What matters is there

“I tell you, we have succeeded, we have called our friends, our colleagues and all the people living on the banks back to their water, to life… this is what matters most: this great choir that knows, that recognises the bonds, the composites, the symbioses, and all our entanglements with the world, with the river… Adamah, the Hebrew word for ground, Adam, the name of the first human, his figure forever forged, bound to the earth... this is what matters, I tell you; and when the time comes for technology, new words, bio-region, hydro-world, biocracy, interspecific negotiations… this should be remembered… Adam, one of the fruits of Adamah, his kind can no longer think in terms of the ancient, of the old modernity; this is what matters, I tell you. Understanding that we can no longer live, think, perceive freedom, emancipation in the same way. Look, I tell you, look closely at this verb: emancipate. From the Latin, it literally means to take by hand. We must entrust the future to the safe hands of weavers, to mend the holes and rips in the places where humans have severed, hollowed out, cut and harmed the bonds of life. This is what matters! There is nothing that matters more.

We can argue like constituents over the forms to be defined, which forms will express our belonging: who will the face, the body, the voice of the river be? Who will the forest be? Could the institution ever bear the concreteness, the embodiment of rivers, lakes and mountains? These questions are necessary, yet all non-essential... these questions, they should be heard like signs in the night, the diverse nights that await us and surround us...

We have understood. What matters is here and it is what guides us so that we get it right. Shaking up the freedom of the modernists, the most outlandish of whom continue to dream of Mars and extraterrestrial drilling.

All that, believe me, it is the old Prometheus who cries out still.

Whereas we, like Sisyphus, we know that we are bound to this task: in which we, modestly, repeat the gesture of being connected to this world… a repetitive, exhausting task but, unlike what is sometimes said, there is nothing rare or finite about it… for if you can experience the meanders of life, if you learn to draw nearer the miracle of symbioses, of earthly interlacing, you will understand at once that this is infinity… an infinite intelligence that surrounds us and nurtures us.

What matters is there, you know…”

Camille de Toledo, June 2024.