Seed banks are banks in the sense of places of collection, protection and exchange, but they are also archives. They contain biological and genetic information and organic DNA, but they also contain stories, narratives and imaginary tools, so to be considered as memory containers.
The genetic material presented in them is intertwined and embedded with the stories of the plants to which it belongs, and with the stories of the people who created the collection and who take care of it.
Seed banks are also tools to preserve life and the biological variety and to fight for food safety and food sovereignty, a space of resistance to capitalist transgenic biotechnologies. Groups of people around the world are organizing themself to create these spaces to save not only their lives and the ones of future generations but also cultures and traditions.
With “A thousand times we will grow” we want to study how activities of gathering, preservation, maintenance and care are activated as resistance practices. We want to observe these strategies in different countries, focusing our attention on both self-managed granoteque and institutional bank seeds. Our field research will be moving between countries, following different groups who organized themselves to create self-managed seed banks to counteract the processes of destruction of biological variety and local traditions by multinationals.
