Practicing Artful Care
It has become primetime for the pruning of olive plants here in Puglia, and the roads are once again jammed with trucks as machineries going back and forth to orchards. It reminds of the early morning and late afternoon traffic during harvest, but this time around, people go equipped with ladders, chainsaws, and similar tools on their way to and from having cut canopies. And cut they become, the canopies that is, and quite heavily so, leaving only a couple of branches on each plant for the purpose of prosperous fruiting for the years to come. Hence, the old saying fammi povera e ti farò ricco, which literally translates into ‘make me poor and I will make you rich’ and which originates from viticulture, speaks quite well to this practical occurrence of cutting almost everything off, such as for a flourished development to come. More than that though, the canopies are pruned for the purpose of maintaining a particular and balanced shape. Namely, one allowing for light and air to flow throughout each plant in contributing to an amplified yield, all while cultivating steady growth of at once the plants and the traditions they fund. As a particular matter of care (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017) then, pruning occurs to be an artful and fundamentally skilled practice (Grasseni 2014, 2007); one where technoscience meet beyond human matters in much situated and cared ways of becoming. Furthermore, skillful of a caring art that pruning appears, it occurs sensuously enacted, and it takes years of practice to master its means of working seamlessly with the eyes and the hands; with gli occhi e le mani as a practitioner had it. It is also a cyclical procedure, and makes in its feel for spatiotemporal flows, a vital part of olive growing and olive oil making. Well, that is at least how I have come to understand it through my thus far ethnographic engagement.
As I have participated in pruning practices, I have learnt that just like different techniques for pruning and harvest become undertaken, so are a variety of different shapes being sought. There is, for instance, a correlation between the specific method of harvest and cultivated shape of olive plants. By way of example, it is common practice for olive trees around the area of Puglia to be cultivated in a rather low, rounded, and overhung shape that hangs onto a sort of crotchy trunk. Supposedly, this shape allows for an aerated and lush growth (of olives) to be harvested with sticks or handheld pneumatic combs, and that either from standing on the ground, in a lift, or within the plants. Meanwhile, with the highly mechanized super intensive method of olive growing used for cultivating the fairly new variety of Favolosa — which by the way is one of the varieties becoming (re)planted in the wake of Xylella fastidiosa and which one of my upcoming posts introduce further — another shape is better cultivated to accommodate its harvesting technique and plantation strategy. Namely, that of a relatively straight and narrow growth habit. The reason is that the plantation, likewise harvest, is done in a streamlined manner with an overarching straddle machine moving along tightly curated rows of plants.
The images and videos above and below accentuate three different orchards and research events that I have partaken over the last month. They are gathered accordingly. Though all three were quite fruitful to experience, the first exemplification occurred especially interesting. This as these guys, the son of Peppinio and the seasonal worker of Alessa, for the first time undertook the practice of pruning. I thus got a rather first-hand-experience of how a cultivation technique got cultivated (learnt-by-doing). The second represent pruning of ancient trees and the third of young trees. There are images from a book of the legendary, and sadly recently deceased, Italian olivicoltura professor Fontanazza (2000) featured within the transition from the second to the last section of the visuals. This is a book that I took the time browsing — in parts also reading — while spending time in the office of Giorgio (Olio Claudio). He sat at de table across from me, and was at the moment working on some stuff for promoting his products online. A science as olivicoltura indeed occurs to be, I found it tremendously fruitful immersing myself also in instructorial means of learning while observing cultured practices of doing. While I have taken a test-ride in the lift, such as seen in the top photo, I have not myself pruned any olive plants.
Referenses
Fontanazza, Giuseppe. 2000. Olivicoltura Intensiva Meccanizzata. Bologna: Gruppo Calderini Edagricole.
Grasseni, Cristina. 2014. Skilled Visions: Ecologies of Belonging and Sensorial Apprenticeship. [online]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hgnANBpcGQ.
——, Cristina. 2007. Skilled Vision. Between Apprenticeship and Standards. Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books.
Puig de la Bellacasa, María. 2017. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More Than Human Worlds. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
