Seeds

Join us for Seeds, an extended lunchtime programme addressing worlding through the lens of ecology, part of the Infinite Ecologies Marathon.

Continuing the legacy of The Magazine Sessions, Seeds delves into the multifaceted significance of seeds as vehicles for world building. Beyond their role in food production, seeds carry history, memory and serve as potent metaphors for growth, ideas and exchange.

This extended lunchtime series aims to create space to discuss the complex narratives embedded within seeds and their ecological and imaginative potential. Seeds invites participants to envision new commons and methods of knowledge exchange through the embodied experience of communal eating, sharing dishes created in close collaboration with the artists. We invite diners to engage with seeds as nourishment and a catalyst for critical dialogue.

Seeds will facilitate four artist-led activations at a communal table to explore the revolutionary potential of food in reshaping our relationships to our environments and each other. The participating artists, David Blandy, Exodus Crooks, Lucia Pizzani and Jumana Manna, were invited to work with chef Moonhyung Lee, Sous Chef at the world’s first zero-waste restaurant, Silo, to develop dishes to complement their contributions. Remaining committed to Serpentine’s artist-led approach and the idea that knowledge can be produced and consumed in manifold ways, audiences will enjoy these dishes during the artist presentations, ingesting not only information but food in live activations that remove the mind/body barrier. The artists in Seeds will explore some of the many methods of world-building, and food is appreciated as a means of collectivity, taking care of each other and sharing, as well as a means of consuming knowledge to imagine new futures.

Allergens are listed below each artist contribution in the schedule of events. Please note that due to the nature of this programme we are unable to accommodate individual dietary restrictions. If you have any questions or wish to know more about dishes in advance of the event to check for allergens, please email [email protected]

Schedule

Please arrive by 11:45

12:00: Introductions

12:15: Introduction by chefs Moonhyung Lee and Ryan Walker

12:30-13:15 Exodus Crooks

Participants are invited to select their own bowl to eat from, thinking about weight, texture, and the conscious or subconscious choices we make in selecting our favourite dish to eat from. The idea of experiencing or world-building through feel and other senses will continue throughout the session as guests engage with a dish that consists of a range of complex textures. To accompany the meal, Exodus will present a meditative piece of writing and sound titled Break Bread with Me: Part 2. The artist will then facilitate a ‘breaking of bread’ with the audience, informally discussing the performance, food, fellowship and ‘feeling our way through this world’.

Please note that this contribution includes explicit language.

Allergen information: This dish contains gluten and dairy.

13:30-14:15 Lucia Pizzani

Venezuelan artist Lucia Pizzani will share her research into creational myths and symbolic stories around corn in Mesoamerican cultures. Corn often appears as both a symbol and tool in Pizzani’s sculptural work and as part of her presentation for Seeds, she will present La que viste la Piel (The one who wears the skin), a video work about the Xipe Totec god of life and the ritual that marked the start of the harvest corn by the Mexicas. Audience members will also have a chance to engage with Pizzani’s sculptural practice as we use corn to impress textures in clay. Special thanks to the Archivo Lares.

Allergen information: This dish contains dairy.

14:30 – 15:00 David Blandy

Audiences are invited to join Blandy in an immersive experience as he demonstrates his new tabletop role-playing card game, Alien Pastoral: The Strain. This worlding game delves into the intriguing and often blurred intersections of agriculture, technology, and capitalism. The audience will become involved in a race to engineer a new plant strain within a biological research station, amongst seedbeds, orchards, and laboratories, as the taste and texture of food becomes integral to a journey through an improvised narrative, and asks, “how do we embrace the change that is necessary for us all to survive?” The game challenges us to discover the resilience of both the seeds we cultivate and ourselves in this complex and dynamic world.

Alien Pastoral: The Strain is a participatory event which involves complex themes, narratives and storytelling; including material around body horror, isolation, loss of autonomy and trauma.

Allergen information: This dish contains gluten and dairy.

15:15 – 16:30 Jumana Manna

Jumana Manna’s feature film Wild Relatives traces an incredible story of biodiversity and resilience in the face of war and climate change. Deep in the earth beneath the Arctic permafrost, seeds from all over the world are stored in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to provide a backup should disaster strike. In 2012 an international agricultural research centre was forced to relocate from Aleppo to Lebanon due to the Syrian Revolution turned war and began a laborious process of planting their seed collection from the Svalbard back-ups. Following the path of this transaction of seeds between the Arctic and Lebanon, a series of encounters unfold a matrix of human and non-human lives between these two distant spots of the earth. Wild Relatives captures the articulation between this large-scale international initiative and its local implementation in the Bekaa Valley of Lebanon, carried out primarily by young migrant women. Wild Relatives patiently teases out tensions between state and individual, industrial and organic approaches to seed saving, climate change and biodiversity, witnessed through the journey of these seeds.

Allergen information: This dish contains gluten and garlic.

The Infinite Ecologies Marathon is a long durational project that looks at the world-building potential of culture in the face of ecological destruction. Committed to working towards planetary thriving, this interdisciplinary series centres artist-led reimaginings for environmental action.

Ecologies is Serpentine’s new interdisciplinary department, dedicated to developing a holistic, flexible and adaptive approach to embedding environmental purpose throughout Serpentine’s programmes, infrastructure and networks. Our mission is to place culture at the core of environmental efforts, demonstrating how environmental commitment can steer the cultural sector. Ecologies emerged from the insights gained through the General Ecology project and Back to Earth.

BSL interpretation is available upon request. Please get in touch at [email protected] if you would like to request this.