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An
old man, N., cultivates mandrake for spell use. Sirbi, Rumania.
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There is in
this piece and the related ones an obvious interrogation on the practices,
techniques and social uses relating to the forest, with the purpose of founding
and legitimating them (...) : how far is it possible to collect and use
wild plants and at what risks ? Can one transplant them and grow them
in one's own garden, attached to one's house, as did an old man of Sirbi
in 1991 with stalks of mandrake ? Would it not be better to encircle
the forest with multiple ties, boundaries and ditches in order to maintain
and exploit it ? Has it not by nature sufficient resources to always
free itself from these ties and recover its wild condition ? Thus,
thought explores from tale to tale the possibilities it perceives and joins
to the questioning on the use of the forest that on the use of sexuality,
as if the tempestuous forces of desire were of the same order as the monstruous
forces of the earth. Under the features of the Girl of the Forest appears
the mythological prehistoric figure of Cybele. Its function persists in
the contemporaneous imaginary for a simple and strong reason : the fear
that forests and, more generally, wild spaces could be destroyed (Ibid.,
pp. 197-211). 
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J.C.:
Mémoire des Carpathes, La Roumanie millénaire, un regard intérieur,
Paris, Plon, Terre Humaine, 2000, pp.195-196 |
