In dialogue with current and former fellows, as well as guest authors, Plural is evolving into a site for the emergence of textual forms that engage with, reflect on, and practice artistic research. These essays and conversations discuss theories, accompany research projects and examine frameworks of knowledge production.

Eric Macedo and Camila de Caux’s article A Carrier Bag, Sprouting traces Aline Baiana’s installation as a poetic counter-archive to monoculture—collecting stories of resistance, memory, and ecological kinship from the ravaged landscapes shaped by Brazil’s soy extraction.

The parts of the text in red were primarily written by Eric Macedo, the parts in green by Camila de Caux. It’s important to note, however, that all parts were edited by both.

A Carrier Bag, Sprouting
– Eric Macedo and Camila de Caux on the installation „Earthseed or Archipelago #1“ by Aline Baiana –

Research material, Aline Baiana. Photo: Clara Sonder

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You are standing in the middle of a field. All around you is a seemingly endless proliferation of a single plant, a broad-leafed bush, three to five feet tall, not particularly charming. Now consider this: the field covers the whole of Germany. There might be a tree here and there, a bird or an insect flying around, but in general there is one single species covering the entire land. On the horizon, a large piece of machinery collects the plant’s pods. Should you be unlucky enough, a flying craft would pass above you, spilling toxic chemicals that ensure the eradication of most life, but this precious plant. This could be the grim ending to an apocalyptic alien-invasion movie. Except that it is real, in a certain corner of the world.

Soybean monoculture currently covers forty-four million hectares of land in Brazil alone, much more than the thirty-five million hectares that compose the whole of Germany. The soybean is the largest crop in Brazil, and its cultivation is responsible for the destruction of habitats in the central region of the country – especially of the native ecology of the Cerrado biome – and parts of the Amazon rainforest.

Realizing the magnitude of such an impact is the core of the artist Aline Baiana’s piece Earthseed or Archipelago #1 (in collaboration with Tapixi Guajajara, 2022), an installation that relates the destruction of biodiversity to the dynamics of colonization and its shrinking of social diversity.

In Earthseed or Archipelago #1, soybean seeds are natural beads strung on long threads. These strings are hung from the ceiling in a wooden structure, arranged in a triangular shape. In its centre, a different piece is hidden, a mosaic of different seeds threaded into a net, vivid with multiple colors and textures. The seeds of the centerpiece were acquired from Indigenous peoples, quilombolas and other rural communities and individuals from all over Brazil. Their multiplicity, however, can only be fully visualized when traversing the sea of sameness represented by the soy curtains.

Earthseed or Archipelago #1, 2022, installation view from the group exhibition Stepping Softly on The Earth at Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead. Photo: John McKenzie

The image of an archipelago represents the socio-environmental landscape of South America in the never-ending process of colonisation that began with the European invasion. As the anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro wrote, the “modern expansion of Europe is the analogue, in terms of the history of civilisations, of the rising level of the planet’s oceans that threatens us today. After five centuries of increasing submersion of the ancient anthropological continent, only a few islands of aboriginal humanity remained above the surface.” (1) The peoples resisting the invasion never ceased to confront the continuous threats to their ways of living and to the integrity of the territories they inhabit – and one of these threats is soybean agribusiness.

Each island in this archipelago is a unique sociocultural formation, with its own specific knowledge, languages, and traditions, and each is menaced by the expansion of what is now known as Brazilian society. If Brazil is not uniform in itself, it can certainly be considered a force of homogenization, a monstrous blob that has historically shown a hunger for destroying and absorbing the islands around which it grows. 

This process, which began five hundred years ago, has dragged on to the present day: in the Brazilian Amazon, the Yanomami, the Munduruku and other peoples have their existence threatened by illegal gold mining; in the south, Guarani-kaiowá gathered on cramped land are being decimated at the hands of soy and sugarcane landowners; several other groups around the country are facing the installation of hydroelectric dams, the invasion of their territories, illegal fishing, deforestation, gold mining, and logging. And some, having chosen to live in isolation from Brazilian society, are still unable to escape the advance of illegal land exploitation, infrastructure projects and the expansion of agribusiness.

At times, destruction of difference takes the form of proper genocide, with the physical annihilation of entire groups (perpetrated either quickly or over the centuries). In yet other cases, it reveals itself as ethnocide, the erasure of the group’s uniqueness and the dismantling of their autonomy. No matter the case – and they often concur, affecting the same victims simultaneously – the result is similar: infinite communities of humans and nonhumans organized in very specific ways over millennia, entire worlds, are simply wiped off the surface of the earth. The earth, this intensive collection of worlds within a world, is poorer by the hour.

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In the introduction to the collection of poems Appalachian Elegy (2005), bell hooks remembers her childhood in the backwoods of Kentucky, where she learned to associate “the passion for freedom and the wildness” of her experience back then with “anarchy, with the belief in the power of the individual to be self-determining”. Living in “simple abundance”, by fishing, hunting, raising chickens, planting and growing flowers or making homemade wine, those Black folks in Kentucky were, states the writer, “deeply engaged with an ecological cosmopolitanism”.

Like Baiana’s work, hooks reminds us that there is no autonomy, no freedom without sharing life in its diversity, without composing worlds with multiple non-human beings that allow these more-than-human communities to be self-determining. When those multispecies relations start to be mediated by the State and the market, when they lose their context on the ground, their relative “wildness”, that’s when freedom ends, and when the specificity of a certain collective in relation to its environment starts to fade. 

Earthseed or Archipelago #1, 2022, installation view from the group exhibition The Silence of Tired Tongues at Framer Framed, Amsterdam. Photos: Maarten Nauwn

The seeds hidden by soybeans in Baiana’s installation are known as creole seeds. They are local variants of cultivated plants managed by traditional, Indigenous and quilombola farmers over generations. The creole variants are the product of a long and diversified process of selection, genetic improvement and exchange of seeds that allows for creating plants adapted to specific local environments and cultural tastes. This diversity is expressed by an incredibly large number of local cultivars, rich in color, shape and flavor.

Although a crucial lifeboat for humanity to face potential risks associated with the agro-industrial model, creole seeds are increasingly under threat. Conventional industrial-scale agriculture is taken to be more lucrative and therefore is incentivized by the economic powers over agroecological and traditional forms of farming. By prioritizing profit margins over biodiversity, large-scale monocropping is pervasively reliant on GMOs and standardized seeds, and on a whole menu of pesticides and toxic chemicals. It is a production process based on sameness, and its result is the expansion of sameness.

The concept of anarchy can be extended here. Bell hooks’ “belief in the power of the individual to be self-determining” not only concerns the humans who manipulate the different species. In the expansive fields of soybeans, where the rigid lines of uniformity stretch as far as the eye can see, the meticulously controlled environment works as a mechanism of constraint – an attempt to impose order and freeze the processes of change inherent in any seed.

The erasure of any other existence has no other purpose than to maintain the uniformity of the grains. Large-scale intensive agriculture, driven by a quest for commercial efficiency, exercises a form of authority over the environment, dictating the conditions in a bid to arrest any potential deviation from the desired traits. This calculated control is not merely a means to an end; it is an endeavor to perpetuate a state of stasis, ensuring that the beans will keep conforming to predetermined standards of commercial viability. It maintains uniform conditions to guarantee the grain’s self-identity, its resemblance to itself: its repeatability.

Thus, the industrial control of creative and transformative processes is not just a commercial feature of agriculture. It is a more cosmological endeavor: it prevents seeds from having the autonomy to self-determine, to change in consonance with their relationships with other species, the land, water, and the climate.

Delving into the profound divergence between the monism entrenched in monotheistic Euro-Christian thought and the cosmopolitanism inherent in the perspectives of non-western communities, the quilombola thinker Nego Bispo points to the difference in the very notion of “one” (2). Instead of the exclusivist unity of western tradition – a unity that positions itself as the centre, a singularity that only knows how to proliferate by subsuming and erasing others – for the bio-integrative cosmoview of counter-colonizing peoples, “there is only ‘one’ because there is more than one”. The one, here, only exists as part of the universe, as an integral and interconnected part of a whole – a oneness that embraces diversity.

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In the middle of that vast, monotonous field, overtaken by the uniformity of soybean bushes, we are once again presented with a tangible manifestation of the inspiration behind June Jordan’s “Poem for Nana” (2005). While sitting on a mountainside in California, witnessing the spectacle of oil despoiling the waters of the Pacific Ocean, the poet reflects on the diversity of Indigenous peoples who once thrived on the lands, now largely eradicated from the territory. Amid the orange poppies, flowers symbolizing the violent Gold Rush colonization that unfolded on the very land where she currently sits, she observes “40,000 gallons gushing up poison” and asks herself: “What will we do / when there is nobody left / to kill?”. (3)

But this isn’t the only question in the poem. “How do we follow after you?” asks Jordan, after listing several names of Indigenous peoples. Instead of an act of surrender, instead of succumbing to the exercise of uniformization, instead of allowing oneself to be erased, the question prompts us to contemplate how we can avoid replicating oppressive patterns that lead to the progressive annihilation of differences. 

How to honor diverse narratives, how to respect them? “I am a woman searching for her savagery”, states the poet. (4) The term “savagery” is not meant in an exoticizing sense, a picture of the other as a fascinating wild creature. In her talks, Jerá Guarani invites her non-Indigenous audience to become “savage”: to become people who are “less intellectual, less important”; people who, in their daily lives, don’t rely on the comfort of consumption, on the subjugation of the diverse existences. Savagery primarily implies the ability to live without a salary, to live without the State; ultimately, however, it entails the power of self-renewal, self-sufficiency, self-determination.

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Baiana’s work is based on a series of stacked metaphors, combining different insights and analogies gathered during her research. “To gather” may mean more than it seems: the artist turns Ursula K. Le Guin’s carrier bag theory into a central part of her method as an artist. “A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient”, says Le Guin in The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1986). Gathering, nurturing and communal sharing are more interesting tools than the spear that convenes the heroic narrative of the hunter.

Gathering is not accumulation, it is an engagement with the world. It is an act of knowing and sharing. You collect “because it’s useful, edible, or beautiful”, says LeGuin. Then, you “take it home with you, home being another, larger kind of pouch or bag, a container for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a solid container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the area that contains what is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again”. (5) The carrier bag is a space for shared experiences and interconnected narratives.

Earthseed or Archipelago #1, 2022, installation view from the group exhibition The Silence of Tired Tongues at Framer Framed, Amsterdam. Photos: Maarten Nauwn

Baiana’s carrier bag is open to ideas, materials, stories. At its core lies a deliberate ethos – the lack of loyalty to the systems that perpetuate homogenization, subjugation, and erasure. Her work is a way of allying; Baiana never works alone. She consistently relies on collaborations and joint creativity. One such collaborator is Tapixi Guajajara, an artist and activist whom she knew from militant engagement for Indigenous causes in Rio de Janeiro.  In Earthseed or Archipelago I, Guajajara played a crucial role in crafting the central piece of the installation, weaving together hundreds of seeds of several different species. Prompted by Baiana, Guajajara’s innovative piece departs from traditional Indigenous art practices but employs seeds not typically utilized in such contexts.

Within the concept of the work itself, the method emerges as a concept: no idea of Baiana emerges with a precise definition. Ideas are crossed, exchanged, shared. And from them a new actant is born. “I turned our minds into gardens and threw in a gourd of seeds”, says Nego Bispo, when explaining his method of counter-colonising discourse to enhance the quilombola cosmovision. Instead of transforming the world into ideas – making an insistently biodiverse land into a backyard of a single notion, a field of an endless repetition of soybean seeds – this method enacts perception as fertile soil. It becomes a ground for the thriving of the world.

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Researchers have been sounding the alarm regarding the loss of genetic diversity of cultivated plants. Every modern variant, however, originated in a local variant. Creole seeds constitute an important genetic source to provide tolerance and resistance to different kinds of stress and to allow plants to adapt to multiple environments. Taking into consideration that the earth’s climate is changing and will change more and faster in the near future, humanity will need to dig into this genetic plurality to find seeds adapted to new climatic conditions.

Luckily, as a reaction to the expansion of industrial agriculture, the practice of protecting traditional seeds came to be recognised as an important movement in Brazil. The “guardians of creole seed” keep, grow and exchange an incredible number of varieties of cultivated seeds. Their work preserves biological diversity in small-scale, family- or community-based agriculture. They favor the exchange of seeds, the sharing of knowledge. It is to them that Baiana turned to gather the seeds that compose Earthseed.

In Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, from which the installation borrows part of its title, a young woman, Lauren Olamina, founds a movement aiming to re-create the possibility of life in a completely broken, dystopian world. Lauren develops a new belief system called Earthseed, which holds that communities must grow their own food to sustain themselves. The central tenet of her philosophy is encapsulated in the phrase “God is change”. As are the creole seeds. Adaptability is the word here. Woven into a network of relationships that makes them stronger and more connected, these seeds encourage us to embrace change, to shape it, to navigate it. They show us one of the pathways to self-determination.

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Eric Macedo is an anthropologist and researcher at the Center for Sustainability Studies of Fundação Getulio Vargas in São Paulo.

Camila de Caux is a writer, artist and anthropologist.

As referenced

(1) Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “In Isolation,” A Perfect Storm, 2020,
https://aperfectstorm.net/in-isolation/.

(2) Antônio Bispo dos Santos, “A terra dá, a terra quer.” São Paulo: Ubu Editora/PISEAGRAMA, 2023.

(3) June Jordan, “Poem for Nana”, in Directed By Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan (Copper Canyon Press, 2005), 249-54.

(4) Guarani, Jerá, “Becoming Savage”, Futuress. Where feminism, design and politics meet, April 22, 2022. https://futuress.org/stories/becoming-savage/

(5) Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” in Dancing at the Edge of the World (Grove Atlantic Press, 1989).