There was, as we know, a violent scramble for natural resources by colonial powers from which Singapore emerged as entrepôt trading post in the 19th and 20th century. Singapore and Svalbard are two islands situated in radically different parts of the globe: Our questions leading what is for us an ongoing project concern how such disparate beings as a wheat grain, a crocodile, and a spirit being, all entangled in the legacies of colonial agro-economies and monstrous dreams of progress, might speak to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in a time of mass extinction and climate change. But equally important for us has been the discovery, initially by Kate Pocklington of what has become a feral diversity of sources all claiming in different ways that this very crocodile (currently in the Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum) is believed to host the spirit of Panglima Ah Chong, nineteenth century gangster, Taoist mystic, and anti-colonial freedom fighter. Our proposal consisted of regarding this 133-year dead, salt-water crocodile as a comparative seed bank to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. For this iteration of the work, Migrant Ecologies Project artist Zachary Chan was flown (all carbon costs were offset) to Svalbard with this very special grain of wheat and a series of other artistic offerings from the Migrant Ecologies Project for a ceremony, in which the works were offered to the mountain and placed to rest in Gruve/Mine 3, next to the Svalbard Global Seed Bank. The Migrant Ecologies Project proposal was called Seeding Stories: A Guide to the Interior of a Salt Water Crocodile and is just one part of an ongoing research initiative that started in 2013 and was first exhibited during a project called Unearthed at the Singapore Art Museum. Wickson believes that nature and human cultures are intertwined and wanted to generate a parallel initiative to remember 21 century cultural relationships with plants and seeds, next door to the world famous ‘Doomsday Vault’. Fern Wickson from the centre for Biosafety at The Arctic University Tromsø Norway. The Agri-Cultures Seed Links exhibition was conceived by Dr. The main specification for proposals was that they were to be able to fit the dimensions of a box used to house the seed samples in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. The work was selected by an international jury of artists and scientists from 100 entries from all over the world for an exhibition called Agri Cultures Seed Links. This gesture was part of an artwork by the Singapore-situated Migrant Ecologies Project. UPDATE April 2020: We are most proud to launch this beautiful Migrant Ecologies microsite dedicated to the many letters written a grain of wheat that was once inside a crocodile but that is now buried in Svalbard:Ī low resolution PDF of the seeding-stories art publication can be found here: Croc PDFĪ single grain of wheat from the interior of a 133 year-dead 4.7m, salt water crocodile shot 1887 at the mouth of the no-longer-existing Serangoon river Singapore and kept for over a century in the Raffles Museum, migrated to the arctic circle was ceremonially buried in Platåberget, adjacent to the Svalbard Global Seed Bank on 10th June 2019. The Agri/Cultures.Seed-Links exhibition, SEEDING STORIES: A GUIDE TO THE INTERIOR OF A SALT WATER CROCODILE" Exhibition, performance and publication, Svalbard, June 2019
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