" If the concept of diaspora, idealistic and romantic, is supported by a return of memories, real or fantasmatic, from the fact of remembering a lost origin, that of metaspora seeks to make becoming present . It is a set of acts making the events to come legible and current .”
Joël Des Rosiers, Métaspora. Essai sur les patries intimes, 2013
In biology, spore (σπόρος) is the seed of every plant. With a gesture of scattering, spores are randomly spread to create diasporic communities of a plant species. As diasporic communities (of people), we remain in the binary, here and there, us and them.
Metaspora (in biology: to re-plant) means to create new ecologies of multispecies togetherness; with care. Different but in synergy, metaspora project chooses to create and cultivate an environment (an actual garden), and re-root together.
Metaspora is an artistic research project that questions how people inhabit the landscape they are part of (or that they find themselves) and their right to flourish in a place that is not their birthland. In this research group, members of the Post Collective (Sawsan Maher, Elli Vassalou, Mirra Markhaëva) and the artist in kinship Anna Housiada, women with different diasporic backgrounds (west Asia, Siberia and the Balkans) and diverse religious cultures (Christian orthodox and Muslim tradition, Buddhist iconography, shamanic practices, and ancient Greek mythology), are experimenting with ways to connect with the - foreign to them - land of Belgium. They are seeking to restore their relationship with their body and each other (self and collective care), develop bonds with the earth, the local human and non-human communities and create new collective/hybrid localities that enable them to re-root their spiritual and transindividual selves (their ancestors, their kin, their children).
Migrant identities are often deprived of connection with the land of their host country. Migrant life in the city is usually one of waiting and withholding or denying connection with what surrounds it in and beyond the city's predesigned neoliberal lifestyle. That feeling of exclusion often results in enclosed diasporic communities as the only opportunity for people to connect with what is lost. In Metaspora, four migrant women, two children, and a dog are trying to break these boundaries of separate communities and distinguished practices of culture; to find their own ways as an open community to redefine belonging and dream of a common future in Belgium. And as Joël Des Rosiers would say to write “their own mythology, and forge post-national spaces, within the general movement of peoples”.
Collective meetings in the rural sphere of the host country function as anchors of connection and exploration, a safe space for celebrating multiplicity, co-learning, co-creating and rerooting. The female collective, explore ways of weaving together memories, traditions and cultural space through storytelling, rural rituals and food, archiving them through text, drawings, recipes, photography, video and textile.
part of PLANB
Veldwerk II
interview by PlanB
Milke Thiste and the turkish seeds text is published in
State of the Arts (SOTA) almanac 2023, as part of month June
Supported by Zarlardinge residency, viernulvier Gent