Chanelle Adams has a voice that soothes me. In speaking, she asserts a knowingness that invites listeners into her calm. Originally from New Jersey, Adams is a writer, historian, researcher and healing practitioner. She was recently invited to contribute to the ICA Live Art Festival 2022 Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens programme, curated by Melanie Boehi, Kefiloe Siwisa and Zayaan Khan. Her offering was a meditative ghost tour of Camphor Avenue — formerly known as Rhodes Road — for which she invoked her voice as medium for a face-to-face encounter with the ghosts of this botanical monument. Adams situates her practice at the thorny intersection of botanical-imperialist gestures and their after-life in the post-colony, providing the precise coordinates for her ghost tours at different sites around the world.1Adams led a haunted walk through the Marseille Funny Zoo in Longchamps Park in September 2021. While a ‘ghost tour’ can be read as a type of adrenaline-bait, Adams’ offerings are, in earnest, soft openings for radical group mourning as generative expressions of grief beyond funeral pageantry.
Chanelle Adams, Camphor Avenue: A Garden of Ghosts, ICA Live Art Festival 2022. Illustration by Salma Price-Nell.
Camphor Avenue: A Garden of Ghosts takes place on a warm Sunday morning, early April. Adams awaits her participants in an alcove in the Kirstenbosch Gardens. We are all nervous about what, or whom, this tour might conjure. Our medium is dressed in an off-white, two-piece linen ensemble. Her iron-straight brown hair the length of her torso, she holds a burning stick of camphor incense. Adams introduces the tour with a grounding meditation and short breath-work exercise. She acknowledges the sacred Khoisan land on which we all stand and invites participants to visualise ourselves rooting down into this land. As we begin to walk the length of Camphor Avenue, Adams quietly plants the burning incense in the soil nearby a signpost that reads Camphor Avenue / Kamferlaan (Afrikaans translation).
Chanelle Adams, Camphor Avenue: A Garden of Ghosts, ICA Live Art Festival 2022. Photo by Xolani Tulumani. Courtesy Institute for Creative Arts and the artist.
The group is led to pause at different Camphor trees along the avenue. Adams reveals something more about them at each stop. We learn of Cecil John Rhodes’ ambition to plant Camphor trees, endemic to Hong Kong — a former British colony — in each Commonwealth territory. Camphor Avenue stands in memoriam of this gesture. Adams notes that botanical literature describes the Camphor as a tree that “colonises disturbed sites.” Its roots, long and dense, sit close to the surface of the soil. They are known to crack concrete and break through drains. The tree body above ground unfurls into large canopies, providing a shade that “displaces and out-competes other plant species.” Adams tells the group that one particular Camphor tree is 125-years-old and asks us what we think this tree may have been witness to in that time. In telling the autobiography of the trees, Adams hints at the hands that have historically been conscripted into caring for them. I begin to realise that this tour might not be about an external encounter with a ghost, but a subtle manoeuvring of our grief back into our own bodies. Adams soothes, “Haunt is just a desire for recognition.”
We stop at a partially-truncated Camphor for Adams to explain that, in the early 90s, a mysterious fungus attacked the vascular tissue of these trees. The infected limbs had to be pruned in order to prolong their lives. Adams points to the self-sealed stumps on the tree and notes that the disfiguring fungus episode coincided with major political shifts in the country. Namely, the negotiations of the political handover from the Apartheid National Party to the African National Congress. This political shift also saw the pruning of the National Party’s Afrikaans monolingualism for a multi-linguistic constitution of 11 official languages. However, the sign here still reads: Camphor Avenue | Kamferlaan.
Chanelle Adams, Camphor Avenue: A Garden of Ghosts, ICA Live Art Festival 2022. Photo by Xolani Tulumani. Courtesy Institute for Creative Arts and the artist.
Adams asks us to observe the “shade-loving plants” that grow under the dense canopy of the Camphor. I pay special attention to the ferns and a purple flowering plant that has populated the underside of the tree. I am made aware that the Camphor must have assimilated the ecology of this land to love shade, creating an intolerable environment for other sun-seeking plants to thrive. The image of an antagonistic tree root, mirrored by an equally over-bearing tree-top, brings to mind Edouard Glissant’s image for western imperialism as an intolerant root, “a stock taking all upon itself and killing all around it.” In The Poetics of Relation, Glissant reiterates, “The first thing exported by the conqueror was his language.” Camphor Avenue was planted during the Boer War when the English language held state dominance, while Afrikaans was still derogated to a ‘kitchen’ dialect.2Neville Alexander, “Linguistic rights, language planning and democracy in postapartheid South Africa.” In S. Baker (ed.), Language Policy: Lessons from Global Models (Monterey: Monterey Institute of International Studies, 2002). Some decades later, the gardens served as a site for “floral propaganda activities” by the Apartheid government, now armed with the formalised Afrikaans language. Kirstenbosch National Botanical Garden was positioned as a neutral site for “botanical diplomacy”, where international botanists could marvel at the country’s natural heritage, while the rest of the world boycotted us on all other counts.
In 2004, UNESCO declared Kirstenbosch a global heritage site, effectively “making a monument out of living land” (Adams). In a dialectics of the living and the dead, a ghost is a ghost only when it is witnessed by a living subject and yet, “ghosts are only horrifying if you deny them their history” (Adams). At the start of the tour, Adams prepares us for a potential encounter: “How will you recognise a ghost: will there be colours, smells, shapes, textures, sound?” I consider whether the open wounds on the Camphor trees were self-sealed by resin, the sweet-smelling viscous medicine that seeps from tree bark. A visitor recently said to me that she thinks of tree resin as an expression of mourning. Everything that seeps is also self-sealing. Adams closes our tour with a meditation exercise. She passes around a pot of camphor crystals: camphor bark distilled into a heat-dissolving balm revered for its psychic and physical healing properties. Breathing in the bright fumes of the tree’s self-sealing medicine, I consider the phantom limbs of the camphor tree: does the tree recognise them by their scent?
Chanelle Adams, Camphor Avenue: A Garden of Ghosts, ICA Live Art Festival 2022. Photo by Xolani Tulumani. Courtesy Institute for Creative Arts and the artist.
