Marleen Boschen is an artist, lecturer and researcher. She has recently finished a PhD at Goldsmiths where her research focussed on seed banking practices as ecological imaginaries, border ecologies and more-than-human sovereignty. She teaches on art and ecology at Goldsmiths and Chelsea College of Art. Marleen is currently curating the artistic programme for the garden of Villa Romana in Florence and co-curated Soil is an Inscribed Body: On Sovereignty and Agropoetics together with Elena Agudio at SAVVY Contemporary in Berlin.

Charles Pryor is an artist and agroecologist who works at the intersection of agroecosystem resilience, more-than-human storytelling and moving image. He has an MSc in Climate Change and International Development from the University of East Anglia. Charles has led agroecology workshops at Sakiya, Palestine; unMonastery, Greece; Goldsmiths University, UK and Cityplot, Berlin. Exhibitions and events include: Sunlight Doesn’t Need a Pipeline at Stanley Picker Gallery; After Progress at the Sociological Review; Unifix Festival; How to Show Time in Monochrome at Manifesta13; Storytelling in the Anthropocene at Tenderbooks and Feral Kin at Auto Italia South East.

A short description of the film

A womb of things to be and tomb of things that were

Marleen Boschen & Charles Pryor, 2023, 28 min

'Womb of things to be and tomb of things that were' is a film by Charles Pryor and Marleen Boschen that explores collaborative survival, containment and vulnerability through seeds. Via episodic, speculative storytelling we follow seed banking and saving practices across the globe from the Millennium Seed Bank and the John Innes Centre in the UK, to a forest gene bank in Poland and a food sovereignty organisation in Palestine.

The film traces how seeds move in and out of these banks and how their metabolic life slows down in processes of freezing. Exploring how practices foster ecological imaginaries of restoration, repair and custodianship the film asks what futures might really be in store for these seeds. What does it mean to remove a lifeform from its world in order to save it?
What are these practices saving their seeds for, but also what escapes them in freezing life?

Supported by the Arts Council England.