Seed As Relation

Seed has been closely ravelled into our evolution, co-evolving at a constant for millennia. Rooted in story, seeds are woven within scales of time, the first to colonize landmasses, becoming key figures in our global stories of creation. Our current reality, however, may be told from the perspective of a post-colonial neoliberal age, where culture, habit, choices, traditions, have been overtaken by an imperial sensibility. Seeds are no longer entrenched in collaboration but rather objectified, commodified, corporatised. Seeds are embedded in the extractive agropolitical methodologies of the current epoch, made invisible from their heritage, history and ancestry. This dominant narrative encompasses seed in a struggle of power, marginalising the seeds and seed keepers, decimating biodiversity, separating culture from land and enforcing an engagement with our own survival through financial exchange. Reviving seeds as commons, through a telling of seeds as story, we move from seed as object to seed as relation, making visible that which has been concealed and hidden from sovereignty.

Zayaan Khan

Seed as Relation is a workshop about the histories, dependencies and strategies of resilience we have inscribed into seeds and they inscribe into us. This workshop follows practices of saving and distributing seeds, of seeding ideas, forms of resistance and struggles for sovereignty. Through contributions by artists, activists and cultivators we explore what a thinking with seeds could entail by bringing together practical learnings from the surrounding lands and histories of cultivation with readings, performances and film screenings. The workshop is organised in collaboration with the studio of artist Hassan Darsi in the Beni Aïssi village. Through an artistic project integrating agro-ecological agriculture, the village has succeeded in protecting its lands and the livelihoods of its inhabitants from deforestation and extractive construction of a large-scale quarry.

The workshop takes place in the framework of our project SOIL IS AN INSCRIBED BODY