La Sangre es una Semilla (Blood is a Seed)
Isadora Romero | Ecuador
This project explores how the loss of ancestral memory influences the loss of diversity of the seeds with which we feed ourselves.
Last year, while working with communities protecting agrobiodiversity in Ecuador, my father told me that my grandfather and great-grandmother were seed guardians and that my grandfather created two varieties of potatoes. I was immediately interested in learning about their history and wondered what memory I had forgotten about the land and the crops. So, I decided to travel to Colombia. Unfortunately, when I arrived, I realized that the idea of the village that my father kept in his memory no longer existed.
This work is a journey to my father's town searching for my ancestors and my family of farmers. It is a two-voice narrative formed between the memory of my father and my own current perception traversed by the changes that small farmers have undergone in three generations. With digital and film photography, videos, and my father’s drawings, this piece integrates the philosophical and mystical aspects of the loss of agrobiodiversity.
It is a story about the loss of memory and culture, but also about resistance to violence and the re-signification of knowledge.
In the past twenty years, we have lost 75% of seed varieties worldwide. This project points to a larger question: what is causing more and more seeds to disappear? I have learned that a loss of ancestral memory, due to migration, racism and colonization is at the heart of this issue. For me, reclaiming seed biodiversity is also a metaphor for restoring ancestral memory.
“Social justice for me means to inhabit the world from a place of respect and commitment to others, to oneself and to the planet. It means understanding the privileges that one has in order to use them for the good of the changes that one wants to see in the world. The difference that this course made in my perception is to really feel that these changes and this way of inhabiting the world start from the simplest conversations with your family, from the most basic actions of respect towards yourself, that social justice can only be built from many fronts together in community and that being consistent with what you do is fundamental.”
This piece will become part of a larger transmedia project, including documentary photography, archival materials, creative audio, and video art. These works will be organized into chapters, focusing on specific themes, and relating to work I did with biologists at a seed bank (DENAREF) in Ecuador and ancestral communities and farmers around Latin America. I hope that, as a multimedia art project, told from an intimate point of view, a wider audience may become aware of this urgent issue.