Banking on the Future

Banking on the Future Commentary by Diana Lipton Cite Share Show Bible Passage He brought him outside and said, ‘Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them’. Then he said to him, ‘So shall your descendants be’. (Genesis 15:14) Biblical Hebrew applies the word zera, ‘seed’, both to human offspring, such as the descendants promised to Abram in Genesis 15, and to the reproductive units of plants. Dornith Doherty, a Professor at the University of North Texas, uses photography, video, animations, works on paper, and scientific imaging to highlight ecological and philosophical issues arising from human interaction with the environment. Doherty thinks about how, at a time of climate crisis and threatened biodiversity, we can protect nature in the far future. Archiving Eden is an ongoing collaborative project in which she creates images of seed banks and the seeds they preserve. Using X-ray equipment intended to assess viability, Doherty documents and collages seeds and tissue samples from all around the globe. The magnified images of forms invisible to the naked eye inspire awe, she says, in the power of tiny plantlets and seeds to survive for as long as two hundred years with the capacity to generate new life. In the work shown here, Doherty used lenticular animation, a technology that employs special lenses to produce images that seem to change or move when viewed from different angles. This digital collage of domesticated varieties of husk corn shifts through green, yellow, and brown as viewers pass by, mimicking changes in seeds as they are dried for preservation. These still photographs whose colours change as they are looked at by viewers allow Doherty to preserve a single moment in these seeds’ lives while at the same time suggesting nature’s ongoing processes. Preservation and process: there is an echo here of the goal of the seed banks, as scientists preserve seeds from the relentless depredations of human activity, not so much to stop time as to shape its course; to point to potential future transformations in the lives of these seeds. In some cases, the banks and the people who built and maintain them inspire as much awe as the seeds themselves. In St Petersburg during the Second World War, a group of scientists starved to death to safeguard seeds they could otherwise have eaten, for the sake of a future they hoped in. Doherty’s photographs put us in touch with a hope like theirs—and perhaps like Abram’s.