Speaker: Olivia Angé - Université libre de Bruxelles
Date: 12 & 13 April 2025
Venue: Brown University / United States
Link: https://sites.brown.edu/seed-pasts-seed-futures/

Abstract

In the highlands of Cuzco, a Papa Mamaq Mujun Taqena Wasi (House of Mother Potato Seeds in Quechua) was built in 2012 as part of an agrobiodiversity conservation initiative known as the Potato Park. The house currently hosts around 1300 native tuber varieties, including 850 collected from local cultivators, and 410 repatriated from the genebank of the International Potato Center in Lima. The repatriated varieties had been extracted from the region during 20th-century botanical expeditions aimed at gathering “genetic resources” for the breeding of new varieties.

In contrast, the mother potato seeds in the in-situ facility of the Park are intended to be grown annually into plants that will bear baby tubers, thereby sustaining the flourishing of highland communities. In this center of potato domestication, agricultural collectives are composed of a diversity of tubers attuned to the micro ecological niches of the Cordillera, but this diversity is under threat due to the spread of so called “improved varieties,” introduced in the past century along with chemical packages and mythologies of agricultural progress. In the Taqena Wasi, seed potatoes are not only mother and baby tubers; they are also curated as a “biocultural heritage,” a term coined by Alejandro Argumedo, the designer of the Potato Park, as part of an effort to seek legal protection for indigenous agricultural landscapes and knowledge practices.

In 2015, a delegation of cultivators from the Park traveled to Svalbard to deposit botanical seeds of 750 potato varieties in one of the Global Seed Vault’s black boxes. The Vault serves as a backup for worldwide conservation facilities, ensuring the transmission of “seeds heritage” across generations by protecting them from loss and destruction. This contribution examines the verses chanted by a cultivator, Brisayda Sicus, as she delivered the 750 seeds for storage in the Vault. Intended to soothe her potato kin before leaving them in this cold and faraway place, these verses reclaim a relatedness that is threatened by agricultural intensification programs. Hearing this chant as a cosmopolitical intervention enlightens the ontological politics at stake in this conservation assemblage, where seeds are enacted as germplasm, heritage, and family.