Crossed Paths – Bardsey Apple Tree (Afal Ynys Enlli)
This is the story of a 2 year old Bardsey Apple Tree (Afal Ynys Enlli) and its journey from an orchard near Bangor to an orchard on Bardsey Island, by boat and by back, delivered knee step by knee step along the last leg of the ancient North Wales Pilgrims Way. The tree was grown from seed by Ian Sturrock in his Welsh Fruit Tree orchard. Sturrock is famous for discovering and rescuing the last remaining, near extinct Bardsey apple tree from the island in 1999.
First we crossed the notoriously treacherous Bardsey Sound, a 20 minute trip from the tip of the Llyn Peninsula, North Wales to Bardsey – a National Nature Reserve, Site of Special Scientific Interest and Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty.
I started to crawl at the first point of land, where the water and concrete meet. It was misty, and quiet, except for the extraordinary amplified snorts, whistles, growls and belly blubber smacking of pre- mating seals.
Crossed Paths – Bardsey Apple Tree is one iteration of a larger crawling project titled Crossed Paths, centred on embodied experience, enactive film making, and on – going deeply into landscape to explore human and non – human narratives.
This slow and gentle activism poetically addresses ecocide and climate justice from the perspective of a human/tree/animal/technological hybrid. From down there on my hands and knees I offer up my body as a site for new encounter and a platform for human and non – human exchange, proposing that from a non – upright position we might better understand our place in the biosphere, and so develop more mutually beneficial, sustainable and respectful interspecies relationships.
Crawling is a tool for deep investigation of place and land, a powerful means of accessing, connecting and communicating the land, it’s matter, its inhabitants and its narratives.
The shift from a two -legged to four -legged position is simple but profound. When closer to the ground I am more than human. I am closer to the matter, I am closer to what matters.
When down there I am neither here nor there, I am in between, I am free, I am feral, I am becoming…in this case I am becoming Bardsey Apple Tree.
I am hybrid – tree and I, me and tree, we are animal and technology too. While the four of us temporarily co- exist a new non – hierarchical dynamic can occur. We encounter each other as though for the first time. ( I did have to walk a bit as I had forgotten my knee pads!)
My crawling body is a platform, from where our non – human others can speak, I am gently suggesting that we listen.
From down there, I am proposing, that we write a new narrative where the tree is not our commodity, our welfare and our wellbeing, not our saviour, our currency, our excuse, not our judge, conscience or our carbon off-set, sink or bin, but a sentient being with a history, a land, a community, with rights, legitimacy and a voice.
My crawl along the last leg of the ancient North Wales Pilgrims Way takes me past the remains of the 13th century Augustinian Abbey of St Mary and into the garden of the chapel which contains an inscribed stone monument from the 10th or 11th century.
In these crawling performances I am playfully muddling everything up, I am purposefully disrupting and disorganising the hierarchy, status and role of us all, we all go upside down, and inside out.
The cameras dismember my body, they fragment and disperse me
They scatter me
My body loses its identity
Then it catches itself seeing itself, in relation to everything else
Perhaps it can re- emerge more consciously
In her book The Living Mountain, Nan Shepherd writes “Lay the head down, or better still, face away from what you look at, and bend with straddled legs till you see your world upside down. “How new it has become” she exclaims “This is how the world must see itself” says Shepherd.
The islanders planted the tree in the orchard adjacent to the chapel, amidst three hundred other wind – swept Bardsey Apple Trees.
