On weeds, for the Prague Quiet Music Festival

From a very young age, there’s a thought being instilled in us, humans, about which plants are the good ones, and which are the bad ones, the latter labeled uniformly as “weeds”. We are taught that weeds harm the environment, our (perception of) nature, and therefore must be exterminated. But delving a little deeper into the subject, we come to the conclusion this is all but true, since many of those plants perceived by the society as weeds are in fact species of great medicinal, political, and economic importance with a strong cultural background worth examining and taking interest in.

Through our contribution to the Prague Quiet Music Festival, we would like to invite the audiences to contemplate the notion of weeds which is, to put simply, a social construct that differs across cultures and geographic location. Weeds have shaped modern economy in an unimaginable fashion, since the perpetual race towards their extinction generates billions of dollars as well as gallons of RoundUp-style solutions with tragic consequences for both the environment and those who disperse weedkillers across the fields. Walking the streets of a random town in the Mediterranean, one realises that weeds are indeed a relative definition, not to mention tropical regions where plants such as alocasias, monsteras, syngoniums and so on - often revered for its lush foliage in more temperate climates - grow in swathes along the roads, just like the stinging nettle or the dandelion grows along the roads of Central European countryside. In the south east Asia, alocasias are often added into stir fries and curries, while monsteras and ficuses are considered weeds simply because of their abundance, and omnipresence in those regions. In a recent Guardian article, community officers from Sydney complained about how popular house plants such as monsteras, tradescantias and chlorophytums would “escape” the homes of their millennial parents, taking over endemic species and wildlife depending on them. What is precious for some may pose a threat to the others, becoming a political issue rather than a cultural one.

In our installation for the festival, these “rogue” tropical plants accompany the music by five composers from the across the world, commissioned precisely for this very event by the Prague Quiet Music Collective, the host of this evening. Plants, however, shouldn’t be perceived as decorations, on the contrary, we recommend the audience to immerse in the scenography in an attempt to establish a deeper dialogue with both the surrounding greenery as well as their own selves.

Our argument is further supported by excerpts from literature dealing with the topic of weeds. Beginning with William Shakespeare’s Sonnet 94, one realises the meaning of the word itself has not really much altered its meaning throughout centuries. Richard Mabey’s book Weeds delves into cultural stories behind some of the most well-known plants - weeds here in European context, while Stefano Mancuso’s The Nation of Plants celebrates, amongst other incredible thoughts, the fact that plants don’t know any borders and very often, they find themselves transported to new regions through human actions as a result of colonisation, capitalism, and so on. Braiding Sweetgrass is a cult classic written by Robin Wall Kimmerer, who, through her teachings, combines the indigenous knowledge and her heritage with biology and plant science, turning upside down the contemporary notion of how plants and nature should be perceived. And finally, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring written in1962, very much an ideological enemy of the agribusinesses who fought against the book’s publication, the author herself having to face a smear campaign against her own academic integrity in the process. Yet she never gave up, providing the very first evidence-based account of how weedkillers harm both the planet and its inhabitants, paving the way for what became the deep ecology and the ecofeminist movements of the 1960s and continues to resonate to this very day.

We hope the festival audience - as well as readers of this journal will take interest in the topic and explore weeds in their surroundings, through books, arts, learning, and most importantly through a mere observation.