Speaker: Olivia Angé - Université libre de Bruxelles
Dates: 15 October 2026
Venue: University of McGill - Canada
Link: www.l4ecozoic.org

Seed Inventories as an Art of Cultivating Attention: Potato Portraits for Reclaiming a Quechua Botanical Repertoire

Seed catalogues enforcing the criteria of Distinctness, Uniformity, and Stability constitute a fundamental tool for the expansion of agro-industrial productivity. In response to this desertifying mode of documentation, the Flourishing Seeds project experiments with seed inventory based on the epistemologies of their cultivators in areas of heterogeneous agriculture confronted with the devastation wrought by capitalist extraction. The etymological root of inventory, derived from the Latin in-venire, emphasizes the generative dimension of this technique, which brings things into knowledge or, indeed, invents them through naming and relating. Drawing on a Quechua repertoire, the first inventory presents 103 portraits of tuberous kin, bringing “varieties” into existence in a mode specific to the agricultural collectives in which they are protected (Parque de la Papa, Cusco, Peru). This contribution examines how such a method of ethnographic collaboration can activate an “art of cultivating attention” (Stengers, 2009) to the effects of naming a potato on the composition of heterogeneous agricultural collectives.

Lino Mamani contemplates the proof of the Qellqapi Taqesqa with satisfaction