When Seeds Speak Miranda Whall

When Seeds Speak

When Seeds Speak: A Seedy Ensemble will premiere at Chapter Arts Centre in September 2024. A visual artist, musician, dancer, musical improviser and composer will respond and interact with a raw unprocessed dataset generated by the metabolomic fingerprint analysis of a Black Oat seed (Cierch du Bach) as well as conversation, interviews and pre- recorded audio from the lifecycle of the grain – sowing, harvesting, threshing, fermenting, cooking, and eating. An emergent, experimental and improvised performance will evolve from a complex and unique synthesis and generative audio work, revealing the performance-making process and a visual and sonic discovery.

Performers Miranda Whall, Owen Lloyd, Neil Luck, Yumino Seki and Angharad Davies will collaborate at the intersection of arts, sciences, and farming to tell the story of the recently rediscovered Cierch du Bach – a resilient crop that once grew on almost every upland farm in Wales. The performance will highlight the grains potential to contribute significantly to sustainable farming practices in the face of climate change, and to the broader hyper-local conversation about the management and farming of the uplands of Mid Wales.

When Seeds Speak: A Seedy Ensemble will offer a non-representational interpretation of the Welsh upland landscape, a creative intervention to an environmental scientific study, and a series of intersemiotic translations – between numerical code and non- verbal language; visual art, music, and dance. The project offers a timely critique on how we understand and manage the complex relationship between nature, scientific data, and humans, and how each element of this triad influences and is being influenced by the other. It prompts reflection on the often reductive and homogenising narratives inherent to scientific data collection, analysis, and representation, and how it is often shaped by power, biases, and inequalities. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, the project reflects on the imbalance between an increasing appetite for scientific data – and its carbon and resource costly management and an alarmingly slower appetite for policy and behavioural change in its wake.

The performance builds upon the project When Earth Speaks by Miranda Whall, which was conceived through a NERC funded cross-disciplinary research project: Making the invisible visible: Instrumenting and interpreting an upland landscape for climate change resilience led by Prof Mariecia Fraser from IBERS, Aberystwyth University, and developed through a subsequent NERC funded cross disciplinary research project: Multispecies Politics in Action led by Prof Milja Kurki, Interpol, Aberystwyth University. The scientific research collaborator in When Seeds Speak is Dr Catherine Howarth from IBERS Aberystwyth University, and the fingerprint analysis was funded by the Rural Futures Hub, IBERS Aberystwyth University in partnership with Aber Innovation.

For more information on the story of the Black Oat in Wales visit the Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/oct/28/black-oats-llafur-ni-wales-crops-grains-growers-farmers-aoe and https://vimeo.com/489406001