The Sympoietic Orchard
Résumé
What can sympoiesis look like in the dappled light of an urban orchards’ everyday life? This chapter is an agripoetic inquiry in search of a sympoietic approach to orchard-making in a twenty-first century urban context. “Sympoiesis” is a twice-born neologism first forged by Dempster B: In: Allen JK and Wilby J (ed) Proceedings of the world congress of the systems sciences and ISSS), (2000) and then Haraway D: Staying With the Trouble. Making Kin in the Chthulucene, (2016) from the prefix sym (with) and the Greek root of poetry, poiesis (making). Sympoiesis is a way to name multispecies creation or (world)making. I will describe three approaches to sympoietic orchard-making I experimented in a communal orchard south of Paris: visiting, prolonging, and gardening possibilities. These immersive methods are not protocols I applied during fieldwork, but rather practices, or even postures, I came to embody in contact with the orchard, and then to name, with the help of orchard writing from poetry collections and gardening books, and in conversation with landscape thinkers such as Gilles Clément or Jean-Marc Besse and multispecies theorists in biology, ethology, philosophy, critical geography, and literature, including Donna Haraway, Vinciane Despret, Isabelle Stengers, Emanuele Coccia, Frédérique Aït Touati, and Marielle Macé.