A Tale of Two Seeds: Sound and Silence in Latin America’s Andean Plains is a sound installation that explores the expansion of the current technical agro-industrial colonization in Latin America, in general, and in Colombia, in particular. The work is composed of three parts: A Tale of Two Seeds: Sound and Silence in Latin America’s Andean Plains uses subterranean and surface recordings of the soil and recordings of electrical conductivity in the soy and amaranth plants to present a sonic testimony of the changing sounds of the Andean landscape after the arrival of GM monoculture soy expansion in the last decade. For some time now, soy monocultures have been threatened by the amaranth plant. Such is the hypnotic force that soy has on amaranth that industrialists are devoting a large part of their capital to developing technology to uncouple and neutralize the spell between the two species. This work draws attention to the fact that amaranth, before being classified as a parasite by multinational agro-industrial corporations, was a plant that occupied a valuable and sacred place in the lives of many indigenous peoples and is an essential grain that circulates outside the predominant agro-industrial matrix. The corporate solution to combat amaranth has been a transgenic war in which an immunological mutation is operated on soy plants in order to diminish the virulent contagion of the indigenous amaranth grain. 

The installation is complemented with two video works. The first On Vegetal Politics explores food sovereignty, deforestation, and the preservation of biodiversity through the story of soy monoculture and its expansion in South American territories. This work is a reconstruction of an algorithm commonly used in agribusiness to model the growth of transgenic crops on any type of soil. The main objective was to subvert this technology using it to model and demonstrate the enormous efficiency of the amaranth plant when pitted against GM soya. The second work Botánica Transgénica is a web 3.0 and blockchain art work that, through search algorithms and web scraping on the internet, aims to register as Colombian intellectual property the codes patented by foreign agro-industrial companies on our living organisms. The project has a specific focus on the patents of genetic modifications of plants. Through a subversive symbolic act, this work seeks to question genetic extractivism, the very idea of genetic ownership of living bodies and the extent to which foreign companies are privatizing our food sovereignty, in Colombia and across the Americas. 

Background information:

Soy, or soybean, has been cultivated in Asian civilizations for thousands of years but today its cultivation is widespread in other parts of the world, becoming one of the great commodities of Latin America. The strong international demand and the high relative profitability of soybeans has fueled the expansion of the cultivation of this plant across the region. For some time now soy monocultures have been threatened by the amaranth plant, widely known as a pesticide resistant weed. 

Amaranth, an 8,000-year old grain, like quinoa and buckwheat, is indigenous to the Americas, and a super-food gaining worldwide recognition as a high-protein edible. A nutritionally complete plant food, amaranth was banned by Spanish colonizers fearing that the indigenous people’s spiritual connection to the plant and the land would undermine Christianity. The threat to amaranth’s existence across the Americas continues to this day. In recent years, modern industrial agriculture has treated amaranth as a parasite. Monsanto created “Roundup Ready” crops, genetically engineered to resist Roundup pesticide, so that the genetically modified crop (in this case, soy) would survive while everything else, (amaranth), was wiped out. In just five years, amaranth developed resistance to the pesticide. In this sonic interrogation of Colombian soils, we will highlight amaranth’s symbolic role in the resistance to modern forms of colonialism most strongly represented by genetic engineering, the privatization of seeds and land sovereignty. Soy monoculture and the forms in which it is being mutated in order to dominate and wipe out the amaranth is a modern form of colonialism and will have a dramatic impact on the future of Latin American territories.