Semillas al Viento: We Are Scattered Seeds
Cultura Ithaca Latinx Heritage 2022 Art Exhibition
Curated by Daniela Rivero

Latinx Heritage month coincides with the fall equinox and the Northern Hemisphere’s descent into the darker months of the year. For growers of all kinds in upstate New York, autumn is the time for harvest and seed saving. For millennia, our ancestors have participated in the life-giving tradition of taking stock of their crop, deciding which plants are for sustenance and which are for seed, and giving offerings and thanks to the Gods before reaping. It is a practice of reaching back through time and seeing far into the future. For those of us that have been scattered by wind, war, dreams, water, fire, violence and empire, this practice looks very different than it did for our ancestors and grandparents.

In a recent episode of Seeds And Their People, farmer and seed saver, Chris Bolden-Newsome, speaks about “the seeds that fall on the floor” during processing, seeds that he will “sweep up and throw into the backyard with a prayer”, reminding him that all of us come from scattered people, scattered seeds. Semillas al Viento is a wild garden of work by artists from all over the Latin American and Caribbean Diaspora. Through a range of mediums, they explore what it is to find ourselves here, scattered, growing through the cracks in the pavement and the fields in the hills. We ask, What is encoded in us? What stories, knowledge, and ways of being do we save and pass on? What do we scatter to the wind?