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Cultivating Abundance

 

Combining text, moving image and archival reproductions, ‘Cultivating Abundance’ traces the history of monocultural farming techniques, and their representation, in Sweden through the long-term research project of artist Åsa Sonjasdotter. Outlining the dangers of monocultural techniques, both ecologically and culturally, the project uncovers the vital work being done by counter-movements to the monopoly of large-scale agribusiness.

This is a story that begins from soil that accumulated comparably recently, geologically speaking. It is generated from clay that gathered by the fringes of the vast ice cap that covered the northern hemisphere until some 10,000 to 12,000 years ago. The retraction of the ice left behind vast plains of mineral-rich earth. Over the years it bore ground to oak and elm forests, where it became soil that would prove to be very generous for farming.

I would learn to know this soil intimately. I grew up in its habitats and by its waters, and I was fed from its yields, harvested in my family’s back garden. The scattered houses of the settlement where we lived were squeezed between vast farm fields where we kids laboured, weeding sugar beets in the summer. We should not drink the water from the wells, we were told, as toxic stuff used in the fields leaked into it.

Extract from a map of southern Scandinavia, the region from which this research departs

Fields of the Sveriges utsädesförening (Swedish Seed Association). Photography courtesy of Lantmännen, ca. 1907

Having grown up near these fields, yet with an unsettled feeling towards them, some twenty years ago I began looking more closely into their stories. One of the sites I visited for research was a local centre for plant breeding. When the janitor learned that I was a visual artist, she asked if she could take me to the

attic; there were a few things she wanted to show me. Pointing at long rows of what I would come to learn were photographic silver-gelatine glass plates, stacked side by side across the floor, she asked, could you make use of any of these? The plates were covered in dust and pigeon droppings. The moments captured on these plates, I would later learn, documented the very first steps towards monoculture plant breeding as it is practised today by the global seed industry.

I continued researching this history as well as its counter-movements. The outcome of this research has been processed in various formats, among them the 2022 film Cultivating Abundance, made in dialogue with local seed association Allkorn (Common Grains) and plant breeder Hans Larsson. The film revisits the photographs and moving images recorded and then archived at this plant-breeding centre, which was later called the Swedish Seed Association. Further, it follows Larsson’s and Allkorn’s work to restore and regenerate still-extant peasant-bred grains that have survived the monocultural takeover.1

Tracing these events with respect to the soil, there was a decisive moment that brought about a shift in relation to the land – a shift that, in many ways, enabled monoculture farming to become a thinkable and even credible concept. Between 1749 and 1827, a few generations before the formation of the Swedish Seed Association, the Swedish state imposed land reforms in this region.2 For about a thousand years before the reforms, the land had been in the custody of peasant communities – even when it was owned by the church, by the crown or by lords. In this older system, each farming village formed a legally responsible entity. Thus, all of the village’s inhabitants were collectively responsible, for example, for tax payments. The land reforms compartmentalized the land and allocated each farmhouse of the village to one land unit. One member of each farming household became the private, legal owner of both the farmhouse and the land. The remaining people in the household had legal rights only through this person. In a patriarchal hereditary system such as this, this person was most often a man. The initiative to found the plant-breeding centre, which opened in 1886, came from farmers and landowners that had gained wealth through these reforms.

Excerpt from the film Cultivating Abundance by Åsa Sonjasdotter, made in dialogue with the plant breeder Hans Larsson and the Allkorn association, 2022

The voice-over of the film Cultivating Abundance (2022) introduces the purpose of the silver-gelatine photographs at the Svalöv Institute:

These glass plates document the very first years of the Swedish Seed Association in Svalöv. It was here that crop breeding for uniform crops was systemized, becoming the approach practised today by the global seed industry.

The breeders knew it was possible to grow uniform crops: Nearby, Copenhagen’s Carlsberg breweries had demonstrated this. Since the end of the 1880s, Carlsberg had cultivated a ‘pure’ yeast culture from a single strain of fungus. This enabled them to predict the outcome of the brewing process, making large-scale production much more efficient. So, the breeders in Svalöv applied the same method to plants.

This method was, in the words of the plant breeders themselves, a ‘total reversal of the old understanding’.3 Instead of saving selected seeds, which since ancient times had been understood as a regenerative, ongoing process of crop adaptation, breeders worked towards ‘recognizing and controlling the uniformity’ of ‘already existing’ properties in the seeds.4 The traditional understanding, that living matter is in constant flux was abandoned as a result of this shift. Instead, ideals were formed in resonance with theories of immutable laws of hereditary, such as those proposed by German friar Gregor Mendel in the 1880s.5



To put these theories into practice, selected plants were inbred over several generations until so-called ‘pure lines’ emerged from which genetic ‘contaminants’ had been removed.6 Crops showing traits of interest to breeders were taken from the fields to the clinical environment of the laboratory, where they first underwent the process of inbreeding. Once a varietal ‘pure line’ had been realized, it was then crossbred with a ‘pure line’ of a different variety of the same crop. The aim was to obtain a new, so-called ‘elite variety’ that would combine desirable features of both ‘pure’ strains in one and the same plant.7 This crossbred ‘elite variety’ would then be propagated in large quantities, to be sold and distributed over long distances for large-scale cultivation. The plant-breeding institute in Svalöv became internationally renowned, receiving prestigious study visits from scientists based at leading research institutes abroad.

The Sveriges utsädesförening (Swedish Seed Association). Photography courtesy of Lantmännen, ca. 1907

The technique of monoculture plant breeding was developed in conjunction with experimentation in the visual representation of uniform and standardized crops, using the recently invented technique of photography. The light-sensitive medium generated black-and-white images, emphasizing contrasts in volume and line while omitting colour. Early photographs show how photographers embedded at the institute developed a method of visually imposing ‘originality’ and patterned uniformity on the plants. Root crops were sorted and arranged into rows and grids in the field after harvest, or else attached to metal poles on wooden structures that lifted them into the air.8 A sheet was then placed behind each structure, whitening or blackening the surrounding environment. Indoors, a studio setting was created. Here, grains and root crops were placed in wooden boxes filled with soil to suggest a farm field, again with white or black sheets suspended behind them.

The production of such images ran parallel to the breeding of crops towards uniformity. However, as this breeding technique required up to ten growing seasons to achieve results, in the early years of the institute’s operation, it was the soon-to-be-obliterated peasant-bred crops that were used as props to visualize ‘originality’ and uniformity in the institute’s studio settings.9

Parts of the photographic installation The visual process towards the image of uniform and original crops, presented at the Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, Germany, 6 October to 3 December 2023, and currently at Lunds konsthall, Sweden, 31 May – 26 August 2024

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