14/10/2026
Fantastic exbition to check out Claire
“We need to reseed our souls and our home worlds in order to flourish – again, or maybe just for the first time – on a vulnerable planet that is not yet murdered”
Donna Haraway, 2016, Sowing Worlds: A Seed Bag for Terraforming with Earth Others, in Staying with the Trouble, p117
Rural communities, urban food farms and insurgent farmers all over the region keep the seeds of landrace maize varieties alive, in defiance of a system that patents seeds and legislates how people may save, exchange and replant them, a system governed by the insidious logic of capitalist expansion. Their existence, and by extension, the hands that have cultivated them, are the embodiment of a through-line of adaptation, relationality, kin-making, making familiar, becoming indigenous, adapting together. This story is capacious enough to carry all of us - if we commit ourselves to the work of keeping the seeds alive, of becoming the seeds - into truly life sustaining futures, as wild and diverse as the many genetic pathways that have brought maize and teosinte, corn’s wild ancestor, into the present.
*When People Remembered They Were Seeds* by Claire Rousell is an invitation to ask, how do we, individually and collectively, seed futures worthy of the children and the ancestors? What can be decoded from the seed’s script for how to be, how to organise, how to resist, how to transform, how to love? What can we learn about how to rebuild relations and culture with the same density of meaning and diversity as these seeds that were selected, planted, harvested and stored with such care over generations?
Opening event: 18h00 on Thursday 22 October at Stokvel Gallery, 27 Boxes, 76a 4th Ave, Melville, Johannesburg
Listening to the Seeds Workshop: 10:30-12:30 on Saturday, 24 October
Stokvel Gallery, 27 Boxes, 76a 4th Ave, Melville, Johannesburg
RSVP essential [email protected]
