Futurefarmers ~ Seed Mast

For the exhibition Left Coast: California Political Art, the San Francisco-based arts collective Futurefarmers, Amy Franceschini, Audrey Snyder, and Joe Riley, banded together across continents and oceans to create a new work, entitled Seed Mast: Provisioning. The piece is a traditionally constructed boat mast and spar, filled with grain collected from all over and currently being grown by Futurefarmers at Slow Space in Oslo, Norway. The wooden mast is stepped into a chute covered by a fine patina of flour and water, and a horizontal spar holds a growing collection of seeds as it might a sail. 

At once a library and a silo, this seed mast is the first of many steps in provisioning toward the Flatbread Society Seed Journey — a voyage in which the grains are transported back to their geographic origins in Jordan. This reverse migration is imagined as a “rescue,” and falls within a larger movement to protect the rights of small farmers.

The project was reimagined in 2017 for Sharjah Biennalle 13, where Seed Mast (2017) took the form of a sailing mast and served as a literal and metaphorical antenna to Futurefarmers’ seafaring project Seed Journey (2017), a voyage in which ancient grains were transported to their geographic origins throughout the Middle East. Seed Mast and Seed Journey, together, occupied the precarious place of contraband, the diverse biological matter is dispersed through currents, hand-to-hand networks and radio spectrums accessed via wires attached to the mast. Through a slow-scan television, Seed Mast received transmissions from the journey, mirroring the pace of the sailing vessel. Thought of as ‘reverse migration’, the collective aims to accent the rights of small farmers, the project also situates grains as emancipatory actors with respect to intellectual property rights pertaining to biological matter.