Speaker: Olivia Angé – Université libre de Bruxelles
Dates: 26 March 2026
Venue: Cambridge University / United Kingdom

Potato Portraits and the Making of a Subversive Seed catalogue in the Peruvian Highland

Crop plant innovation—the genesis of novelty in the plants used to furnish grains, tubers, fruits, vegetables, and other produce—is essential to the success of contemporary agricultural systems. This is true of smallholder production in economically and environmentally marginalized spaces, where farmers continuously exchange, adopt, and adapt diverse seeds of an equally diverse array of species. It is also true of vast industrial monocrops of maize or soy whose origins lie in part in transgenic manipulation undertaken by transnational firms. In a world where pests, diseases, climate, and markets all shift and change, crops must too, and successful farmers are, by and large, those best positioned to take advantage of crop innovation. This innovation might arrive as an off-type rice in their field, a distinct potato tuber at the market, a maize import distributed by the government, or a bag of trademarked soybeans whose use as seed is subject to a strict contract. For all its centrality to diets and economies, histories of crop innovation have yet to capture most of the knowledge, tools, and labor mobilized in this work. Seed Scenius: Reinventing the History of Crop Innovation, will do exactly that, illuminating what the composer Brian Eno calls a “scenius” around the making of crop varieties.