Mission Potato: How do we cultivate the future? Is the future a high-performing, "engineered-to-perfection" single solution? Or is it a diversity of options/avenues that can help us adapt and resist to the changing climate? Is the movement of time only forward and up? Or can we learn about future through digging backwards and down into the ground.
Native to Peru, potatoes are now the fifth most grown crop worldwide and among the first chosen to be grown by the Chinese Space Agency for its Moon landing. In both agriculture and politics today, there is a movement towards monoculture. In our mission, we call on potatoes (in their more than 4,000 varieties), to carry alternative narratives of what the future might look like. We choose multiplicity instead of the singular, a vision for anti-colonial planetary futures. In March 2020, we selected 250 true potato seeds with the help of the International Potato Center, and then sent them into Earth's lower orbit. They traveled on board the International Space Station for a month before returning to Earth. We are now germinating them in our backyards in New York City and Portland alongside control groups to look for morphological changes caused by their time in space. The six varieties of Peruvian potatoes that travelled to space are the protagonists of our project and will be planted and harvested at the exhibition.
After the seeds retuned back to us from ISS, we started the germination process in petri dishes so we could follow the process closely. Each petri dish was divided in two and held “space seeds” on one side and “earth seeds” on the other side. Both groups of seeds corresponding to the same family. Pink labels indicate seeds that were on low-earth orbit for a month (space seeds) and yellow labels indicate seeds from the same family that remained on Earth (earth seeds).
After the initial germination period the seedlings were transplanted into small soil pellets and remained indoors. Finally, they were transplanted into pots and are growing outside covered by a mesh to protect them from hungry insects. They are planted in individual pots and maintain their yellow and pink labels so that we can grow them in the same conditions but follow their process separately. This will allow us to see if there are any morphological changes caused by their time without gravity.
This is an on-going project and we are eager to work with people. Please reach out!