Ecologies of Dispersal: Sound, Seeds, Holding

This research project explores the concept of dispersal through the interconnected lenses of sound and seeds, drawing on ecological motifs such as dormancy, seed shadows, and germination. Botanical processes are proposed as a critical framework with which to interrogate how both seeds and sounds are transported into, collected, held within, and potentially released from institutional spaces; sounds and seeds resist containment, yet they may become fixed within archival and museological logics.

The investigation takes on two case studies: firstly, the Caxixi, an Afro-Brazilian percussion instrument traditionally used in Capoeira, which is composed of a gourd base, woven plant fibres, and contains wild banana seeds. The Caxixi becomes a focal object through which to trace layered histories of movement—botanical, musical, and cultural—reflecting broader patterns of global trade, forced migration, and colonial entanglement. By following the material and sonic trajectories of the Caxixi, the project examines the ecological and historical implications of its components: the banana plant as a carrier of colonial and agricultural histories, and Capoeira music as a diasporic and resistant form of embodied sound. The research will be conducted through engagements with the collections of the Ethnological Museum and the Phonogram Archive in Berlin—institutions that hold both sounds and seeds of the Caxixi.

The paleobotanical collection of the Natural History Museum in Berlin provides a further point of inquiry. The focus lies in particular on fossilised seeds that were extracted from the earth during lignite mining in former East Germany (Lusatia) and are now held in the storage facility in Berlin, the river Spree is an ongoing connector of these regions, a hydrological and historical corridor through which the legacy pollutants of the industrial era continue to be dispersed. The seeds gesture towards multiple temporal and spatial registers: the subtropical, swampy ecosystems of 300 million years ago; the extractions and legacies of industrial modernity; and the infrastructural systems of museum holdings and institutional care. As ‘non-viable’ forms suspended in stone, they invite a reading of dispersal that spans deep geological time and contemporary conservational logics. In this way, fossilised seeds operate not only as botanical specimens but as resonant figures within the project’s broader inquiry into the ecologies of relation between deep geological time, industrial and agro- modernity, epistemology and infrastructures. 

This project is part of the Research and Fellowship Program 4A Laboratory: Art Histories, Archaeologies, Anthropologies, Aesthetics, a cooperation between the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz – Max-Planck-Institut and the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz.