Culture: [Re]Searching the Seeds

A report by Margaret Carrigan for The Observer.

For almost two decades, Brazilian artist Maria Thereza Alves has been traveling to European port cities documenting the non-native plant species she finds there. Her work is less horticultural than ethnographic, however. The project represents original research into the seeds that have been transported across seas in ballast, a material (often gravel, sand or coarse stone) used to balance maritime trade ships. Ultimately, this project reveals the impact of human displacement due to migration and slave trade over the course of centuries.

After exploring the shores of Marseilles, Reposaari, Dunkirk, and Bristol, among others, Alves has now turned her attention to the “New World” by bringing this ongoing project to the U.S. for the first time. She’s been working with the New School’s Vera List Center for Art and Politics, Pioneer Works, the High Line and Weeksville Heritage Center to excavate seed sites around New York City. The artist’s findings of plant species that were originally native to countries like the West Indies, Brazil, and the U.K. are presented with her maps and drawings depicting the ships’ journeys in an exhibition of the same title at the Vera List Center through November 27.

Alves told Observer that her research revealed that so much ballast came into Manhattan, it was used to fill in the city’s ravines, marshes, creeks, ponds and other “undesirable” local topographies from 1646 until the middle of the 20th century. For example, she found that Eighth Avenue from about 155th to 140th Streets was filled in with an average of seven to ten feet of ballast with seeds hailing from the Sweden, Ireland, Algeria, the West Indies, Norway, Sierra Leone, Spain, Portugal, Antigua, France, Cape Verde, Germany, Bermuda, Brazil and of course, England. “So when we are walking around, due to the colonization process of our land, we don’t know if we are stepping on New York or Bristol, Kingston, Lisbon, Rio de Janeiro, or Oslo,” she explained.

Unique to the artist’s New York-based findings is the discovery that while solid ballast like sand, earth, and stones gave way to the use of water ballast from the early 1920s onwards in European cities, such was not the case in America. According to Alves, ships sailing from New York harbor to Europe during World War II to deliver armaments returned heavy in ballast back to New York as there was nothing else to bring back.