Nature Compressed, Nature Unfolded: Heterotopic Seed Banks

• In Event: ‘I Contain Multitudes’: Materials of Making Worlds.

Abstract

In this presentation, I aim to untangle how the ex-situ conservation of seeds from endangered species fits into a suite of various world-making practices in agriculture, horticulture and conservation biology. Seed banks are not only cold storage, but active, dynamic, circulating laboratories for planetary futures, and their frantic race to preserve a threatened biological status quo is doubled by a science-fictional inscription of potential worlds into the supremely generative body of seeds.

In ex-situ conservation, life and cells are not only suspended; they exist in a space that is intensely other, encapsulates evolutionary and planetary discontinuities, juxtaposes species in non-naturalised arrangements—a heterotopia from which not only individual bodies or species but entire natures emerge changed, at least potentially. The compressions and choices operated by ex-situ banking, be they predicated on the search for crop wild relatives, the possibility of assisted gene flow or evolution or dreams of the assisted migration of endangered species across irremediably damaged landscapes, have implications for future unfoldings of differential natures—rehearsing various and often violent versions of what a planet during and after extinction could be.

Author

• Anna-Katharina Laboissière, Ecole Normale Supérieure/Curtin University