Council of Seeds installation and performance, 2022

‘Each seed carries the DNA of the future plant. And not only. As we have evolved together, all ecosystem participants are intrinsically interlinked in a complex dance. Every seed carries the memory of everything else around it, including minerals of the mountains, waters that nurtured its plant parents, animals and birds that carried it around, and other plants growing nearby. Every seed carries the stories connecting it to humans. 

I am looking for ways to know the essence of the seed, beyond mainstream narratives. By tuning in with the seed, and the tree it comes from at the moment when it finds me, through intuitive poetic weaving, rooting in indigenous knowledge and research of common properties and uses. I become that essence of the seed that holds the matrix, the multidimensional memory of its continuous rebirth through time. 

This new performance brings together the seeds that found me and spoke to me in the Botanical Garden of Lisbon. Telling their stories in the first person is the way of speaking their essence. 

These relationships and connections are healing. Even though the seeds come from all parts of the world and they might have lost their local cultural associations as they have travelled via colonial routes, they speak to me in the present moment, offering their medicine in the appropriate way for the specific cases and on their own terms. They invite me to plant them, make ink from their hulls, taste them and retell some of the forgotten stories.