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kapit. System -> geht nur mit "totem" Samenverständnis. in der Sicht machts dann auch Sinn, dass man in White-Savior-Manier alle Samen in Svalbard sammeln muss, "weil man es ja kann" und "weil die Bedingungen in den Herkunftsländern ja nicht sicher aufbewahrfähig sind" (like in the museums). Zufällig konzentriert man dabei natürlich auch extremen Wert im eigenen Laden aus den kolonialen Peripherien.
- Keeve: Vavilov hat "roadmap gelegt"
- Svalbard is melting :)
- auch Svalbard-Leute haben ein gute Intentions, aber haben eben auch ein Weltbild
- Svalbard hat vielleicht auch irgendeinen Sinn in der Welt und ist nicht der Teufel in Person
- andere Samenkonzeptionen sind gefährlich, bringen das koloniale Konstrukt zum Bröckeln -> Müssen als Sagen/Mythen markiert werden

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The Leningrad seedbank was preserved and protected through the 28-month long Siege of Leningrad. While the Soviets had ordered the evacuation of art from the Hermitage Museum, they had not evacuated the 250,000 samples of seeds, roots, and fruits stored in what was then the world's largest seedbank. A group of scientists at the Vavilov Institute boxed up a cross section of seeds, moved them to the basement, and took shifts protecting them. Those guarding the seedbank refused to eat its contents, even though by the end of the siege in the spring of 1944, a number of them had died of starvation.

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The Leningrad seedbank was preserved and protected through the 28-month long Siege of Leningrad. While the Soviets had ordered the evacuation of art from the Hermitage Museum, they had not evacuated the 250,000 samples of seeds, roots, and fruits stored in what was then the world's largest seedbank. A group of scientists at the Vavilov Institute boxed up a cross section of seeds, moved them to the basement, and took shifts protecting them. Those guarding the seedbank refused to eat its contents, even though by the end of the siege in the spring of 1944, a number of them had died of starvation.

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75% der Agrobiodiversität ist weg - könnte man kontextualisieren und bissi drauf eingehn (Warum weiß das niemand, Warum ist es so), führt dann ja zum Seed Vault

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Coming to you from the maker of "Fugitive Seeds": 

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Coming to you from the maker of "Fugitive Seeds": 

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Treffen vor der SUB mit Café und Hipster spielen im Nebenraum

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Treffen vor der SUB mit Café und Hipster spielen im Nebenraum

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Warum Samen in einem Stadtleben relevant ?

Was ist ein Samen

Unterschiedliche Samenkonzepte (Epistemizid; andeuten,Teil eines Netzwerks, blabla > wie sollen wir das auch erläutern, wenn wir in West Europe aufgewachsen sind)

kapitalistisches Verständnis von Samen

Probleme die damit einhergehen (Hybride Samen,...  Property Rights)

damit das Video nicht mit Tränen endet: Alternativen > positiver Ausblick, wie wäre Welt wenn Saatgut geteilt wird, was für Schritte notwendig um etwas zu verändern, Handlungsideen

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the breeding and keeping of local varieties throughout the South points us to a larger story of mutual relations between seeds, their keepers, and the land.

The logics of the Plantationocene bring to light the deep connections between ecological simplification and racial capitalism; in other words, the machinic urgency of and control over production and reproduction across landscapes of life that must be defined, mapped, and governed.

A seed is a “deep time technology… so sophisticated it appears quotidian.

Seedkeeping is one of the oldest cultural and technical practices on the planet

agricultutal revolution or what?

Ausblick: deepens connections to land, and makes space for critical and speculative interrogations of seeds as sites of political resistance, cultural resilience, biological archive, and environmental adaptation.

This neat little package of genetic information and carbohydrates has a peculiar distinction of archiving and carrying biological histories while wrapped up in cultural ones, and those cultural valences often manifest as stories

Seeds, in a sense, are nodes of ecological storytelling, as folklore or as scientific ways of knowing the world.

n nettes Photo von Seedshop aus 1939

?: black rice hypothesis

stories of enslaved women hiding rice seeds in their hair and even sneaking them to their children before being separated.

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Vague Readinglist Indigenous views on seeds

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Vague Readinglist Indigenous views on seeds

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Brush, S. B., & Stabinsky, D. (1996). Valuing local knowledge: Indigenous people and intellectual property rights.

Booth, A. L. (2003). We are the land: Native American views of nature. In H. Selin (Ed.), Nature across cultures: Views of nature and the environment in non- Western cultures

Deloria, V., Jr. (1995). Red earth, white lies: Native Americans and the myth of scientific fact.

Best of two worlds: Traditional ecological knowledge and Western science in ecosystem-based management

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Plantationocene

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Früher war Getreide viel größer - deswegen schauen menschen auf historischen Gemälden kleiner aus

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Christian Brooks Keeve traces how fugitive seeds and seed stories are deeply entangled with the stories and legacies of the Black diaspora.

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What's that ?

“the farmer’s right to breed and exchange diverse open source seeds which can be saved and which are not patented, genetically modified, owned or controlled by emerging seed giants”

(Lexicon of Food)

53% of the world’s seed market is controlled by just three firms — Bayer-Monsanto, DuPont and Syngenta (The Guardian).
BASF (Ludwigshafen amk) and Corteva Agriscience are also big players.
These 3 seed giants have essentially created a monopoly over the seed industry, slowly draining their consumers for every ounce of wealth they can obtain, regardless of the thought that their actions may be unjustified.

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1. It is the basis to maintaining biodiversity as well as food security.

2. High-quality open source seeds can be easily produced and at a low cost, thus, reducing the costs of purchasing seeds.

3. Allows farmers produce their own seeds (seed self-reliance)

4. It allows for the free exchange of and sell of seeds among farmers.

5. Enables farmers to select seeds suited to their environment. If one wants fruits that are big and are not attacked by pests in the garden, they can choose seeds of the plants that are grown in their garden with these specific traits.

6. It enables the preservation of valuable traditional or indigenous seed varieties of vegetables for future generations.

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Seed are produced mostly by transfer of pollen (male parts) to female parts of the flower and is called – Pollination. It is carried out by wind, insect, birds, or other natural agents. Open-pollinated Varieties (OPV) seed is one in which pollination is carried out from either the same (parent) plant.

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Shift from open-pollinated seeds to hybrid ones

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Shift from open-pollinated seeds to hybrid ones

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Throughout history, seeds have been bred and shared openly between farmers, communities and governments. However, a major shift occurred following World War Two with the transition from open-pollinated to hybrid seed. With the task of feeding a growing population, agricultural scientists bred crops for yield, nitrogen uptake efficiency, pesticide resistance and shelf life. Hybrid seed became increasingly productive and widely available.

With hybrid seed, farmers could choose more productive varieties that required less labour. A decreased demand for labour facilitated urbanisation throughout the 20th century, which also meant a general loss of knowledge of how to farm, as people moved out of rural areas. Access to hybrid seed as well as declining numbers of farmers also led to a loss of seed saving expertise, and since the green revolution 75% of agricultural biodiversity on earth has been lost. Reclaiming biodiversity is thus a critical goal of the seed sovereignty movement.

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What is one of the reasons why seed sovereignty is threatened ?

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What is one of the reasons why seed sovereignty is threatened ?

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Hybrid seed has eroded seed sovereignty through the use of patents. Breeding a single hybrid variety can take up to 30 years and requires significant labour and investment. Acts such as the Plant Variety Protection Act in the United States and the establishment of the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants based in Geneva have helped to secure intellectual property rights for breeders.

Currently, farmers who purchase hybrid seed are prevented by intellectual property laws from saving seed year to year. Hybrid seed is generally their only choice – it is so dominant in the marketplace that farmers now struggle to access non-hybrid varieties, giving large seed breeders a near monopoly on what crops are grown.

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The Preservation of Culture Begins With a Seed - Black seed keepers are recovering African American history

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The Preservation of Culture Begins With a Seed - Black seed keepers are recovering African American history

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https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/preservation-culture-begins-seed

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The Preservation of Culture Begins With a Seed

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Black seed keepers are recovering African American history

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The Declaration on Seed Freedom (by Dr. Vandana Shiva from Navdanya International

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The Declaration on Seed Freedom (by Dr. Vandana Shiva from Navdanya International

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https://navdanyainternational.org/key-issues/seed-freedom/

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Is a reactionary approach to hybrid seeds sufficient enough ?

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Is a reactionary approach to hybrid seeds sufficient enough ?

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The issues surrounding hybrid seed are not black and white. While its ‘evils’ are frequently discussed, the advantages must also be recognised. In addition to increasing food availability worldwide, hybrids have given farmers a choice to use more productive seed, which requires less labour. For subsistence farmers and their families, this might hugely impact their lives – for example, by allowing them to send their children to school. Seed diversity is recognised as critical to agricultural adaptation and resilience. Yet it is ironically colonial to place the burden of seed preservation on rural, subsistence farmers who may find greater economic success planting hybrid or transgenic varieties. That said, access to diverse, non-patented varieties is critical to the resilience of small-scale farming, especially in extreme climates.

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Etymologically, an epistemicide is the killing of a science understood in its proper sense as knowledge. The term is attributed to the Portuguese sociologist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, who in 2014 published Epistemologies of the South. Justice against Epistemicide.

Epistemicide has tended to follow the arrival of a dominating and colonising worldview, advancing like smallpox with European invaders. Our own era’s dominant epistemology loves binaries, flatters itself as uniquely rational and enlightened and refuses to share a table with other ways of knowing, even where they might have complemented and catalysed each other’s evolution if they had been allowed to fall into conversation.

Perhaps we should use the plural and speak of a murder of knowledges, for epistemicide erases the plurality of ways in which human experiences can be interpreted: traditions, philosophies, values and beliefs, rituals, recipes, languages and songs, and all the other multifarious forms taken by the vehicles and prisms of vernacular knowledge. It is a kind of ontological mountaintop removal: when that summit, those foothills, that high pass through which you might have found your way home, have been dynamited out of the air, the views of the universe that could be seen from those places will never be perceived again. It is, Santos lamented, ‘a massive waste of social experience’.

A typical response from the dominant worldview might be: Heritage seeds and old ways have been superseded by something better, more efficient and more marketable. It is sentimental nostalgia to seek to preserve them in aspic. Times change and one must change with them, or die. But – to reply on that utilitarian field of play – what if heirloom seeds actually offer routes to survival?

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(As an example) What were the four  great epistemicides of the sixteenth century ?

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(As an example) What were the four  great epistemicides of the sixteenth century ?

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1) The conquest of Al Andalus and its genocide/epistemicide of Jews and Muslims. (Burning of the library of Cordoba as well as those of Seville and Granada (1 million books destroyed in all)

2) The conquest of America and the killing of the Amerindians

3) The enslavement of Africans

4) Women (witchcraft)

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Confiscated knowledge is often associated with destroyed knowledge, since it is the result of the action of a dominant on a dominated person, which means, in a way, dispossessing the latter of knowledge when it is not simply a matter of eliminating it.

In this sense, all genocide implies epistemicide. But confiscated knowledge is not, strictly speaking, destroyed, but rather displaced, reused and interpreted (even if it can sometimes be destroyed by omission or lack of mastery of know-how).

In this respect, the history of knowledge of medicinal plants is particularly eloquent.

See, for example, Samir Boumediene, La Colonisation du Savoir : Une histoire des plantes médicinales du « Nouveau Monde » (1492-1750), Vaulx-en-Velin, Les éditions des mondes à faire, 2019.

In line with the issues related to herbalism, there is the issue of medicine and its practices and the various opposing thoughts, between prevention, healing, care etc.

We can think of the supremacy of the agroindustry supported by governments, which prevents, for example, farmers from resowing their own crops or prohibits the cultivation of certain fruits and vegetables, just as it imposes the administration of antibiotics on livestock. (See the manifesto of the 1052 outlawed farmers).

These various confiscations give rise to clandestine, outlaw practices.

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Modern science is based on a practice of professional and social technical division of labour and on the infinite technological development of the productive forces, of which capitalism is today the only example. Alternative social practices generate alternative forms of knowledge. Not to recognise these forms of knowledge implies delegitimising the social practices that support them and, in this sense, promoting the social exclusion of those who promote them. The genocide that so often characterises European expansion was also epistemicide: strange peoples were eliminated because they also had strange forms of knowledge, and these strange forms of knowledge were eliminated because they were based on strange social practices and strange peoples. But epistemicide has been much more widespread than genocide because it has always claimed to subalternise, subordinate, marginalise or illegalise social practices and groups that might pose a threat to capitalist expansion, or for much of our century to communist expansion (in this respect as modern as capitalism), and also because it happened in the peripheral and extra-North American space of the world system as well as in the central European and North American space, against workers, indigenous people, black people, women and minorities in general (ethnic, religious, sexual).

The new paradigm considers epistemicide as one of the great crimes against humanity.

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What is the system of patent also notorious for ?

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What is the system of patent also notorious for ?

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BIOPIRACY  (international pharmaceutical companies and academic researchers call it bioprospecting lulz)

Traditional plants around the world such as neem, ayahuasca, maca and basmati rice have been patented by biomedical and food companies, often after being taken from local communities without their consent. In response to biopiracy, food sovereignty movements like La Via Campesina have taken a primarily protectionist and reactionary approach by blocking bills that prohibit sharing seed or blocking access for companies such as Monsanto from selling their hybrid and often transgenic seed in developing nations.

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Seeds once used as weights for balances.

Seeds used as toys by children, such as for the game Conkers.

Resin from Clusia rosea seeds used to caulk boats.

Nematicide from milkweed seeds.

Cottonseed meal used as animal feed and fertilizer.

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Some Palestinian varieties have remarkably drought-resistant properties that, in the context of climate change and water stress, could offer lifelines: ‘There is an heirloom zucchini, very buttery and delicious. And it was the genius of our ancestors who kept selecting and developing this zucchini that I can now put in the ground at the right time, use literally zero irrigation and have zucchini all summer. It’s not an accident, it’s something they did over millennia and it is not something to take lightly, because it is going to determine whether we survive or not.’

These resilient strains are Ba’al varieties – the reference to the pre-Abrahamic Canaanite fertility deity hints at how far back their provenance might stretch. Summer Ba’al varieties, including tomatoes, can thrive on little more than morning dew. Winter Ba’al, including spinach, rocket and onions, are rain-fed only.

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The Travelling Kitchen is an ingenious contraption. It can be dismantled, folded satisfyingly into a compact cuboid and slid into the boot of an estate car. A beautiful wooden construction with the dimensions of a humble street handcart, it is, too, unmistakably a work of art and skilled craftsmanship. It causes a stir as it makes its way across the West Bank, appearing in public streets and squares and cultivating profound conversation.

The kitchen as object is the creation of artist and maker Ayed Arafah . As concept, project and seed of change it is the idea of Vivien Sansour. Vivien has been a photographer, a documentary filmmaker, an academic and a farmer. She is now consumed by her role as founder and organiser of the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library , from which the Travelling Kitchen project sprouted.

The kitchen is visiting a different West Bank community each month during 2018. On arrival, it is re-erected to provide a focal point for people to congregate, prepare food, swap seeds, share recipes, tell stories and discuss food system issues that include - in Palestine as elsewhere - the growth of agribusiness, with its sterile hybrid seeds and chemical inputs; climate change and water stress; the spread of fast food outlets and junk food diets; loss of land to construction; as well as - in Palestine as nowhere else - the challenges of growing, distributing and gathering food under militarily-enforced apartheid.

In Vivien's words, it 'creates a dynamic in which the kitchen itself is like a seed that you sow. People gather around it - elders, youth, farmers, everybody comes together. You might be sitting there talking about the watermelon, but then one elder will mention a kind of leek they used to grow. With each seed there's a story, a tradition, a way of life, and that's the heart of what the seed library is about. We're not a seed bank - our objective is not just to collect the genetic code and keep it in a freezer for a doomsday scenario. The idea is actually to keep a culture alive through these little seeds.'

The seed library crew recently returned to their base in Beit Sahour, near Bethlehem, from a day spent in Nus Ijbail, a village of around 500 people in the Nablus region of the occupied Palestinian territories. suggests a halfway point ( ) between two mountains ( ). An alternative theory tells of an catastrophic earthquake that left only a 'half mountain'.

In fact, Nus Ijbail is already doing much to resist the earthshaking forces of homogenisation, extractivism and erasure. Organic farming is widely practised by the area's farmers, many of whom are organised into a co-operative and benefit from relationships with Fair Trade distributors. This, however, is far from universal in the occupied territories, where marketing, often by Israeli companies, of hybrid seeds - sterile and dependent upon manufactured fertilisers and pesticides - has seen their widespread adoption. This has sped the erosion of traditional farming practices that have evolved over millennia to suit Palestine's particular topographies, ecological communities, climate and microclimates. It has removed autonomy from farmers who must re-purchase seed each year. It has also seen Palestine's unique vegetable, grain and fruit varieties threatened with extinction.

If these seeds are not saved and regrown each year, then also threatened is the constellation of skills, knowledge, traditions, recipes, practices and communal culture that accompany their cultivation. Rescuing these seeds and the culture that orbits each of them is the mission of the Seed Library. It is an attempt to prevent what Boaventura de Sousa Santos has called 'epistemicide'(1).

Say the word. It has a toxic, metallic feel on the tongue. It sounds like something sprayed by municipal contractors in biohazard suits, leaving a wake of expiring insects and bleached vegetation. Or perhaps it's a charge brought at the Hague in an almost perceptible future. (The accused will surely declare that they don't recognise the court's authority.) Santos explains it bluntly as 'the murder of knowledge' - words that land like a punch.

Epistemicide has tended to follow the arrival of a dominating and colonising worldview, advancing like smallpox with European invaders. Our own era's dominant epistemology loves binaries, flatters itself as uniquely rational and enlightened and refuses to share a table with other ways of knowing, even where they might have complemented and catalysed each other's evolution if they had been allowed to fall into conversation.

Perhaps we should use the plural and speak of a murder of knowledges, for epistemicide erases the plurality of ways in which human experiences can be interpreted: traditions, philosophies, values and beliefs, rituals, recipes, languages and songs, and all the other multifarious forms taken by the vehicles and prisms of vernacular knowledge. It is a kind of ontological mountaintop removal: when that summit, those foothills, that high pass through which you might have found your way home, have been dynamited out of the air, the views of the universe that could be seen from those places will never be perceived again. It is, Santos lamented, 'a massive waste of social experience'.

A typical response from the dominant worldview might be: Heritage seeds and old ways have been superseded by something better, more efficient and more marketable. It is sentimental nostalgia to seek to preserve them in aspic. Times change and one must change with them, or die. But - to reply on that utilitarian field of play - what if heirloom seeds actually offer routes to survival?

Vivien argues that some Palestinian varieties have remarkably drought-resistant properties that, in the context of climate change and water stress, could offer lifelines: 'There is an heirloom zucchini, very buttery and delicious. And it was the genius of our ancestors who kept selecting and developing this zucchini that I can now put in the ground at the right time, use literally zero irrigation and have zucchini all summer. It's not an accident, it's something they did over millennia and it is not something to take lightly, because it is going to determine whether we survive or not.'

These resilient strains are varieties - the reference to the pre-Abrahamic Canaanite fertility deity hints at how far back their provenance might stretch. Summer varieties, including tomatoes, can thrive on little more than morning dew. Winter , including spinach, rocket and onions, are rain-fed only. But can even these survive the severity of conditions that climate science says might befall this region?

'We're not a seed bank - our objective is not just to collect the genetic code and keep it in a freezer for a doomsday scenario. The idea is actually to keep a culture alive through these little seeds.'

'Trust me, that's a question we think about every day,' says Vivien. 'I think they will do better than others, but that's not to say that we shouldn't be looking into breeding the best varieties the way our ancestors did, based on the changing climate. These seeds evolve as you go along. This year I had some fava beans that stayed green longer, even after the rain stopped, so I saved seeds from those; I'm collecting varieties that tolerate more. We're not claiming to have the answers to climate change, but it's one attempt that I think will provide us with at least more options.'

Field trials by the Seed Library, involving 20 farmers, aim not just to rescue varieties of tomato, wheat, cucumber and watermelon, but also to continue that work of skilful, watchful selection for properties that best fit changing conditions. Heirloom seeds are not inert and ornamental inheritances meant, like grandmother's vase, for reverent display on the mantelpiece. Their meaning and value lie in the continued practice of choosing the most promising mutations from each generation of seed.

It is no exaggeration to say that these varieties seem imbued with personality, even personhood. The Haba Soda wheat strain is known better by its nickname, Abu Samra, and its mention frequently inspires people to relate childhood memories of its flavour - 'Better than cake!' Some remember being clipped round the ear for over-watering tomatoes and so jeopardising their exquisite flavour.

'People really cared about what they ate as a flavour, not just about size and quantity,' says Vivien. 'But we also learn that people really respected and surrendered to the power and generosity of nature. The stories of these crops remind me of a time when humans were perhaps less anxious, and more trusting that nature would provide for us. In this work I find myself examining my own journey and my own anxiety and seeing how we as a human species destroyed so much due to our incredible fear and lack of faith in anything that is already there.'

Gathering from nature's wild generosity is also a deeply-rooted feature of Palestinian culture and Mediterranean cuisine, but one that is also threatened: "At the opening of the Seed Library we served , a wild foraged green. The older generation know what it is but the younger ones do not, and this was an opportunity to talk about it.

'We have a huge array of wild greens, but those varieties have become less and less integrated into our cuisine because of lack of access to land. So for example, , a kind of thistle: in many areas where women traditionally went out to gather it, the army confiscates it and fines them - they say it's illegal, supposedly for the protection of nature.

'It's very similar to what happened in the Americas, where the Europeans made large areas into nature reserves, making it difficult for Native Americans to actually make use of their land, which is how they had lived. It's the same for us, but it is also often because of military control and military zones, so it's not as safe to go and forage there .'

Violence, or its threat, is an everyday lived reality under occupation and apartheid. But I am startled to hear that Vivien, a horticulturalist, perceives it even in her own work: 'Agriculture, while important of course, is violent in its roots. It's emotionally violent in that it comes from a sense of lack, as if we're constantly tormented because we feel we don't have enough and we want to make more, we want to save more, we want to control what's around us to fit our needs and to soothe our anxiety. Which we all do in our real lives.'

And yet she acts - and she acts as if it's not too late to do so. It's something I struggle with, despite living in much greater peace, privilege and freedom in the West: How to act from a position of seeming powerlessness? What sources of strength and knowledge to draw on and build from in a time of unpredictable, oppressive chaos? For Vivien the answer seems to be a faith in collective action, in the living, breathing ancestral ways of knowing and doing, and in the power of communal storytelling - heirloom knowledge - to forge the components necessary for ongoing, tenacious, stubborn survival. Faith, hope and action pollinating and fertilising each other.

'I feel that the journey of reviving these crops and of the seed library is about these same things. We live in a very unpredictable, unsettling, violent reality, and yet within this violent reality we're trying to find some consistency, some peace of mind, some life and some way to somehow love ourselves, because we've been so trained to think that we can't produce anything, that we're not good enough.'

Vivien's 'we' is the 'we' of colonised people everywhere, she explains.

'They had been told they were not good enough, that their traditions were "primitive". So the seed library acts a catalyst where we shift the dynamic to: "Wow, look what my grandmother did, she passed down to me a seed that can live without irrigation, and if my grandmother is intelligent enough to save these seeds and pass them down to me, then there must be something good in my DNA, just like there is something very brilliant in the DNA of this seed.'

'It's a shift in terms of how you think about your power versus the power of those you've been trained to think have so much power over you. We cannot combat these powers by trying to create an equivalent power, whether it is military or public relations, or a form of fighting in the traditional sense.'

I point out that she has just paraphrased Audre Lorde's maxim that you cannot dismantle the master's house using the master's tools.

'Exactly, I totally agree with that. And I feel it, I feel it strongly, because I think for many years, like many Palestinians, I felt there was nothing I could do in the face of this reality. And then someone asked me, "Well, where do you see your power?" And I had to sit with that question for a few years, actually, until I found a lot of power in the beauty that exists in the middle of all this chaos.

'There is so much beauty - and I think this applies not just to Palestine but everywhere - and I feel it's our duty as human beings living in this time to expand the beauty as much as we can so that it can hopefully overshadow the ugliness. So at least we know that we've left the new generation more beautiful spaces that they can find hope and power in, rather than just concrete, concrete, concrete. Our grandparents didn't leave us concrete, they left us a live seed. There's nothing more powerful than this message.'

This message, expressed through convergences of action, story and conviviality, will be borne through the West Bank as this year unfolds. Next to host will be the conurbation of Al Bireh, a city of 40,000 stomachs, countless passionately defended recipes and who knows how many new stories. After that, the village of Al Shawraweh and its thousand souls will welcome the kitchen's unfolding, and will proudly show the visitors its golden-green fields of the Abu Samra heirloom wheat they call 'the handsome brown one' - that flavour better than cake, its grains swelling with the promise of the most extraordinary freekeh soup. At some point amid all this, the library must answer queries about nut varieties from a thirst-stricken Californian almond industry in search of drought-ready alternatives. And welcome a delegation of Norwegians bearing old wheat grains on a pilgrimage that will retrace these Northern hemisphere seeds to their birthplace. This subtly rebellious, cross-fertilising, storifying project has already begun to cultivate a quiet, restorative revolution in Palestine that also offers gifts to a wider world-in-crisis.

(1) Epistemologies of the South: Justice Against Epistemicide, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, 2014

Khobeizeh

The Palestinian wild green, , is known in English as common mallow (in Latin, Malva sylvestris ), and is widely available to forage for in Britain. Take a little care in choosing a place you feel confident in picking from, as it likes to grow on roadsides and field edges where runoff and spray residue might be present. This is a very simple Palestinian recipe:
INGREDIENTS: (I don't think you need your hand to be held on amounts - include from each what you think you'll enjoy.)
Rinse the leaves and chop fairly roughly. Fry the onion for a few minutes before adding the leaves, garlic and salt. Simmer on a low heat until cooked, 10-15 minutes perhaps. Serve, adding a squeeze of lemon and some chilli pepper.

Gawan Mac Greigair's downward career trajectory has included journalism, political research, vegbox scheme admin, gleaning and digging fencepost holes on nature reserves. When moved to write, his interests have included Palestine, refugees and migration, and food systems.

On Twitter he is @gawanmac, and there's a selection of his freelance writing available at gawmac.wordpress.com .

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The Travelling Kitchen is an ingenious contraption. It can be dismantled, folded satisfyingly into a compact cuboid and slid into the boot of an estate car. A beautiful wooden construction with the dimensions of a humble street handcart, it is, too, unmistakably a work of art and skilled craftsmanship.

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If knowledge can be destroyed or confiscated, it is also concealed (which can, in the long run, precipitate its oblivion and hence its destruction if it is not preserved).

School textbooks and, more generally, the pedagogies used across the world speak for themselves. For example, parts of history that are not taught or outright denied, organs that are not represented (see the example of the rehabilitation of the representation of the clitoris), authors who are censored etc. We are thinking here in particular of women who are hidden, unmentioned or simply dispossessed of their own discoveries or inventions in the history of art, science and politics.

More generally, we will think of censorship which, at times, has resulted in the real loss of knowledge when the hidden works and documents have not been preserved.