Wheeled Whereabouts
Driving my car, a bright red Fiat 500 that I rent monthly during my time here in Puglia — which thus is not really mine at all, but which after months of driving sort of feels like it — I have my pen and on-the-road notebook readily placed on the passenger seat next to my drone and recorder; also them placed on the seat, as I somewhat aimlessly steer the wheels through the landscape of Ostuni. My drive is aimless insofar that I have no particular place to drive, no pre-decided route to take, wheeling around this sunny afternoon in late March. I have just finished a participant observation event at Masseria Brancati, having spent the entire forenoon learning about pruning by closely observing the work of Cosimo, and I am sort of on my way home to work with experiences from the forenoon, yet still on the road to further experience. Random as it takes place, the drive is as such not aimless at all, but a way, methodological in sense, to encounter, apprehend and explore further.
Just like on my footed explorations, I can drive around exploring for hours, browsing slowly through the landscape cruisingly surveying it, stopping wherever I notice something catching my attention, turning the wheels around compelled to attend to something recently passed by, which, after moments of thinking about, usually correlationally to previous experiences, come across as noteworthy some additional attention. These somethings can be branches seemingly affected by Xylella fastidiosa (those brownish in color standing out in the otherwise greened canopies), signposts enhancing legacies of this place, intriguing trunks or modes of them being rooted, or sceneries, oftentimes breathtaking in kind. These somethings most of the times comes with other things becoming noticed, such as the presence of circles of bluish pearls spread around trunks and entirely different foliage growing on divergent branches on the same trunk. Grabbing my pen, I jot in my notebook, making notes simultaneously of that which caught my attention, how to investigate it further, such as in noting who to ask about what, and why it appear to be of importance for my research; turning on my recorder, bringing it with me as I step out of the car, I voice sensed reflections upon the things that I hear, see, smell, taste and feel encountering an array of here and now, then and there; flying my drone, I produce photographic overviews, using yet another technological means, in creating a sense of the landscape and the spatiotemporal practices forming it.
Documenting and noting, curious in my visual, literal and articulate, let alone, in my corporeal and spatial wheeled whereabouts, I make corresponding accounts of the surrounding, tying these experiences to prior and future ones, attempting to deepening and contextualize that which I thus far have come to know, at once to practices and histories of olive growing and olive oil cultivation and to the methodological procedures by which my researched encounters become assemblaged.
