➔ Fabulochoria

2023 - ongoing
Anna Siekierska and Agnieszka Dragon

Through guided seed walks, storytelling, workshops and exhibitions, Fabulochory project opens to questions regarding humans’ relations to seeds.

The container is used to collect and store goods. Ursula K. Le Guin concludes that it may have been one of the earliest cultural creations. In her essay 'The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction', she describes the possibility of spinning a story from the position of the collector. Can a story about the daily collection of seeds into a container be as interesting as a hunter's tale full of sharp tools and fast-paced action? Story matters. We want to spin the stories of women collectors and give a voice back to the people involved in collecting and storing seeds, and help to listen to the voices of more-than-humans.

For the three exhibitions in DOMIE (Poznań), Stroboskop (Warsaw), Galeria UL (Gdańsk), we showed sculptures depicting scaled-up seeds of the greater calandine, bidens and lime and pictures of the various seed containers. It was an attempt to capture the different ways in which people hold seeds and pass them on to each other. The bean seeds brought back after the outbreak of war by a woman from Ukraine became iconic for us, in which the past, the future, identity and hope are revealed. The photographs are kept in the style of family albums and traditional photographic studios. They also refer to scientific publications documenting natural objects, i.e. stones, meteorites, insects. Unconventionally professional, evoking the aesthetics of early digital photography.


An additional element was to conduct walks in each city to overgrown sites, inviting participants to create their own seed containers. This became the basis for the development of the Fabulochory zine.