Water Your Roots

In the West Pomeranian Voivodeship of Poland, a region that was part of Germany until the end of the Second World War, is a tiny town by the name of Jankowo Pomorskie. Perhaps more a county than a town, Jankowo boasts a population of five hundred.

In the final two weeks of July, the population grew to five hundred and fifty-five — myself being part of the temporary body increase. T’was time for the Institute of Articipation, an artist residency run by Warsaw Bauhaus, a Polish organization whose work presently seeks to bridge urban-rural cultural dialogue through colloboratively revitalizingthe life/ purpose of an abanoned granary.

As one of the residency workshops, British theater director Gareth White prompted us to curate an immersive performance within a time constraint of thirty minutes. With my group of five — myself being the only non-Polish speaker, albeit my Polish mother — we decided to anchor our performance around roots.

The performance began with all participants forming a circle outside the granary — the HQ of the residency activities. Two members of our group then began a game of double telephone, meaning each of us spoke into the ear of the person standing next to us, one in English, one in Polish: “water your roots” ; “Podlewaj korzenie”. The double-entendre played out so the final participant announced their understanding of the English words whispered: “what are your roots?” (From my understanding, the Polish version wasn’t as likely to get misconstrued).

The circle then broke into a single line-turned-spiral as we led the participants to our shrine-esque creation: an inverse grave. The plot of dirt was contoured with pebbles; within this circle we piled dirt slightly elevated above the standard ground level. We dressed the plot with flowers picked from the nearby field.

Facing the fifty people now in a straight line leading to the designated/decorated dirt, our group announced: “We now invite you to whisper to your roots, whatever those roots might resemble to you.”

One by one, every single person stepped up. At each turn, they either squatted down, stayed standing, got on one or both knees, leaning down — most often with their hands cupped around their mouths as they spoke inaudibly to the pseudo-shrine.

Throughout the course of this residency, roots took on an especially personal meaning to me. It was my first time in Poland, my mother’s home, surrounded by people speaking a language that sounded as familiar as foreign to my ears that had only known Elzbieta’s native tongue through her version of pet names, child-directed commands, and road rage curse words.

However, this theme of roots has taken a central place in a broader thought process over the past year, beyond my own pursuit of discovering heritage.

In summer of 2025, Malik and I founded Fouràco Collective, a film collective of four artists (alongside Dalton Mumphrey and Ansley Nguyen Stotelmyre) with an initial focus on creating works that trace food in its step-by-step lineage of soil to plate. Though the projects have since evolved beyond being solely food-focused, agriculture remains a core subject matter to discuss as well as draw inspiration from.

Tomato Skin was the first exercise of such a thought experiment. The purpose of this essay is not to once again reiterate the plot of the film, but rather to address the significance of this approach—not just for filmmaking, nor even storytelling, but for stimulating a conversation about how each of us makes sense of navigating what often feels like a world aflame.

Recently a memory came to me of an Indonesian artist named Benjamin Suharto and his performance/ video installation work for an artist residency I was writing about in Hanoi in fall 2023 (Heritage Art Space and their Month of Art Practice).

Entitled Walking Backwards, the piece entailed Benjamin walking backwards in different corners of hectic Hanoi, a city known for a pedestrian experience that most resembles a game of new capitalism hopscotch: motorbikes zooming through streets as well as sidewalks, joggers negotiating pathways between tiny chairs and live fish basins, curbside merchants either spread out on pavement or in route on loaded bicycle, … to offer a brief visual.

This idea of moving backwards had been woven into Benjamin’s work before arriving in Vietnam, though the traffic polluted setup of the nation’s capital did make it an exceptionally interesting space to experiment such choreography.

When asked about the thought process behind the performance, Benjamin spoke of moving backwards as a call to discover new forms of awareness — in this case, through the body and through a gesture as simple, absent-minded and repetitive as walking.

In his description of the work, he writes: “Motivated by the desire to find new forms of awareness through minimal and repetitive actions, the project aims to reorient the body in its environment and propose an alternative to the forward-driven mentality that leads to ecological disaster.”

In butterfly effect hindsight, Benjamin planted a seed that’s been subconsciously watered over the course of the last three years.

To come back to now: we are living in a time of normalized nausea. With headlines of disaster flashing in front of us at a speed that renders every word a blur, boy, has it become hard to digest anything of emotional weight. Scrolling has become our means of bearing witness. And you can’t cry at every reel of a bombing, shooting, or killing, nor at every soundbite of another war, of another form of aid getting cut. It is horrifying to think of the accumulative effect this will have on our collective compassion. The desensitization occurs in tandem with an increasing sense of disconnection.

Most often, rather than contemplate if any sliver of care can still reside in a body so numb to calamity, our response mechanism utters: “What now? Where do we go from here?”. Sometimes, when the nausea becomes too much, we shift away from future tense: “how the hell did we get here?”

When a tree is sick, you don’t treat the fallen fruit, nor do you examine the branches. You look to the roots. Given the frequency with which the standard social media user encounters images in a day (try 3.2 billion images shared daily), the act of looking alone has become a cognitive challenge. And still, the world is yearning for us to reorient our vision.

So, where the hell do we look — before even considering how?

Suharto proposed walking backwards as one experiment of discovering new forms of awareness. By no means does he present this as a proactive solution (as though the world stops burning if we all just strode with our scalps front-facing). Rather, he invites us, via our bodies, to navigate the world differently to fast-paced forward-moving progress.

None of us hold the golden answer. However, if we sense the tree is sick (nausea as a key symptom)… it seems that the least we can do is look to the roots.

Lo and behold, the roots of food and heritage don’t run so far apart! After all: agriculture is the root of culture.

Where to locate these roots? And once found in a given plot of soil, what are the simple, repetitive gestures that surround them?

Naturally, Agnès Varda comes as a North Star in framing the art of gleaning.

However, in the case of Fouràco’s documentary series, the focus is not on random individuals but on an interconnected network that implicates each of us directly: our roots (yes, yours included!). In other words, we invite our audience to look at roots through an attentive lens, noticing those growing the food that makes us grow (we didn’t turn from kids to adults on empty stomachs!), that sustains our livelihoods, and that anchors our cuisines, shapes our painted patrimonial landscapes, and inspires our poetry, songs, etc.

As seasons change, the climate shifts, and turbulent circumstances make it so that cultivating food is not just a given, to pay attention to roots is to be caught by an abundance of care and resilience. It also prompts us to wonder why this set of hands is at work with these roots.

When we shift our lens to the micro level, to the most instinctive image of ‘source’, we open our imaginaries to a different scale of world-building. In film, what’s captured in the zoomed-in frame becomes its own temporary universe.

Although asking “what are our roots?” won’t heal a sick tree, nor extinguish a world on fire, it might reveal a more grounding way of making sense of where we are. In the process, we might feel re-connected, re-sensitized, to something as silly as roots (!) … insofar as to hear that tiny voice when it gingerly reminds us to water.