by Krasna Vukasovic Herrero
The copihue is a Chilean plant that grows by climbing others. It needs a host to elongate and travel around as it looks for light. Copihues can sprout from seed or stem — a mugrón, which is formed when an adult plant or one of its branches falls to the ground and roots grow from the stem at a point of contact between the plant and the ground. Once rooting has occurred, the new plant can be transported to another location.
Since leaving my home country, I reflect on being my own house: repairing my cracked walls, changing the broken glass of my windows, heating my cold rooms. Migrants are constantly sounding the frequency of themselves. Reviewing their affections, their biography, their changing personality, their things that fit in a suitcase and those that aren’t transportable.
Metaphors help us cope with the grief and solitude brought by rootlessness and a lack of belonging. Everything essential that I consider as memory pushes on my back and behind my heart — home, pain, images, songs, the love and heartbreak I have come to feel, manners of people, absences and companionship. Although it may seem like a burden, those things that constitute the weight of memory are also the same elements with which we are able to build our house in any territory.
The roots of the copihue deepen. They form fleshy secondary roots, very sensitive to transplanting, which is an inconvenience for cultivating them in an artificial environment.
***
For academic reasons, a visit to the botanical garden in Leipzig was organized. I had no expectations for this experience of observing specimens of diverse flora from all over the world. I didn’t feel entirely comfortable: the words “colonial practice” were breathing behind me.
Those who come “from the outside” are constantly attending to certain issues that are mundane, silent or simply non-existent for locals: Use of public spaces, failed translations, systems of power, colonialism, the impact of this word, among others, are issues that locals can ignore for a lifetime. Migrating puts us in an uncomfortable and strange place, which regularly feels like a tidal wave or a swaying of forces that push and pull us back and forth between the waters. Its swirls and blows disarm and discompose us, leading us to strand ourselves on the shore, forgetting where we came from and what our destination was.
The last time I visited my country, I dressed in my old clothes again. I slept in what had been my bed, covered by the blankets my mother had woven. The warmth of a place has a changing aura: it’s crossed by the affections that link us to the people who inhabit those places; it‘s a warmth that adapts to the presence or absence of our relationships.
On that trip, my luggage was lost and I had to replace everything that was missing: my toiletries, my underwear, my coat, my intimate letters. Everything that was most mine floated in the atmosphere of uncertainty and what was most foreign was what I appropriated under the urgency of sustaining my identity. While I was rediscovering old belongings, I wondered if it‘s possible to build ourselves from an empty suitcase, or to repair ourselves when the tools at our disposal are located on the other side of the ocean. I was troubled by the image of my personal belongings sinking into the sea.
***
My feet stepped on a ground planted with roots from other latitudes; spaces prepared to cultivate species brought from far away. Suddenly, I saw my shadow reaching the edge of a dark pot. It contained a clump of copihues, the Chilean national flower. Around me lay little corpses turning the color of the earth; floral bodies that had once enjoyed lushness now dried up far from their soil. I could feel my own heart shedding its leaves.
I have a representative in my country, for we are both Guardians of the Sensitive. I write letters to her, and she writes letters to me. She is the one I think of when I walk in silence through this garden full of scattered distances. This is a letter to her:
Dear Virginia:
I write you from the botanical garden in Leipzig, on a surprisingly sunny day, in the shade of a plant… We would never have imagined that this letter would be affected by my encounter with this flower, from whose shade I‘m writing to you and finding the silence and embrace I was missing today.
At this moment there is a copihue planted in a pot behind me. It has blossoms, it is in bloom, it is in flower. There are also fallen leaves around the pot, leaves of the most beautiful flower I’ve ever seen. I was finally able to pick some.
That trip when I was missing my luggage was the one when I saw my first copihue in the south of Chile. Copihues have different ways of spreading. One is when a flower falls and sprouts on the ground. When I saw the flower for the first time, climbing on a arrayán, I immediately wanted to find one on the ground to take from my root-country to my flower-country, but I couldn’t. I had to be satisfied with a supplement to my object of desire: a white cloth embroidered with the motif of a red copihue. An illusion that would fit in my suitcase.
***
There was a time when copihues grew on any fertile land throughout the country. They say that you could find them in houses, parks, on the road, in the periphery or in the center; the copihue was present in all Chilean life. So precious was this flower that people cut them out of every plant they came across. A law had to be implemented to prohibit its undue manipulation, having declared it in danger of extinction. Specimens could only be observed in national parks or in properly registered cultivation fields, and since then it has been increasingly difficult to see one.
Copihue comes from kolpiw, a word originating from Mapudungun — the language of the native Mapuche people. Mapuche means people of the earth and copihue means to be upside down. By its bell shape, the form of the flared flower of the copihue seems to have blossomed upside down. Originally, their fruit was also called kolpiw. In Spanish it’s called pepino, but copihue remained to refer to the whole plant.
In thinking of the word copihue, certain associations are conjured: memory, distance, territory. I’ve always heard that Chile is a country without memory. As I observe the plant in the botanical garden, growing on itself, without a host on which to climb, I avoid crossing the threshold of nostalgia and I think of the structure of memory: image, experience, affect, remanence, possible incongruence with reality. W. G. Sebald wrote that during our travels we should avoid buying postcards, because the impact of postcard images on memory is stronger than those we perceive sensibly. Thus, creating memory seems to be a decision. We trust that the way we capture and represent memories is in our hands. Would it be better — or less painful — to avoid anchoring ourselves to the objects that constitute our biography? To avoid going to the beach, collecting shells, admiring and keeping them, to avoid returning home to pack them, to avoid flying back home at all. Avoid structures of remembrance.
From the botanical garden in Leipzig, I decided to collect the fallen copihues that I hadn’t been able to bring with me from Chile and send them back there. I was motivated by their intrinsic poetics and also by the absurd intention of wanting to send myself — to return and give myself from a distance — in a quest to become baggage.
Migration is to be a copihue upside down, falling on a strange land and trying to grow roots in it, climbing towards the sky with the hope that, day by day, we will get closer to the light.
Krasna Vukasovic Herrero is a visual artist and occasional writer from Santiago de Chile, currently studying Painting/Grafik at Hochschule fuer Grafik und Buchkunst, Leipzig. She is a member of the Chilean artistic collective La Farmacéutica Nacional. Krasna is interested in how we sensitively link ourselves to objects, how materialities absorb time, and the way we represent what is inscribed in memory. Her focus is mainly on archives made up of old black and white photographs and handwritten texts. Oil painting, charcoal, handwriting and typography are her core materials. She often paints large formats on fabrics and papers, forgoing the stretcher frame. As leitmotiv, she understands memory as the fundamental engine for creation.