The Seed Keepers

Abstract

Seeds always presuppose cooperative arrangements of tending and care. Seeds are useful to think with because they connect the past, present, and future, carrying old biologies and inherited histories as well as genetic transformations and new possibilities. This essay traces a history of botanical classification in herbariums, photographs, and seed libraries in Palestine that stretches back to the nineteenth century. Through individuation and taxonomic ordering, colonial botanical archives isolated plants and people from history and vanished Palestinians from their land. The colonial archive's formal organization and orientation to preserving dead or disappearing objects also opens space to investigate the proliferation of archive-based artworks by contemporary Palestinian artists such as Larissa Sansour and Jumana Manna. Sansour and Manna's artworks demonstrate that the value of seeds lies in their cultivation, transformations, and local adaptations. The seed is an alternative archive that maintains the vitality of being in the world. The seed is well-suited to planting Palestinian futures that are living, growing, and changing.