I feel the work with affectual plains is very strong. This piece enacts a certain affectual swirl that anyone who has felt a strom coming will know well. This photo has bodily and sensorial information certainly, in the facial expressions as well as what appears to be a quickened pace in the strides of Pancha and Chon. The photo brings a sense of movement, temperature, and thought. The open and freshly-tilled soil suggests a certain precarity. We think about labor and bodily ways of knowing the land. We consider the farmer's relationship with weather, land, and environemnt. We see lives, bodies, and weather linked as storms connote hazards that have the potential to overpower humans.
The everyday feeling is strong. The viewer may be reminded of routine, pattern, and duty. We see memory in this domesticated land as well as future in the potential of the open field. In a conversation on climate change, destruction lurks like the dark cloud in the photo, hovering and heading directly to the people of the world who tend the soil and directly impacting those who live in direct relationship with the land.
I find the standpoint of the farmer to be utmost in a conversation on contamination. Those who live in knowledge of the cycles of the land and in intimate connection with the earth also have deep understandings of the land and atmosphere, including weather patterns. What, too, is their exposure in living in tandem with the earth and looking to the land to supply?
