Lotería de la Salud / U k'aybuulil toj óolal
Planting Communities
Cultivating Abundance
16. June 2023
16.00-19.00
16.00-19.00
Save the Date
for free
all ages welcome
in German/in English
The upcoming gardening session will be practical with a focus on maintenance and care techniques for vegetable plants along with berry bushes and will cover summer crop rotation. After the hands-on workshop, we will pick up on the theme from our previous session and watch Åsa Sonjasdotter's film "Cultivating Abundance". The screening will be followed by a discussion with the artist.
Cultivating Abundance
Duration: 64 Min
Year of production: 2022
OmU (Swedish with English subtitles)
The film Cultivating Abundance returns to the invention of monoculture plant breeding as it was carried out at the Swedish Seed Association from the 1880s. The method built on ideas of genetic ‘purity’ and ‘originality’, a scientific fiction by which current seed laws operate and seed industries claim royalties. Further, the film follows plant breeder Hans Larsson and the seed alliance Allkorn’s clandestine mobilization for the reclamation of those peasant-bred grains that were deep frozen in gene banks along the monoculture overthrow. Assembling gelatine silver glass plate photographs and moving images re-discovered in a cold store barn, as well as filmed material by scientists, activist farmers, and breeders, Cultivating Abundance is made in dialogue between Hans Larsson, Allkorn, and the artist Åsa Sonjasdotter.
Åsa Sonjasdotter is an artist and researcher. Departing from the margins and gaps of monoculture plantations in Southern Scandinavia, Sonjasdotter joins alliances of farmers, re-breeders, re-searchers, archivists, and activists for the re-cultivation of outlawed crops and close readings of related matter in archives and landscapes, towards the re-mobilization of peasant relationalities.
Hans Larsson is a plant breeder practicing traditional and participatory methods. In 2004, Larsson initiated the Swedish alliance Allkorn (Common Grains), which is the custodian of reclaimed and restored peasant-bred cereal varieties and other grains and currently consists of more than 450 members. Based at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Alnarp, and in collaboration with the farmers of Allkorn, Larsson has since the 1990s restored a wide range of peasant-bred grain varieties.
