Tending An Olive Tree

This essay explores the entanglement of art, ecology, and geopolitical violence through the translocation of a Palestinian olive tree sapling to a Scottish gallery space. Positioned within a recent exhibition by the Reading Landscape Research Group at The Glasgow School of Art, the work documents and reflects upon the complex symbolic, material, and legal journeys of the sapling—a gift from the author’s former instructor, a Palestinian olive farmer displaced by war. Interweaving personal narrative, classical references, and historical context, the essay situates the olive tree not only as a botanical entity but as a deeply politicised and juridical object, implicated in settler colonial practices and international regimes of plant regulation. Drawing on Aristophanes’ Peace, the essay reconsiders the ancient comic invocation of peace through agrarian imagery, proposing a contemporary reading of peace as a fragile truce rather than a romantic ideal. Engaging theories of the body, care, and xenopolitics from Judith Butler and Jean-Luc Nancy, the essay proposes the olive tree as both subject and witness—a migrant body marked by trauma, surveillance, and hopeful resilience. Through a reflection on exhibition practice and the limitations of representation, the work advocates for a form of political tending: an ethics of care enacted through embodied, situated artistic practice in the face of ecological and humanitarian collapse. The essay ultimately positions the olive tree sapling not as an object of aesthetic contemplation, but as a living, contested agent that disrupts dominant narratives of peace and belonging.