Un dragón de cien cabezas

In Greek mythology, Ladon was a 100-headed dragon that guarded the Garden of the Hesperides. After its death, its blood spilled and sowed dragon trees, which grew widely throughout the Canary Islands. Centuries later, banana trees spread across the archipelago, inflicting their monoculture and robotic acclimatization systems. With heavy hands, men tie and prop up the bunches. "Mom, I'm dying of heat. There's not even a breeze," we read. The banana trees enter into the conversation. Plants, says Stefano Mancuso, "are forced to communicate and use different systems. The most important way is through volatiles, or chemicals emitted into the atmosphere and received by other plants. It's an extremely sophisticated form of communication, a kind of vocabulary." In this liminal space, Girón and Delgado turn to guesswork: they translate by way of biosonification techniques, challenging the threshold of the audible. "Who is the vegetable here?" "If plants could talk, this might well be one of the first questions they ask us." (PB)