Presented by the UC Berkeley Department of Art Practice, through the Berkeley Art Museum + Pacific Film Archive Arts + Design series. October 19 2020. 1 hr 16 min (including Q&A).
From pandemic gardening to street murals featuring seeds of change, the humble seed has seen a resurgence of popular interest in the United States since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, in the spring of 2020. Yet the seed is a millennia-old motif of both survival and colonization, with expanded meanings for the strange new era of the present—a time characterized by cascading climate catastrophes, stark racial and economic inequity, violent ideological polarization, media pollution, and xenophobia. Drawing from film, contemporary art, mythology, natural science, popular culture, propaganda, and other sources, this visual lecture explores some old and new ways in which biomatter has embodied humans’ hopes for survival and fears of contamination, as well as divergent possibilities for radical counter-narratives to racialized, neoliberal formulations of climate apocalypse.