One Olive Tree Garden (2024)
A single olive tree, fragmented in the pursuit of understanding
This installation consists of six double-sided concrete walls, inlaid with 12 slices of one olive tree—cut apart like a C-section. Visitors enter the tree by stepping inside and walking through its dissected form—an experience usually impossible for humans.
Yet, in seeing the details, we lose the tree.
This paradox mirrors the mechanisms of Orientalism, as described by Edward Said. In isolating, analyzing, aestheticizing, and reassembling cultures through an external lens, the observer creates a new construction that reflects their own fears and desires rather than the original whole.
Visitors may notice that all the scattered pieces belong to one tree, yet the tree itself has vanished, hidden within an exploded cube of concrete.
The olive tree—deeply rooted in the land, a symbol of the Mediterranean and the people who have cultivated it for generations—stands for endurance, belonging, and life. But here, uprooted, dissected, and encased in concrete—like a partition wall—it speaks of forced separation, fragmentation, and control. A reminder that the pursuit of understanding can sometimes erase the very thing it seeks to know.
Disclaimer: The tree itself was not cut down for this work—the farmers decided to uproot it after it stopped bearing fruit. No living tree was harmed in the process.
CONCEPTION
The artwork is a physical metaphor and display of invisible mechanisms and structures of the discoursive phenomenon that Edward W. Said elaborated on and conceived as Orientalism. Isolating objects from physical and social environments and historical contexts, analyzing, framing, and generalizing individual details and specific properties through abstractions, and aesthetic remixing and appropriating this mental and intellectual construction in eclectic images of Otherness are discursive back-end routines that, according to Said, run the European Orientalism. He spotlighted how refined and generalized abstractions project on situations and subjects for control and domination while provoking the adversary yet complementary roles of the Oriental bodies (mainly objects) and the Orientalist observers (mostly subjects) who used intellectual tools to split and analyze, explain, and construct their ideas and images about a foreign world that they were unable to understand. The lack of understanding provoked vivid descriptions of the other as primitive, wild, enigmatic, sensual, and brutal, which somehow reminds the curvy and rich texture of olive wood. Orientalism constructed what is not “Western” in one large container for all kinds of empirical observations, from Egypt, India, and Asia. The other seemed anachronistic as if stopped in time. Like the slices of concrete that not only cut the tree but freeze and conserve its anatomy in time. Edward Said, who applied the methods of French philosopher Michel Foucault and aligned with the critical theory laid out in Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno’s “Dialectics of Enlightenment,” inverted in his study the processes of Western Orientalism and converted it into an emancipatory form of criticism. Through describing the strategical complex of analysis, appropriation, alienation, and assimilation with a word of Valéry as a “machine puissante,” “[…] absorbing what it could from outside of Europe, converting everything to its use, intellectually and mentally, keeping the Orient selectively organized (or disorganized),” he also helped to understand the subjectivity that was affected by this kind of constructions, ascriptions, and expectations.
The olive tree symbolizes the Middle East and North Africa and is a typical pillar of Mediterranean agriculture. It is a natural symbol of unity, as humanity unites people. Yet, uprooted from its soil, sliced in pieces, analyzed and exploded in cross-sections, lithified in concrete, and isolated from its environment, it becomes a metaphor for the rationalized fabrication of Otherness, superior behavior, domination, and control. As the study of Edward Said showed clearly, any object of observation reflects the fear and needs of the observer and gives one tree the power to create a garden.
