AMHERST, MA and NEW YORK, NY—Amherst College Press and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School are pleased to announce the second book in their publishing partnership, Maria Thereza Alves: Seeds of Change, edited by Carin Kuoni and Wilma Lukatsch. It is the first book to highlight renowned Brazilian-born artist Maria Thereza Alves’s twenty-year investigation into the hidden history of ballast flora—plant seeds found in the soil used to balance shipping vessels—to trace the relationship between displaced plant species and the colonial maritime trade of goods and enslaved peoples. While the print edition will be released March 14, 2023, the e-book is available now at acpress.amherst.edu.

In a career spanning fifty years, Brazilian artist Maria Thereza Alves has focused on questions of belonging in an era of extractivist economies, forced mobility, and climate change. One of Alves’s most iconic, generative, and expansive works, Seeds of Change examines the influx and significance of imported plants to reveal the entangled history of “alien” plant species and the colonial maritime trade of goods and enslaved peoples, inviting us to de-border postcolonial historical narratives and consider a “borderless history.”

Each chapter of the new book delves into one iteration of Seeds of Change, which has materialized at port cities across several continents: Marseille, Reposaari, Liverpool, Exeter and Topsham, Dunkerque, Bristol, Antwerp, and most recently New York, where it was awarded the Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School. Section introductions by the artist are augmented by material and artifacts from her studio. The intimacy of Alves’s personal accounts then gives way to illuminating contributions by a range of scholars, curators, artists, and historians, including Seth Denizen, Katayoun Chamany, Jean Fisher, Yrjö Haila, Heli M. Jutila, Radhika Subramaniam, Lara Khaldi, Richard William Hill, J. Kēhaulani Kauanui, Tomaž Mastnak, and Marisa Prefer.

Of the book, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Director of the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art in Torino and 2016–2018 Jane Lombard Prize jury chair says: “Seeds of Change addresses urgent questions of resistance to the homogenization of life itself. By reimagining the historical geography of the contemporary world, Maria Thereza Alves practices globalization from below to understand the planet as a holistic ecology. Seeds of Change tracks the routes of transport of goods and people while making visible the dormant potentialities of soil, seas, and people.”

Amherst College Press publishes pathbreaking, peer-reviewed scholarship and makes it available to readers everywhere as digital, open-access work. Titles are published on Fulcrum, a platform created by University of Michigan Publishing, allowing narrative to be richly integrated with multimedia and optimized for long-term preservation and accessibility. acpress.amherst.edu

The Vera List Center for Art and Politics is a non-profit research center at The New School in New York. Through its dynamic interdisciplinary programs, conferences, artist fellowships, residencies, exhibitions, and publications, the VLC imagines and supports new forms of politically engaged art, research, public scholarship, and community around the world. www.veralistcenter.org