Productive Rot: Summoning Natural Processes for Other-than-natural Ends.

• In Event: Ferment as Method: Creating the Conditions for Transformative Relations - III

Abstract

When collections of seed arrive at the seed bank laboratory, they go through a long and careful process of ‘purification’ from natural specimens to laboratory facts that can be quantified and commodified for their future use. Since ‘nothing comes without its world’ and only seeds end up in the frozen vault, great pains are taken to separate them from their worlds and make seeds legible through the seed bank systems of valuation. Sometimes whole fruit arrive as part of collections and as part of this extractive process of ‘constitutive cleaning’ they are allowed to ferment in the holding rooms till they fall apart. Sorting through this funky mess of fizzy fruit pulp to separate out the seeds is a day long process that requires everyone at the bank pitch in to make the work go faster.
In this paper I think with this moment of ferment, this conviviality of seed bank labour—gendered, technical, and creative. While these scientists are engaged in the odorous work of separating seed from fruit, they are getting entangled with the seeds and each other through shared space, jokes, and bodily pains. How might the seed bank, with its neocolonial symbolic position as ‘a caretaker of the world’s plants’, also be a space of hope, fun, and laughter. As the fruit in the seed bank laboratory ferments, it draws curators into a shared effervescent bodily practice that requires attention to sensations and smells—all the while participating in the extraction of seeds from their worlds.

Author

• Xan Sarah Chacko, Wellesley College