Rest Crops
ISABELLE SULLY

Over the past three years, artists Marie Ilse Bourlanges and Liza Prins have maintained a flax plot at the edge of Amsterdam’s Flevopark, from which they have grown and processed flax into its more commonly known counterpart of linen. This process, both intensely laborious and historically feminised, brought with it an artistic research project into the material and social realities of flax production, from its glory days in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rural France and the Netherlands through to its current-day industrialisation. Along the way, tools were arduously handcrafted into instruments and an ode to work songs emerged—a way of maintaining desire and political agency in the face of labour struggles.

Following one hundred days of maturation, the harvesting and processing of flax unfolds over a number of key steps. Firstly, the crops are uprooted from the ground and left to rot. After this period of drying, during which the unwanted fibres are loosened and separated out, the flax is hauled through coarse combs, often fashioned from piercing metal teeth designed to separate the seeds from the fibres. Pulling it back and forth through the instrument, the working body finds a rhythm. Next, the flax must be broken. To break it, another wooden tool enters the frame, wherein the fibres are crushed between a hard, flat surface and a long wooden arm crunching down repeatedly to again begin another cycle of separation. Lastly, the fibres are pulled through another comb, with the final traces of unwanted plant material encasing or simply clinging onto the finer fibres removed. Reduced to a bare fraction of the original mass of growth, what remains is a soft swatch of fibres, not unlike a clump of human hair. It is these steps of production that provide the structure of a performance in four acts.

Flax has many advantages and uses as a crop, yet it’s overwhelming disadvantage is the amount of labour exerted from sowing to harvested fibres. Recite, reprise, repeat. And yet, despite all this labour, flax is considered a ‘rest crop’. It earnt this designation as it is often planted between rotations in order for the soil to recover from more nutrient-depleting crops. In this sense, it allows for regeneration, thriving out of focus and ‘off season’.

With the new ‘cultural season’ soon upon us in September, and intentionally programmed in a moment of ‘rest’ between exhibitions, it could be said that Flax, baby! Flax [Interludes] is itself a rest crop. Considering the production line of this project at A Tale of A Tub—which largely unfolded through workshops open to the public at moments of quiet convenience—this project found its own tenor amidst the more dominant happenings of the institution, and harmoniously so.

If we were to take seriously the lessons learned from nature’s rhythms and apply them to the ecology of exhibition making, then it wouldn’t be long before the endless cycle of rest-less overproduction endemic to the field would be undone. Given this, it could also be seen as contradictory that in our moment of short reprieve we, instead of taking it, program another project. Yet over the months of sitting (and singing) with Songs of Flax—as well as with the histories of under-recognised and unacknowledged labours more broadly—it has been made clear that the tool we have in our garden shed is that disruption—an instrument of political agency not out of step with the devices of song, like rhythm. To draw on the intensity of labour practices while at the same time making visible necessary moments of recuperation (often through their lack) is to ensure that cycles of exploitation are rendered visible.

Beyond the scope of the health of our own workplace labour, the practice of working with rest crops as a farming tradition can be metaphorically applied to the larger social ecology of an art institute as well. Different crops are grown in the same area in a sequence of growing seasons. These crops, through their difference, ensure that an over-reliance on one growth cycle over another is circumnavigated, meaning that a multitude of nutrients, insects and plant life live together, ensuring the health of the soil is not sacrificed for the good of a singular plant. As has been proven, the production of a monoculture is highly depended on harmful external inputs that bring with them the erosion of foundational aspects, like soil.
If we bring the lessons learnt from crop rotation into conversation with the histories of gendered labour that Prins and Bourlanges speak to through their project, what we get is further evidence—as if we needed it—of the importance of intersectional and intergeneration materialist feminist work. Flax not only prevails but also ensures the prevalence of much more life matter around it, precisely because it exists within a constellation of intersecting needs, strengths and differences. When sung in a similar key, an art institution on the edge of a city can provide sustenance in the face of dominant narratives and rhythms of visibility, if only it might begin to sing to its own tune.