A requiem for a lost innocence
Although indigenous people represent about 5% of the world’s population, they might help protect as much as 80% of all biodiversity, with more than 370 million individuals living in more than 90 countries and caring for one quarter of the planet in better ways than the rest of the population does. Cambodia is one of the oldest of these nations, with 24 indigenous groups representing 1.4% of its total population. For instance its northeastern provinces comprise what has been described as Zomia by anthropologist James Scott, the largest anarchist non-country in the world. This large territory reaching out from mainland Southeast Asia to Southern China is an example of a large population governing themselves for centuries, focused on community self-reliance and far from centralized-power centers of previous empires. As soon as the modern world reached them it was to exploit their lands, bringing visions of development they do not recognize, large scale plantations and tourism that do not count them as equals, do not value their nature or relationship with its spirits. A nostalgia for a way of life before the present one, a version of now they are forced to engage with it. On other people's terms.
A requiem for a lost innocence.
Where do you go when your home is lost?
Ghosted by today's greed in service of a
tomorrow estranged from yesterdays.
A family album rotten by the speed of time and silence,
each cousin fading into oblivion,
one more tree cut down,
another mushroom left uncollected,
the leaves that dried out before being made into medicine.
A dying way of life
and an empty village replaced by yet
another city dweller scavenging for left overs.
Between promises for the future and nostalgia of what passes too quickly.
The mindless cruelty of the flow of things...
Would you trade a single minute in innocence
for an entire life being part of the machine?
The process of observing and choosing what to eat with our mind,
from real to surreal, from surreal to so-real.
What do we want to see?
There's no difference in the act of looking as a citizen, artist, a farmer or an activist:
the process of being in the world is in itself a never-ending gesture of creation.
And destruction.
Seeing is also deciding what's valuable, what's raw, authentic.
If we undress all the plastics, what's the bone deserving to become a future fossil.
And what do we want to say goodbye to?
A requiem for lost lands,
a nostalgia for a way of life endangered by the speed and the greed.
Ideologies and the business-as-usual, the religious divide, the human leftovers.
An indigenous boy removed from his forest farm
in exchange for another rubber plantation,
his sister forced to move to the city
for another low paid job toiling in a garment factory,
the spirits left angry, hungry for justice
and a sense of normalcy.
Why do we only assign value to what's inside a package or opaque walls fed by the coldness of air condition and the spreadsheet?
How to desacralize the sacred and sacralize the mundane?
How to quit the games of competition
and the heavy strings that control them:
the debts that keep us in uncertainty,
an unlevel playing field where blood runs thicker than rice
and the cats are loved by the mice.
Kindness as an act of resistance,
aesthetic choices as gestures of care.
There is beauty in ethics, a resilient ethic in quiet beauty.
How to imagine an antidote against the tragedy of commons,
something to spread out -- a pandemic battling the parasitical nature of the modernity we infected ourselves with.
What if we paid more attention to the stains of our actions,
learning to look at the rhizomatic furniture of stories around us.
To slow down and pay attention.
No more hand games, limiting gains to stop the pains.
An ecology of shapes with meanings waiting to be rewilded;
towards the stone-souping of a slowly fading society.