Alon Schwabe and Daniel Fernández Pascual (CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA) sit with Segnonline to discuss their recent installation ‘Rights to seeds, rights of seeds’ at the Museo delle Civiltà in Rome.
Consisting of 125 suspended ceramic pots containing diverse varieties of drought-resilient peasant seeds from southern Italy, the installation is inspired by CLIMAVORE x Jameel’s Monoculture Meltdown project.
The project explores the climate challenges threatening farmland and traditional seed-saving practices in Sicily and Puglia.
Alon and Daniel explain: “The preservation of these seeds is dynamic, as all the seeds are designed to be redistributed during the sowing season and returned to the museum after the harvest, a process that is repeated annually.
“This type of preservation is the opposite of the static preservation typical of seed banks, where seeds are jealously guarded after being stolen by multinational agribusinesses and made inaccessible to the communities that have preserved and passed them down for years.”