Raquel Ajates presents the artistic curatorships framed in her project, recognized in the first edition of the Daniel Carasso Fellowship

Raquel Ajates was one of those selected in the first edition of the Daniel Carasso Fellowship with her project on the digitization of seeds. With the intention of making a multidisciplinary approach to the subject investigated, Ajates included in his project the realization of three artistic curators, whose resulting works make up the exhibition Sprouting between science and art: Seeds as resilient pillars of healthy and sustainable food of the past, present and future.

The exhibition Sprouting between science and art consists of three artistic works resulting from three curatorships framed within the scientific project of Raquel Ajates, The challenge of seed digitization, sustainability, big data and the social movement for open source seed systems. To select the works, a call was made in which the conditions for each of the three commissions were specified: a portable seed bank, physical seeds and digital seeds. In this way, Ajates includes in his research a line of art that brings scientific results closer to the public.

This project, a vibrant cross between sustainability and biocultural diversity that obtained one of the two research grants in the first edition of the Daniel Carasso Fellowship, has as its main objective to shed light on alternative models of seed governance, exploring how the concept of the common good and digital open source movements can be allies in the fight against variety loss and privatization. In addition, it seeks to recognize the key role they play in preserving biodiversity, farmers’ rights and the sustainability of the food system.

Three works, the result of the artistic curators of the project, are the ones that make up the exhibition Sprouting between art and science. Each one offers a unique perspective on the importance of seeds, exposing with inspiration, creativity and great expertise, the social and environmental issues faced by seeds and cultivated diversity, inviting us to reflect on their beauty and importance for human and planetary health, calling for action to conserve them.

Among the artistic creations, we can find the works “Mobile Seed Bank” by Marco Ranieri, “The Dance of Seeds. The germination of knowledge” by the Associació Varietats Locals, and “Sound seeds” by Javier Forment. But the curators have gone further, generating interdisciplinary educational resources with multimedia material for high schools and universities. These valuable tools are available in the Planea Network Resource Center, so that the impact expands further and reaches a wider audience.

After its exhibition in Madrid, the exhibition can be visited in Tarragona at the Museu de la Vida Rural in L’Espluga de Francolí from 1 to 31 December 2023.

Curator No. 1. Mobile seed

bankMarco Ranieri, artist, artivist, independent researcher and associate professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Polytechnic University of Valencia, is the creator of this work. It consists of a portable seed bank that allows you to store, reproduce and grow traditional horticultural varieties. It is composed of different drawers with different uses, it can be assembled to build a single device or two separate modules for seed conservation and cultivation. It is, in short, aninteractive pedagogical tool, and an access point to rural knowledge that generates new narratives and promotes the construction of collective imaginaries.

Curator n.2. The Dance of the Seeds

The Associació de Varietats Locals de Mallorca is an entity that seeks to recover, conserve and multiply the local varieties of Mallorca. She is in charge of developing this interactive installation that seeks to identify the act of planting, in collaboration with Lluís Vidaña (visual artist), Nívola Uyà (author and visual artist) and Enric Socias (transmedia artist). It is made up of several elements: the continent in which to plant, the seed and the diversity of local varieties (horticultural, cereal, legume and fruit). The public can interact with the installation by learning about the different seeds and about the people who have helped to preserve them.

Curator n.3. Sound Seeds: cultural/spatial/geopolitical sonification of seeds deposited in international

genebanksJavier Forment, a specialist in Bioinformatics, professor of programming for biotechnology at the Polytechnic University of Valencia and a self-taught musician, is the creator of this audiovisual installation with sound sequences and graphic animations automatically generated from the genetic sequences of seeds. Forment uses sounds and images of the places of origin of each seed, thus highlighting the cultures that have cultivated and preserved them until today. These files come from public and open databases and the carbon footprint generated by these consultations is also added to the exhibition, comparing it with that derived from the maintenance of the seeds in the germplasm banks.

Seeds are the basis of life and of a healthy and sustainable diet. However, we are very distant from their beauty, their cycles and the challenges that characterize these tiny pillars that sustain agriculture and become our food. That is why Raquel Ajates’ research project is so important, as it manages to combine the two main axes of work of the Daniel and Nina Carraso Foundation, scientific research in relation to Sustainable Food and artistic exhibition of results to a wide audience, Arte Ciudadano.

Daniel Carasso Fellowship
The Daniel and Nina Carasso Foundation promotes this initiative to support systemic research in Sustainable Food, aimed at postdoctoral researchers of any nationality and discipline who seek to promote a deep and lasting transformation of the Spanish food system.

Raquel Ajates and Daniel Gaitán, selected in the 2021 call, are joined this year by Marta Albo Puigserver for her project Climate resilience of small-scale fisheries in the Balearic Islands: assessment of food security in the fisheries sector and possible adaptation measures (ReFISH-Food); Ujué Fresán Salvo for Environmental Nutrition: the path from a pioneering methodology and Adrián González Guzmán for his project Formulation of filters, through the use of waste, for the capture of nitrogenous gases from slurry and their application as organomineral substrates inoculated in agriculture (FORIOS).

In addition to the financial support of 160,000 euros for the contracting and development of research activities for two years, the Daniel Carasso Fellowship has as its ultimate goal the creation of a community of young researchers, essential to guide the transition towards a more ecological, just and inclusive society.