Plot in Dialogue
Film: Doña
Doña is a film that explores-with four women of the ejido* El Triunfo II, as they elaborate stories on each individual item rooted in their domestic space. Each story demonstrates the social encounters, experiments, exchanges and necessities that describe social and biological life as inseparable in agrarian contexts within Mexico. Women share plants and seeds with each other while the dense traspatio’s* soils prevent erosion. This everyday in-flux formation of biological-social commoning are the details that work to shelter knowledges. Quiet embodied practices that refuse the coloniality of economic ideologies aiming to homogenize life in the rural zone. The multi-scalar dialogue from soil to the hands of the doñas complicate reducibility and instead argues that scenes of everydayness help form political opposition.
*communal land holding
*cultivation area next to the home
A backyard, a space tangential or completely surrounding the home. That’s where the traspatio is. Doña Magdalena, Doña Rosenda, Doña Mary Carmen and Doña Lupe tend to theirs. Rue, basil, spearmint, mountain mint, bougainvillea, cilantro, wild cilantro, epazote, white sagebrush, guava leaves, black nightshade, Mexican pepperleaf, moringa, fennel, avocado leaves, neem, rosemary, rose, aloe vera, bryophyllum pinnatum, purple verbenaceae. They cook on thin metal sheets over oak wood. Chickens and maybe turkeys walk around, sometimes cats nap near the adobe stove. Doña Nora shows me the black corn she’ll soak tonight. White chili, serrano chili, tepin chili, pomegranate, coconut, jackfruit, red corn, white corn, orchids, dahlias, green avocado. The night before leaving El Triunfo II, Doña Rosenda trims two months worth of leaves from her malabar bush, solanum erianthum, so I may plant it. I’m to make one litre of tea a day, drink it as I do water. Back in my family’s home, a neighbor recognizes the plant and we pack him a bag full of leaves.
password: traspatio
Overheard Projection Image, a collage of field work drawings, consists of four women's traspatio's and their stages of growth: