The installation ‘Glass-House, Soft Stones’ by Laura Palau, unfolds around the apple as a site of relation, transmission, and political imagination. As a multidisciplinary storyteller, Palau explores how knowledge is acquired, shared, and preserved at the intersection of agricultural practice, embodied knowledge, and cultural memory. Her research approaches the apple and apple trees as living archives, carrying traditional varieties tied to specific recipes, rituals, and stories.
Developed through collaborations with pomologists from Flanders and Catalonia, the project approaches grafting and cultivation as cultural practices that shape how humans relate to nature. Ideas of balance, protection, and vitality are not neutral, but formed through beliefs, habits, and climate, turning acts of care into mirrors of cultural imagination.
Situated at the intersection of agricultural practice, embodied knowledge, and cultural memory, the installation approaches the apple not as a singular object but as a living constellation of gestures, marks, and narratives shaped over time. It considers the apple as a carrier of inherited techniques, shared labour, and contested histories.
The project begins from simple yet persistent questions: what forms of entanglement are produced through acts of protection, control, and circulation? Drawing from l’ensachage des fruits, the practice of bagging fruits to protect them during growth, the installation reflects on how gestures of care are inseparable from regimes of productivism, standardisation, and value. Once, apples bore the faces of monarchs sun-tattooed onto their skins, carrying imperial imagery as evidence of technical mastery and commercial desire. Today, the project asks: who owns the heritage of apples, who narrates it, and under which conditions are they allowed to circulate?
