Agrilogistics

During the day, the greenhouse is a cinematic device, an automated film set optimized for the mass production of fruits and flowers. At night, the factory stops: without an inside or an outside, the greenhouse becomes an oneiric chamber where plants, animals and machines form new entanglements.

The conveyor belt, the perfectly regular spacing of the objects moving along it, the metallic whistling that lulls their passage – everything commands our intuition to recognise an industrial scene. The following shots, with their coloured hypnosis-inducing symmetry remind us of the images of a beautiful film that Alain Resnais had made on the plastics industry more than sixty years ago – The Song of Styrene. Two elements are out of place: on the belt the objects are bulbs; all around, cameras keep watch, assisted in the corners by wide reflectors that would look more at home in a film studio. In reality, we are in the triage area of an industrial greenhouse in the Netherlands. The cameras and their attached computers are there to ensure the smooth agro-industrial running of things: so that each flower bulb, each tomato has the size and shape required by the standards. Here, man has disappeared (like in Resnais’ film, surviving only as the gloved hands of workers assisting the robots) and nature itself seems a far-off memory. Yet, when night falls, as if in secret or in a mischievous dream, nature returns to make its nest under the metal beams, indifferent to the hydraulic arms that continue their work – they too are imperturbable, but suddenly resemble a form of parallel life in an astonishing sci-fi fantasy.

Jérôme Momcilovic