“The earth you think you’re on is not, it is someplace else, the only way you would know the place is from the flower.”  — Maria Thereza Alves

Over eighteen years, Maria Thereza Alves has disentangled the naturalization of bodies, ideas, and objects through her ongoing project Seeds of Change. Presented in various iterations and in collaboration with different communities, organizations, and art events, in countries ranging from England to France and Finland, Alves’ momentous body of work—encompassing an entire human generation—has given form to ongoing legacies of colonization that have recently come into sharp, violent focus in Europe and the United States.

For Alves, the use and occupation of conventional tools of analysis and scientific proof are the fodder for pointing to and delimiting modes and spaces for thinking anew about how and what we know. As Audre Lorde wrote in The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House, “those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference […] know that survival is not an academic skill.” In Seeds of Change Alves considers ballast soil—used to balance ships during colonial trade and displaced onto the shores of port cities—to steer her research. Working with soil as an interlocutor she traces the effects, impacts, and distribution of plants that can be seen as ciphers for individuals and communities sold as commodities in the transatlantic slave trade and branded accordingly. The persistence and survival of these beings form the literal and metaphorical ground of the exhibition.

By making this marginal byproduct of colonial trade—seeds inadvertently carried by ships as part of their ballast—the focus of her work Alves activates the knowledge of botanical experts, historical records and the “silent archive” Saidiya Hartman speaks of in relation to slavery. In so doing, she decolonizes the ways we know and engage with our surroundings. The exhibition Maria Thereza Alves, Seeds of Change: New York—A Botany of Colonization reworks the physical and discursive material that we shape and that shapes us in order to suggest a proximity between human body and land, both branded and marked by processes of often violent, sometimes inadvertent migrations. The artist’s constellation of markers elicits new modes of recognizing where we are, who we are, where we are from, and what we are responsible for—and to.

To understand this history from a material perspective, Alves researched the stories ballast flora tells us about migration, movement, trade, and valuation. Not surprisingly, the connection is immediate to  pressing issues of our contemporary moment such as indigeneity and belonging: which plants do and do not belong to this land; which plants stand to threaten “native” species and vice versa, and which have the “right” to be here? Rather than provide a comprehensive history of plant migration in the New York area, the artist examined, in detail, key moments of such encounters. She parsed, for instance, the Bulletin of the Torrey Botanical Club from 1879 to 1881 and then developed a list of ballast flora sites, including specific locations in New York City such as 107^th Street and 8^th Avenue in Manhattan, Hunter’s Point in Queens, Gowanus Creek in Brooklyn, Mott Haven and Oak Point in the Bronx, and Communipaw and Hoboken in New Jersey. The names of ships arriving or departing “in ballast” appear in the painting In Ballast: To and From New York. Another work, Traces from the Past: Some Ballast Material and Flora, shows ballast flora, ballast, and earlier manmade landfill that may, or may not, have included ship’s ballast.

These maps of land displaced in trade are supplemented by a series of watercolor paintings of ballast indicators and entitled accordingly: Ballast Indicator: Atriplex rosea; Ballast Indicator: Verbene officinalis; Ballast Indicator: Mercurialis annua; and Ballast Indicator: Diplotaxis-tenuifolia. Stylistically these works are akin to those of botanical illustrations produced during the 18^th and 19^th century that were seen as both appealing and scientifically valid. Alves has also included seven text-based works that relay specific narratives from ballast dumping sites in the New York area. These are transcribed by the artist into poetic accounts: “Peach Tree War,” “Whenever people were transported …,” “Spring had come …,” “The Liberia,” “Much Ballast arrived in 1877 from Norway …,” “Documents of Disturbance,” and “Inwood Park.”

Historical records and botanical journals cite the plants that have grown out of ballast soil as “non-indigenous.” Outside of botanical gardens and the realm of horticultural expertise, they are often referred to as “weeds” growing out of the cracks in the sidewalks, city parks, and suburban landscapes. Seeds of Change familiarizes visitors with these persistent and enduring plants through the extended project of the exhibition. Through this they begin to operate as keys to knowing an alternative, extra-anthropocentric mapping of the New York landscape and the traces of colonialism that continue to shape it.

In this New York iteration, the first in the Americas, the exhibition scales between micro and macro iterations through a network of partner sites around the New York area: The High Line in Chelsea, Pioneer Works in Red Hook, Weeksville Heritage Center in Crown Heights, and The New School in Greenwich Village. In the spring of 2017 approximately four hundred individual plants selected from thirty-eight species were propagated at Pioneer Works and The New School. These plants populate the gallery for the November 2017 exhibition at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center. In the spring of 2018 the same plants will be distributed to the full list of partner sites to live indefinitely as ballast flora gardens in those spaces.

This cultivation and dispersal organically tie together each site’s distinct history of trade and the distribution of people, plants and goods. Pioneer Works near the banks of the East River in Brooklyn is literally built on ballast: in the 1851, an Irish immigrant, William Beard, purchased land and gained permission to build the Eerie Basin, originally marsh land below the Brooklyn Docks where ships from around the world would dock. Beard invited ships to dump their ballast at the Basin to shore up the space producing a landmass that is largely made of ballast soil and populated by ballast flora. Weeksville Heritage Center is testimony to a community founded by African American freedmen, located between Bedford Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, and Brownsville, Brooklyn. After abolition purchasing land became a means for freed African Americans to gain economic and political freedom. Weeksville was established by stevedore James Weeks and others in 1838 to accomplish this. By the mid-1800’s Weeksville was providing for a community of five hundred people with their own newspaper, school, orphanage, housing and, perhaps most importantly, $250 worth of property owned by every non-white man—the ticket to democratic participation, i.e. a vote. The High Line is a public-private partnership park in Chelsea that was opened to the public in 2009 on elevated train tracks. Here, the story of ballast dispersal shifts from the ports to the Western frontier of this country. As goods arrived at the city’s ports, carrying seeds with them, they were loaded onto the trains that had traveled on what is now The High Line, themselves the carrier of seeds from the West and now transporting “non-native” seeds across the United States on their undercarriage.

In these pieces, Alves works an idea eloquently articulated by scholar Fred Moten, “seeing is a sensuous assemblage.” Using paint, text, and imagery the artist evokes an alternative way of knowing, by layering the stories plants tell as witnesses in the anthropocentric histories of trade and migration. The traces these plants leave, as annuals and perennials, create a map of colonialization that is deeply embedded yet often invisible in the landscape of New York City. Selected for their presence in sites around the New York area, the ballast flora in the exhibition sets up a key for the map of the city’s sites of colonization. In the shape-shifting cultural, economic and social environments of New York, Seeds of Change holds open physical and temporal spaces for thinking with the plants about the reasons that these landscapes are constructs we all actively co-produce.