VIDEOS

ROOTS & SEEDS XXI

Awareness Videos
© Pavel Tavares and Marta Salazar

What is the Biodiversity Crisis?

Speaker: Lucio Montecchio

During the last years, the discourses around the loss of biodiversity and more sustainable production and consumption models have advanced widely in the fields of natural sciences, social sciences and new technologies. However, our actions individually and collectively are lagging behind. We call it "loss of biodiversity", but this is not a loss, we are killing biodiversity through our behaviour.

How can we change this and co-create a more sustainable future?

Multidisciplinary Garden Cartographies

Speaker: Claudia Schnugg

During the Roots & Seeds XXI workshops, participants from different fields (artists, scientists, philosophers, researchers, curators, cultural agents, and others), whose practices are linked to the plant world in different ways, will analyse the crisis of biodiversity with the intention of proposing sustainable ways of relating to nature. During the event, the participants will carry out a joint mapping of a garden. Beyond its taxonomic information, this cartography will have the intention of making visible discourses that consider plants as agents and not as resources.

Urban Biodiversity

Speaker: Gabino Carballo

Gardens have been called “la terza natura” by Jacopo Bonfadio, the third nature. They have also been called “the greater perfection” by Francis Bacon, the philosopher, suggesting that it was harder to grow a garden than to build anything else. Gardens, for all their poetry, reflect our vision of the world in terms of what nature should be like.

Art Industry

Speaker: Blanca de la Torre

"We still think that it’s enough to theorize on political ecology, and that we are already doing our part just by sitting in our academic chairs, and simply researching and writing essays on the climate crisis. But this is not enough anymore; we have reached the point where we need to act, and the time is now. Culture has to be a call to action, not just a call to thought".

Aquatic Environments

Speaker: Robertina Šebjanič

“The oceans are an industrial zone, and this is a huge problem. We still do not know how to get past this and understand that we cannot just use it for our own pleasure”.

Humanistic Look

Speaker: Paco Calvo

“The fact that we are trying to understand plant intelligence by forcing it into an animal mould. We shouldn’t be doing that; we should be trying to understand plant intelligence in itself, not comparing it to our standards of what we think animal or human intelligence is about.”.

Agriculture and Biodiversity

Speaker: Nacho Peres

“We have to put human beings and care of their environment back at the centre of sustainable action in any undertaking or activity. We need ground-breaking ideas and projects based on what nature teaches us and shows us without words: the tendency to balance. We have to get our creativity going and propose useful solutions”.

Plants and Points of View

Speaker: Paula Bruna

“The problem is the way we think, which is a very anthropocentric paradigm. What we see are resources and ecological services, but we are not looking beyond. What I am trying to do in my artistic practice is to address other, non-human realities. By extending our way of thinking to non-human perspectives, we might just be able to think about other possibilities of coexistence that are impossible to see from our current viewpoint”.

Techos Verdes (Green Roofs)

Speaker: Joan Rieradevall Pons

“ One of the biggest global problems is the one addressed by this event: the loss of biodiversity and its consequences. To explore these issues, we need to focus our attention, now and in the future, on food, cities and materials.

(...) As you can see, cities are deserts. The majority of city roofs around the world are not productive, with just a few hotels using them for parties or swimming pools; 50% of the surface of cities is total desert. And our idea is to change that".