Allotment Garden Event Series // Crocodile Seeds by The Migrant Ecologies Project

Saturday 16 March 2023 at 3 p.m.–4:30 p.m.  
Museum of Finnish Architecture, 2nd Floor, Kasarmikatu 23, 00130 Helsinki 
Museum admission fee (20/10/0 € or Museum Card)  

Bioartistic approach, storytelling, and plant cultivation meet the varied themes of the Garden Futures exhibition, as visual artist Lucy Davis presents her fascinating work at Museum of Finnish Architecture in collaboration with Bioart Society. 

Crocodile Seeds is an artistic research project that explores a 130-year-old dead crocodile, its history, and its contents.  

The 4.7 meters tall crocodile was killed in Singapore in 1888 and given to the British colonial Raffles Museum. It was stuffed with straw of yet unknown providence. From this straw, were gleaned cereal grains, and as-yet-unidentified plant and flower seeds. 

Organic farmer, Magnus Selenius and his niece Embla Lindblad from Nyby Gård, Espoo, specialise in older cereal varieties, and are trying to grow the seeds and cultivate this ‘crocodile meadow’. 

Another story concerns the historical figure of Pang Limah Ah Chong, a 19th C. Chinese, Taoist mystic and tin mine Triad leader in Colonial Malaya. According the a 1948 article in the Straits Times, his spirit resides in the same crocodile. 

How might incongruous materials and beings, hosted by this colonial trophy, seed stories that inspire in a time of climate change? 

The event is part of the Garden Futures: Designing with Nature exhibition program. The exhibition is the first collaborative exhibition between the Museum of Finnish Architecture and Design Museum on their journey towards a new architecture and design museum. It will sprawl across both museums, taking over the exhibition spaces on Kasarmikatu and Korkeavuorenkatu from November 10, 2023 to March 31, 2024.  

The event can accommodate 30 participants. 

Lucy Davis 

Lucy Davis is a visual artist, art writer and founder of The Migrant Ecologies Project. Her transdisciplinary practice encircles plant genetics, tree lore and bird song as well as art/science, naturecultures, memory, materiality, narrative environments, and most recently, pyscho-ecologies of resilience. She is Associate Professor (Contemporary Art) in Visual Cultures, Curating and Contemporary Art (ViCCA) Department of Art & Media, Aalto University, Finland. 

www.migrantecologies.org 

Bioart Society 

Bioart Society is a Helsinki-based association developing, producing, and facilitating activities around art and natural sciences with an emphasis on biology, ecology, and life sciences. The association facilitates Ars Bioarctica, an art & science program with focus on the sub-arctic environment together with the Kilpisjärvi Biological Station of the University of Helsinki as well as the Tokyo Art & Science Research residency together with the BioClub Tokyo and The Finnish Institute in Japan. Bioart Society was established in May 2008 and it currently has over 130 members from Finland and other countries.