Thérèse cultivates a Creole garden in Guadeloupe. She resists invisible poisons. Her hands merge with the earth. Her face with the light. “The garden was part of a decolonial activism for Thérèse, as it was a means of cultivating the land by her own means and cleaning it up in the face of widespread pollution. Historically, chlordecone is an insecticide used on a massive scale in the French West Indies and placed on the market in an abusive manner at the beginning of the 1970s, by dispensation of the Minister of Agriculture at the time, Jacques Chirac. Intended to combat banana parasitism, its industrial and colonial use led to pollution of natural environments and poisoning of plant, animal and human life. Frédérique Menant’s film places eco- logical awareness at the heart of the ecofeminist and post-colonial question: the garden becomes a utopian land of rewilding, of regaining power, of regeneration. By placing the relationship between the cultivated and the wild within the same filmic and agrarian perimeter, the filmmaker leaves behind Western dualism to reclaim the idea of continuity: ‘Recognise the culture that has been denied in the sphere conceived as pure nature, and recognise the nature that has been denied in the sphere conceived as pure culture.’” (Elio Della Noce)
