2017, p.8–9).
If the person who has experienced the trauma is not able to build a coherent story about their traumatic experience, the post-traumatic symptoms usually will get worse. However, forming a story that supports the continuity of identity is not possible immediately after the trauma and a traumatic experience. It can take weeks, months or even longer to process a traumatic experience.
The reconstruction of the experience is usually influenced by the information from the world surrounding the subject about the event that produced the trauma (Bargai, N., et al., 2004, p.290–291). The trauma-related narrative will make it possible to include the trauma as part of the story told by the individual about their own identity, but also about their community’s identity. Instead of the trauma, the individual can focus on this narrative that the traumatic experience has caused.
Narrating in the garden
The condition of living in the present after a traumatic event is remembering (Howie, 2012, p.29) and recounting events for the sake of continuity of identity. The most important aspect of the community garden established after the Bataclan theater terrorist attack is the sharing of stories and experiences related to the attack among the members of the garden. It is important that the stories are reflected from different perspectives and by those who have experienced the same events. The terrorist attack is not over immediately. It continues in the minds of the local people for a long time.
Normative society often tries to keep the traumatized in the margins. Those suffering from trauma do not have always a common public story with which to reflect on the trauma. The further away the cultural community is from the traumatizing event, the fewer suitable narratives exist. Our community garden in the Jardin Truillot has brought together people from different cultures who have moved to Paris. Together, the members of the garden narrate and produce different trauma stories. Those participating in the garden's maintenance can reflect on their own personal life situation through these stories.
According to normative expectations, trauma victims are expected to regain psychological balance and return to their previous normal life within at least a few months. If the survivor does not have clear physical injuries, the event defined as traumatic can even be considered an excuse for avoiding responsibilities related to social life. The ability to go over a traumatic event is individual. Sometimes those who have experienced trauma say that the events they experienced have changed them permanently. If the community does not have similar experiences of trauma, other members of the community are often not able to reflect on what happened with the traumatized person. (Brewin, 2003, p.16)
The sociologist Margaret Somers calls the lack of narratives about a certain identity and event narrative silence. This silence denies the individual the possibility of his own subjectivity. At worst, the identity of the victim of terror, refugee status, or environmental injustice does not become visible in the community, but remains trapped in the closed space of individual experience. It is possible to challenge narrative silence with a counter-narrative. (Somers, M.R., 1994.) The places of counter-narrative among the three gardens are the community garden in Paris and the Sandoponic garden in Helsinki.
Past and present trauma
The images and memories related to the traumatic event do not only deal with the past event, but also with the victim’s current experience of the event. (Bennett, 2005, p.24) This is also the primary reason why Jardin Truillot community garden exists and why narratives related to traumatization are told. Even if outsiders might think that the traumatized person repeats the same narrative about what happened and the trauma that followed, the small shifts and differences in the narrative are essential above all. They might signify two different selves: the one who had to face the traumatizing event, and the temporally later self, which unravels the trauma with the help of an ever-evolving narrative.
French poet Charlotte Delbo survived the Holocaust and was freed from Auschwitz, after which she dealt with her experiences by separating the present self from the past Auschwitz self. (Bennett, 2005, p.25) In Delbo's perspective, something essential to the experience of the Holocaust disappears when the essentially traumatic experience is consigned to history and ordinary memory. Delbo separated common memory from sense memory. For Delbo, ordinary memory is connected to thinking processes and words. They are areas of the mind where events are made understandable, tied to common knowledge and experience, so that they are easily understandable to different audiences. (Bennett, 2005, p.25)
Delbo's sense memory registers the physical trace of a certain event. As such, it is always present in the present moment, even if it is not constantly felt. Delbo also makes another distinction, that between the “self of the history” and the “self of the present”. According to Delbo, everything that happened to the other self in history, the one from Auschwitz, does not affect the present self. The experiences of Auschwitz belong to the self of the history.
For Delbo, sense memory registers the physical imprint of the event. As such, it is always in the present although not continuously felt. Everything that happened to this other ‘self’, the one from Auschwitz, doesn’t touch the self now. The Auschwitz experience is the property of another self. Physical trauma can come back if the memories of the historical self evoke past feelings in the present self through sense memory. Sense memory operates through the body, producing a kind of "seeing truth" rather than being characterized by "thinking truth." Sense memory registers the pain of the memory and conveys it as a bodily experience. (Bennett, 2005, p.25-26)
Based on the distinction of Delbo's proposal of two selves, it is understandable that even if the community surrounding the victim of a terrorist attack would want the processing of the terrorist attack to stop, the victim’s sense memory and the related bodily experience do not allow the trauma to be completely erased. The Jardin Truillot community garden represents resistance against normative expectations of the disappearance of the pain associated with the past Bataclan terrorist attack. It is a place where the two selves are accepted.
Helsinki Sandoponic Garden PHOSfate
Our PHOSfate garden is about phosphorus and its impact on the Sahrawi, but also about environmental injustice, climate change and the eutrophication caused by phosphorus fertilizers in the Baltic Sea. The Sahrawis have started to engage in practices of organic farming. They are developing new knowledge about it. The most important new garden model is the Sandoponic Garden. The plants grow in a controlled sand environment.
The aim of our PHOSfate garden is to combine both realities, the realities of the Sahrawis and the Baltic Sea. The garden on the Helsinki island, Vallisaari, is inspired by the model developed in the Sahrawi refugee camps, but it has another shape. It resembles the blue-green algae cells as they divide and multiply. In the Vallisaari garden, we will grow basil, coriander, carrots, potatoes, kale and lettuce, the same plants that the Sahrawis have in their sandoponic gardens in Sahara. Our garden will be a sign of artistic and ecological resistance against forgetting and marginalization.
The Sandoponic garden in Helsinki Biennial 2023 will be a place to understand the consequences of phosphate rock mining in two very different locations, in the refugee camps of Sahrawis in Sahara in Southeast Algeria in the North European Baltic Sea. There is no clear understanding how the mining of phosphate rock has traumatized Sahrawis in the refugee camps and in the communities on the shores of the Baltic Sea.
Phosphate mining is the reason for the Sahrawis losing their nomadic way of life and it has reshaped the Baltic Sea marine ecosystem over a half century. The phosphorus fertilizer made of the distant phosphate rock in Western Sahara has ended up in the Baltic Sea as well. (Western Sahara Resource Watch Report, 2020.) The mined phosphate rock used for fertilizers in agriculture has increased the phosphorus fluxes to marine areas threefold (McCrackin, et al., 2018, p.1107). The excessive use of processed fertilizers on farms is causing eutrophication. It is most evident in the form of cyanobacteria blooms, especially in the summer (Meier, H.E.M., et al., 2018. p.3227), sometimes also as traces in the frozen sea. The algae get their nutrition from phosphate and nitrogen fertilizers. Finally, the algae die in the sea. Dead algal blooms absorb oxygen from the water and sink to the bottom. (Gupta, C. et al., 2015, p.22-23, 35.) This causes oxygen depletion in large areas of the Baltic Sea. Significant oxygen loss leads to death of fish and marine life. It is most evident in the form of cyanobacteria blooms that consume oxygen. (Ahtiainen, H. et al., 2014, p.9-10.)
My understanding of the environment is linked not only to nature and its surroundings but also to perceptions of social, racial and economic justice. In environmental justice, social and ecological views come together. They raise issues related to the fair distribution of natural resources, the importance of community and democratic responsibility (Schlosberg, 2007, p. 73).
The point of view that we present in the Helsinki Biennial Sandoponic garden is philosophical and political in nature as identities related to environment are always political questions. Our Sandoponic garden is bringing to light the marginalized identities of the Sahrawis as well as the underrated ecological and environmental identities of Sahara and Baltic Sea.
Conclusions
The task of genealogy is to highlight fragmentary, local and previously rejected knowledge as opposed to institutional, established knowledge. Genealogy is about subjugated knowledge, but also the knowledge of the subjugated about historical struggles and conflicts pushed to the margins of institutional knowledge. The genealogical interest in the micro-history of minorities has opened the possibility for the writing of history about the identities of the marginalized (Ojakangas 1998, p.17-18). This text is an attempt to bring up the subjugation of the Sahrawis but also their resistance that has taken a shape in the Sahara refugee camps family gardens. My aim is to do the same with the Helsinki Sandoponic garden together with Mohamed Sleiman Labat on the island in the Baltic Sea in Helsinki Biennial 2023.
The underlying point for my research text is the idea of mutual interaction of physical spaces, cultural places, group positions and identities. The different gardens are the real-life places for the manifestations of these connections. The very specific group and community identities I’m bringing up relate to the Sahrawis and the victims of the Paris terrorist attack. Both have been shaped and produced within the influence of various powers that are discussed in my text in relation to such discourses as environmental and ecological justice, trauma definitions, identity and narrative theory.
Sahrawis have their very own oral knowledge formation that Mohamed Sleiman Labat has named Desert Knowledge. In recent years, the Sahrawi horticultural knowledge has been shaping and changing their traditional oral knowledge. The Sahrawi horticultural knowledge and practices can be thought of as a forming of a new horticultural discourse. It has developed in the Sahrawi refugee camp under extreme conditions, when the Sahrawis have combined both Western garden knowledge and their own knowledge of the Sahara desert and its conditions.
In both the community garden of Paris and the Sahrawi family gardens, discussion is an important tool to connect the gardens to the discourses of art. I argue that these gardens have a connection with art because they manifest resistance to power and they have become meaningful in the context of art. Conversations taking pace in the gardens can be classified as conversation art. Gardens have an artistic dimension in addition to their horticultural level as the gardens challenge misrecognition, subordination, inequity and bring to light the communities whose identities are being disrespected. All the three gardens I’m bringing up perform as they repeat differently the form and the idea of a garden. The Sahrawi gardens are resistance against the idea that the UN food aid could be the only solution for the Sahrawi refugee’s nutritional needs.
Michel Foucault suggests that we should focus attention on the prevailing structures of subjugation, on those continuous processes as a result of which bodies are subjugated, gestures are controlled, and behavior is controlled. According to Foucault, it is precisely in these processes that subjects are produced in their reality and materiality, and it is precisely these processes that can be politicized in a genealogical examination. (Ojakangas 1998, p.17, 21.) The purpose of a terrorist attack is to produce death and subjugation. Subjugation occurs when an individual is traumatized. Only an attempt to unravel the trauma can open the way out of subjugation. One place for the struggle against subjugation is in Paris in the Jardin Truillot.
The Paris community garden in the Jardin Truillot resists the idea that there should be a closure for the healing process after a terrorist attack. It resists the marginalization of the traumatized victims who continue to narrate the events of the Paris terrorist attacks. To narrate repeatedly the same events is a performative act that makes space for a trauma narrative in a certain time and place.
The Helsinki PHOSfate Sandoponic Garden is a promise for the future as it attempts to light up injustice of two different realities, the Sahrawis and the Baltic Sea. It could be a meaningful place against forgetting the injustice of phosphate rock mining in Western Sahara and the harm and destruction phosphorus fertilizers have wrought to the marine ecosystem in the Baltic Sea.
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