A BOTANY OF DECOLONIZATION—AN EXCERPT FROM MARIA THEREZA ALVES: SEEDS OF CHANGE

PUBLIC SEMINAR, FEBRUARY 13, 2023

“My focus draws on some of the themes brought into sharp relief in the [New York iteration of Maria Thereza Alves’s Seeds of Change project]—specifically the observation that ballast flora in Europe is not the same as ballast flora in North America. Here, it is evidence of the economic systems of enslavement in the context of settler colonization. The Dutch systematically enslaved African people, introducing slavery to the continent when they first settled the colony. Both the English and the Americans carried on this system of terror when they superseded the Dutch. For more than two centuries, New York was considered the capital of American slavery. As Alves points out in her essay accompanying the New York exhibition, ‘The transport of bodies in ships required ballast to offset their movement.’ She explains how ships arrived from England with ballast material such as flint, iron, and soil, and from the Caribbean with coral, volcanic sand, bricks, stones, and rocks. Alves unearths historical ballast sites and ballast flora through her careful archival research, scientific investigation, and artistic representation of these complex and multilayered histories. Among many important elements in the New York iteration of the project, we learn that the settler colonists used ballast as landfill to flatten it out to marketable territory that could then be demarcated for commodification. And, as Alves explains in the same publication, “Upon arrival in port, the ballast was unloaded, carrying with it seeds native to the area where the ballast had been picked up. […] Colonization is built into the very soil of New York. A process of decolonization must begin on the ground.” This begs the question: What of the Indigenous peoples who are ontologically rooted in that soil?”

J. Kēhaulani Kauanui