A Rye Story

How might thinking with seeds help us to reconfigure conventional domestication narratives and how they influence the ways many of us stage our relationships with the non-human world? Picking up a thread from a previous event hosted by Atlas on seeds and seed saving, Joss would like us to take a journey with rye, following its migration from the meadows of Anatolia to the fields of northern Europe. A short speculative fabulation as a provocation to get us thinking differently about seed-human relations and how we might rethink notions of care, agency and domestication.

Bio:

Joss Allen can be found at the edges of the garden, amongst the weeds and compost heaps. He is a gardener and cultural worker interested in exploring how creative practices can shape community economies and ecological ways of being in playful, radical, responsive and meaningful ways. Adopting a curatorial and socially-engaged art practice with an emphasis on engendering collaborations across disciplines, education, storytelling and community-building. His work has been influenced by his time as a support worker for adults with autism, a labourer on an organic farm and a refuse collector, among others. He recently co-ordinated a three-year community food growing project, Town is the Garden (2017 – 20), with Deveron Projects, Huntly, Scotland. Joss currently lives in Helsinki, Finland, and is in the process of establishing a local seed library and pursuing a PhD research project on seed saving and story.

Event will keep numbers somewhat restricted and invite other artist’s to contribute to the conversation who have an interest in seeds, plants, heritage varieties and botany etc. We currently have artist Caroline Dear and Dorothy Jackson (Skye Climate Action) but are looking to add more.