Cosmic Seed Basket Wakehurst

To bring back the spirits of the seeds

The Cosmic Seed Basket is a speculative vessel. In the shape of the seed of Colorín, of Tzité, of Erythrina americana it was nesting in Kew’s Garden in Wakehurst. A vessel across time and space, traversing a triangle across Mexico, Colombia and England. It was sent to rebuild relations where connections were lost, to reimagine reciprocal ways of being and knowing. This rebalancing of ecological relations, deeply informed by Indigenous knowledge, is also political. The Cosmic Seed Basket brings together many conversations with elders, healers and plant scientists, across geographies and cosmologies, guided by the seed and its inherent wisdom.

Dr. Marleen Boschen
Post-doctoral Fellow: Future Ecologies of Art
Interdisciplinary Research
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

Bringing back the spirits of the seeds
That was the task ordered by the elders, the taitas from up heavens and down earth, as grand father Berito Kuwaruwa told me when he asked them, they said this job has to be done. This is seed is part of the origin.
The piece Is a 1me vessel in the erythrina americana seed minimum shape, amplified. The colorin, Tzité, for the Mayans, Tzompantle In Nahuatl is connected to the origin of humanity and 1mes, according to the sacred book Popol Vuh the first grandparents throw the seeds of Tzité along with the corn seeds to create humanity. The oracle practice of seed reading with the erythrina americana is s1ll in use by the Mayan quiché and by the Mexica
who carries 260 seeds with precious stones in the sacred bag, and throw the over the mayan calendar Tzolkin or Mexica tonalpahualli. The Mayan created the concept of cero depicted as a seed or a shell.
For the totonacas lak’tanga” o “lak’1lo” in Veracruz, this was also a sacred seed, a protector used to prevent form bad eye and cure spiritual and natural illness: envy, tooth pain, and muscular soreness as Doña Juana tell us.
The 1me travels in numbers and codes, from dates of recollection of the seed to different purposes, on the first of march, for bad eye, on the second to protect a business, and so on, on 7th un1l the last ones on the 13 th of march,
The effect of the ingestion seed is to stop 1me, as sedative, hypnotic, anesthetic and analgesic, and psychoactive agent

Inside this structure build with bamboo, iron and natural dyed coYon fabrics, with Colorin seeds, Dragons Blood, achiote (annayo), grana cochinilla, moons blood, zapote. The work of weaving of 20 nets of seeds are trans dimensional portals and amulets of protec1on. You find the sound of the Erythrina americana seed, taken from the electrical resistance thru a vegetal sound translator, the sound has a bird style codes, and Mrs Juana Gonzalez, voice in Spanish, telling her relationship with the seed and the tree. She’s a traditional Healer from Tlapacoyan, Veracruz. Who take us in her narrative to the seed as an interstoce on dimensional passage to 1mes, honoring her culture and the law of origin of American people, or Abya Yala.
We will broadcast from this cero temporal seed sta1on and also grow a plant of erythrina americana the piece will be vanished and disappeared.
Cris1na Ochoa