Seed Journey
2017 – $10,000 General Support
2016 – $10,000 General Support
“We can speak of this voyage as return or a re-tracing of a very ancient route combining human and non-human initiative by which wheat was domesticated from the wild and then slowly made its way through gifts, trade, winds, and sea currents, from the highly cultured Middle East to the barbarians of the north…” – Michael Taussig
Seed Journey (2017 – 2020) was a seafaring voyage from Oslo, Norway to Istanbul, Turkey upon an 1895 rescue sailboat. Carrying hand fulls of seeds and a rotating crew of artists, farmers, bakers and researchers, Seed Journey was a process of reverse migration, retracing the path of seed dissemination, and by extension human migration, back to their origins in ancient times. At each port, Futurefarmers gathered local heritage seed custodians, enacted Seed Ceremonies (elaborated seed exchanges) and accepted gifts and grains to add to a growing archive. The project situates grains as emancipatory actors with respect to intellectual property rights pertaining to biological matter.