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I received an email today from Tamer and Armand. If participating in an art project or screening their film appeals to you, they can be contacted via the email address in the image above.
Dear Pat and Steph,
We’re writing to tell you about an art project we are working on based in the US on seed exchange and to see if you would be interested in participating.
In 2013, when we began making the film Accession, we came across a small box of letters while visiting a seed company in Virginia, in which each letter accompanies a tiny envelope of seeds. This marked the beginning of our collecting family histories, stories of particular varieties and mundane details of everyday life. The film is now finished and we’re starting to show it at film festivals. We’ve also been invited to show the film in an art gallery in Chicago and we’re contacting you to see if you would be interested in participating in the installation.
In addition to screening the film, we are inviting people to send seeds, letters (either ones you’ve saved or specifically written to us for the installation), and any other ephemera such as photographs, seed slips, etc., to display in the gallery. We are wondering if you would be interested in sending us some seeds you’ve saved for the exhibition. If you feel inclined to write something, or include any other material, to accompany any seeds you send us we could include that in the exhibition as well.
We are interested to see what happens when we bring these various materials together in the same space and put disparate histories in conversation with each other. At the end of the exhibition we will send materials back to the senders, or in the case where materials are addressed to us, we will bring them home with us. We intend for the temporary site-specific nature of the installation to reflect how seeds are being kept in a state of transition, adapting to historic interactions and migrations, by an informal network of seed keepers. Since we don’t have land to plant the seeds ourselves, we are thinking of passing the seeds along to other seed savers who would participate in the exhibition and who could better take care of them.
We’ve attached a small flyer that people have been using to spread the word. Feel free to share our project with anyone you think would be interested. Please let us know if you have any questions and we hope you or people in your networks will be interested in participating.
Tamer and Armand
