Composing green #2: Agroforestry: science, truth and the arts

Biography:

Francesca Camilli is a biologist based in Florence, Italy, working at the intersection of agroforestry, rural development, and environmental sciences. At the time of the recording, she served as Vice-President of the European Agroforestry Federation (EURAF), of which she remains an active member. She currently serves as President of AIAF, the Italian Agroforestry Association. Deeply committed to interdisciplinary approaches, Francesca is particularly passionate about exploring the connections between the arts and agroforestry, bridging scientific research with cultural and historical perspectives on landscapes.

Link to Google Scholar

Biography:

Patrick Worms is a Cambridge-educated geneticist who represents CIFOR-ICRAF —the Centre for International Forestry Research and World Agroforestry— engaging with policymakers, donors, and corporate partners in Brussels and across Europe, Africa, and Asia. He serves as President and Treasurer of the International Union of Agroforestry and is a member of the European Agroforestry Federation (EURAF). With a strong background in science and policy, his work focuses on advancing agroforestry as a resilient, biodiverse, and climate-responsive agricultural model at the international level.

Link to CIFOR-ICRAF

Biography:

Zayaan Khan is an artist, consultant, food transformer, ceramicist, writer, and researcher whose work engages deeply with land reform, agrarian transformation, and food justice. She explores the socio-political roots of contemporary crises while challenging dependency on neoliberal systems, advancing indigenous food reclamation as both practice and praxis. A 2023 Prince Claus Fund Awardee, Zayaan is currently completing her PhD at the University of Cape Town’s interdisciplinary research cluster, where her research, “From seed-as-object to seed-as-relation,” reimagines seeds as living relationships embedded within ecological, cultural, and political systems.

Link to LinkedIn profile

Damien Helly (00:00): You are listening to the Composing Trust Podcast by culture Solutions, a series on European cultural action with the world. Is Europe still attractive? How is it perceived outside the EU? How do Europeans promote culture together in the world and with which partners? What have they learned together? What is their experience? Our Composing Trust Podcast series will address these issues. Welcome to you all, my name is Damien Hely, the co-author of this Composing Trust series by culture Solutions.

Because trees are so important for climate, we are trying to understand how the practices of agroforestry interact with culture, both as a set of world views and as artistic forms of expression. In our first episode, we explored the question of cultural perceptions of trees and agroforestry within various societies. And today, with this second episode, we will investigate the connection between science and the arts in agroforestry and what kind of opportunities it opens for EU international cooperation and cultural relations.

In this episode, we hear four practitioners who are dealing with trees from a combined scientific and artistic perspective. Maya Marchak, from South Africa, has a PhD in environmental studies and she uses artistic practices in her research. Patrick Worms, a Cambridge-educated geneticist, is the president of the International Union of Agroforestry.

Based in Brussels, he has a refined knowledge of EU policies. Francesca Camilli is a biologist working in Florence, Italy. She is the vice-president of the European Agroforestry Federation, EURAF, and passionate about the connections between the arts and agroforestry. She is also a member of an association called Café Scienza. Zayaan Khan is an agroecology and cultural professional based in Cape Town, South Africa. There is also a brief quote by Method Gundidza, who was featured in a previous podcast. What struck me first when listening to Maya, Zayaan, Francesca and Patrick was that they all describe agroforestry as some kind of lost cultural heritage. 

Francesca Camilli (2:42): Agroforestry has a different translation. In Italian, at least, it is a quite recent combination of words agro, which stands for agriculture, and forestry. And these words indicate a set of agricultural practices which are still common in many parts of the world nowadays, but that all across Europe have almost disappeared. They have been abandoned and so we have to find them if we want to have a look at them. So it’s very interesting for me to ask myself, to ask ourselves, what is left of the past agroforestry today, what has been lost and what can be recreated, can be designed again.

Damien Helly (3:26): Maya Marshak has carried out research on the disappearance of insects because of industrialised agriculture. She used art to reimagine disappeared creatures. A bit like rediscovering ghosts, she said.

Maya Marshak (3:41): With the maze research, we produced an animation in collaboration with the sound artist, Kara Stacey. We recorded the soundscapes from both agroecological maze fields and then commercial maze fields, which were grown in an industrial way. Then she worked with that sound to create a soundscape from this very biodiverse soundscape to this very more quiet soundscape. And using the archival materials I’d collected of insects, I imagined insect diversity of what would have existed and what existed in agroecological spaces and then what exists in those more degraded industrial landscapes where there was only one or two species left. 

Damien Helly (4:22): Patrick gives his view on the reasons why this cultural heritage loss took place and what it led to. 

Patrick Worms (4:29): We have to remember that for the past three centuries or so, at least in Europe, we have aggressively encouraged clever young people to leave the country and move to the city to be educated at universities and take non-farm related jobs. That has had very pernicious impacts on the culture of the natural world because it has put in place a value judgment that if you are a lawyer, say, operating in a glass tower in a big city, you’re worth more than if you are a farmer operating somewhere in the countryside. And when that is repeated generation after generation, people internalise this sense of inferiority and that sense of inferiority is what is destroying landscapes. 

Damien Helly (5:15): In parallel to this destruction of landscapes described by Patrick, other destruction dynamics have been at play with colonisation, the consequences of which Zayan is dealing with in her work.

Maya Marshak (5:26): We also come out of, or we’re in, let me say, it hasn’t left us really, you know, over 500 years of colonisation, a very brutal colonisation that has decimated and severed so much of our culture and so much of our knowledge systems. And so I have a skill or a calling to kind of, not so much mend that, but to really look at where our survivalism and how we engage with land has been broken by that detrimental kind of colonial intrusion and how we’re able to reconnect those things. And for me, agroecology is a beautiful way to do that.

Damien Helly (6:14): Zian said it is a beautiful way to do that, echoing Patrick’s words on the linkages between truth and beauty. 

Patrick Worms (6:22): ​​The reason why combining arts and sciences makes sense, especially in the context of agriculture, is because of something very odd but very reassuring that scientists across a range of disciplines have discovered over the past century or so. And that is something that you cannot prove through a scientific method, but that many scientists feel in their very bones. There is beauty in truth. If something is beautiful, it is more likely to be truthful. If something is ugly, it is less likely to be truthful.

Beauty is a word that will often be used by mathematicians. And in the same way, beauty is a word that is used by people who fight for a better environment. They may not say so in public because we’re all supposed to be worried about money and about efficiency and such things. But in practice, the reason why somebody gets out of bed in the morning and militates for a national park or to protect the elephant or to protect the Amazon is also because they find these environments or these creatures to be particularly beautiful.

Maya Marshak (7:36): I see it as something I’m always learning about. I think even in school, I was interested in biology and interested in art. Those were my favorite subjects. And I kind of intuitively knew they were connected or knew an interest in the environment. And I think I also recently finished my PhD, and I think this question of how do the arts and the science relate and how can I work in that in-between space was very much a question throughout that work of learning, what am I doing? I didn’t really know where I was going with it. It was just about being curious, collecting images, stories, sharing those with the people that I interviewed and kind of seeing how that opened up new conversations.

Damien Helly (8:26): For both Patrick and Maya, the connection between science, aesthetics and the arts is like an obvious mystery. In Patrick’s case, artwork is even used to engage scientists on sensitive or complex topics.

Patrick Worms (8:38): If you’re finding yourself in an environment filled with hardcore scientists who have not looked at ecology but are instead agronomists or geneticists or financial engineers, you tell them about the benefits of agroforestry. An easy way of doing that is first to show them some pictures because you know that as people who evolved in a landscape dotted with trees, these are pictures that are going to speak to them subconsciously, but that are going to speak to them. And using those pictures, and they could be artworks, they could be photographs, they could be something else, will open up the conversation beyond the antagonistic one of, for example, organic versus petrochemical agriculture, but towards one which is far more interesting which is, right, how can we use all of the tools we have today together with the tools that the science of ecology is teaching us are so very important, such as agroforestry.

Damien Helly (9:41): There is indeed something about methods using arts to pursue scientific goals, as Maya described. 

Maya Marshak (9:47): The more and more I work with other artists who also work in that space, the more I realise that it is in a way about methods, about the mode of inquiry or being engaged in a space. So I think coming from a research, kind of academic background, there’s often a kind of a set of tools that you use to interview methods.

For example, I took lots and lots of photographs, and then would discuss those photographs with the people I interviewed. Sometimes those were photographs of things I found in the archives, or things I found within research and developments, kind of laboratories, things that were hidden under the desk that hadn’t been looked at for 20 years. Maybe a catalog or a field notebook or some old entomology connections. So I think it is just sort of looking for things out of a place of curiosity.

Damien Helly (10:42): Speaking of methods, our other guest, Francesca,  tells us about her experience of using paintings in her research. 

Francesca Camilli (10:50): Being working on different projects regarding rural development, dealing with natural resources and agricultural resources, trying to understand if it is possible to recreate the local supply chain. And when you study them, you also need to understand how these resources have been considered in history. And in some way, this approach also has brought me to look at paintings or at all the pictures, for example. And when I look at them, I don’t just try to see what is in the foreground, but also to understand what is in the background. Even though, as I said, I’m not an art historian,  many times it can happen that there are some representations which have nothing to do with the reality at that time. So we have also to be very careful.

Damien Helly (11:50): I asked Francesca to give us more detailed examples of paintings she had been interested in order to understand how arts and science could help each other.

And what she came up with were her webinars during the Covid pandemic and called Science in Arts. 

Francesca Camilli (12:08): We wanted just, let’s say, integrate art and science. So we called these webinars La Scienza nell’Arte, that means Science in Arts, and we invited some experts in different disciplines to talk about what we could appreciate in paintings through science. So botanists, or meteorologists, or experts in soil sciences, or in forestry and astronomy. Many people followed us and they appreciated their approach because sometimes we look at paintings without knowing some representation of the vegetation or natural phenomena, which are not explained from people who are competent in art history because they don’t have scientific knowledge about that.

So they were quite much appreciated and also from tourist guides. A more recent example of her exploration includes the discovery of 17th century botanical models made of wax. These are some wax botanical models which are at the Museum of Botany of the University of Florence. These artists manufactured these wax botanical models promoted by the Grand Duke Peter Leopold of Lorraine because he wanted them to be an educational tool. These artisans or artists they used to just reproduce the real model that many explorers at that time brought to Italy and they were planted by somebody new at that time. So this was another way to use art in the time to make people know about natural sciences.

Damien Helly (14:00): Since re-recording this podcast some of these wax models are now exhibited in the Florence Scientific Museum. Francesca had another story of collaboration between artists and scientists around the work of painter Bartolomeo Bimbi.

Francesca Camilli (14:18): They had a meeting with two botanists and an art historian and they talked to the public about this amazing description of fruits made by a painter called Bartolomeo Bimbi who lived in between 1600 and 1700. So he used to paint all these different kinds of apples, pears and figs and plums and cherries and grapes and citrus. But the special thing is that he reported each type of these different cultivars on scrolls painted in the same painting. So these are painted databases of what they used to grow at that time and what they used to cultivate. I think this is a good marriage between art and science. 

Damien Helly (15:16): These paintings can be seen at the Museum of Still Life at Villa Medicea di Poggio in Prato near Florence. These examples from Old Europe are quite clear about the blurred boundaries between arts and science and also between scientific disciplines. I asked our podcast participants how they view multidisciplinary approaches in agroforestry and agroecology. It also values the role of artists in representing landscapes. 

Patrick Worms (15:51): Now as it happens in the context of agriculture, beauty is a surprisingly accurate proxy for truth in the sense that a landscape with trees, an agroforestry landscape will seem to us to be much more beautiful than a landscape comprised only of large fields that are more efficient, more productive, more resilient, they lock more carbon, they host more biodiversity, they give us more of the things that science tells us are important for our thriving on this planet. That is also why artists are such useful allies of a better agriculture because it is artists who have across the centuries painted and recorded.

Damien Helly (16:47): For Francesca, agroforestry requires an integrated approach combining several disciplines.

Francesca Camilli (16:52): Agroforestry can be defined as culture as it is an example of complex integration of different disciplines, going from natural sciences to social science, sciences to humanistic disciplines. We have a book which is entitled Storia del Paisaggio Agrario Italiano which in English is History of the Italian Agricultural Landscape. This book was written by Emilio Serrini who was an historian and this interdisciplinary characterisation of the rural life involves economic and social history, linguistics, archaeology and artistry so it’s multidisciplinary.

Damien Helly (17:49): Zayaan Khan as a practitioner insists on a significant nuance between multi and transdisciplinary approaches

Zayaan Khan (17:51): Yes it is multidisciplinary but what I’ve recently learned is that it’s much more transdisciplinarity. The subtle difference is that it combines all of those things and it’s sometimes science but it’s also art. It blurs those boundaries and it brings more allowance because oftentimes the story that needs to be told it’s about healing, it’s about community, it’s about the collective.

Damien Helly (18:21): At the end of this journey I asked our guests which takeaways they wanted to share with our podcast followers and also what the EU and its member states could do to bring added value in this space where agroforestry, science and culture meet. 

Zayaan Khan (18:38): People really want to talk to one another and it opens a vessel into a new way of working so that the crux of a lot of that situation that they may have been struggling with sometimes for years is able to flow better, to answer better. I think we get so stuck in our silos and we work within such a strange kind of capitalistic notion of time these days it’s hard to break out of that and so these opportunities really offer kind of fodder for future freedoms in work and answers, solutions.

Patrick Worms (19:14): So the most important thing that the EU could do would be to encourage the cultural institutions of its member states to give more credence to cultural works coming from the countryside, to give more value to cultural works coming from the countryside. That means no doubt that you are going to have all sorts of things coming up including things that are going to be deeply inimical to a more natural way of judging agricultural landscapes. But it is out of that dialogue between different ways of looking at the world and between different ways of perceiving the world that truth will arise and as we know, truth and beauty have very many things in common.

Zayaan Khan (19:57): We’ve seen a lot of reparation lately and it’s been remarkable. I don’t know if it’s fast enough and especially for example with the movement of museums reconciling stolen artefacts. Yes, we can talk about the changing of the policy. I used to do that lobbying work and I know how hard it is and I know how much it can make you sick working so hard when nothing changes. Releasing some euros really helps with that. Sometimes it’s very little money but it also allows us to do the work that is really important especially if it’s kind of targeted around a specific theme or a question. Artists really have a way to find solutions in these scenarios, this kind of agroforestry culture nexus.

Francesca Camilli (20:41): I think this interdisciplinary approach must be considered at different levels both policy level at educational level informal and informal and at the research level. So I think this is something that the institutions should consider. Also when developing programmes that would like it to become also a real project  in the future. 

Damien Helly (21:09): With new security emergencies on the EU agenda and a backlash on the EU Green Deal there’s a long way before we see new European initiatives mixing agroforestry and cultural relations. At culture Solutions we will continue developing transdisciplinary partnerships on culture and science diplomacy to understand how best EU policies can jointly deliver scientifically relevant creative climate and biodiversity actions. And let’s finish this episode with a quote by Method Gundidza.

Method Gundidza (21:46): Decolonising our minds to redefine the correct relationship of us as people to plants and to the greater spectrum of life. 

Damien Helly (22:07): Thank you for listening to today’s episode of our Composing Trust podcast by culture Solutions.