Organized by Allison Carruth and Rachel Lee,“The Cultural Politics of Seeds” symposium will look at how gender, ethnicity, and race shape contemporary cultural and political movements related to seeds. Conceived as a forum for integrating research, policy, activism, and art practice, this event will include day-long event with 3 panels and two keynote talks and a related art exhibit at UCLA’s Art/Sci Center featuring Fallen Fruit, the Los Angeles–based art collaborative. By bringing together farmers, artists, academics, and political organizers, the symposium demonstrates that to adequately examine seeds’ diverse functions in culture, taking a multifaceted approach is fundamental. “Moving into a century of 9 billion people and unprecedented pressures on the environment, there is nothing more important than how we will feed ourselves and the sustainability and equity of that enterprise,” says Glen M. MacDonald, Director and Distinguished Professor at the UCLA Institute of the Environment and Sustainability about the upcoming event. “Here is a thoughtful and multifaceted exploration of that challenge.” Participants in the symposium come from across the country, including farmers, artists, academics, and political organizers. Several participants take several of these titles. For example, Stephen S. Jones, a professor, collaborates with graduate students to develop wheat for organic and small farms that are underserved by traditional research programs.

Elaine Gan, an artist, lecturer, and Ph.D. student studying Film & Digital Media, is working on a multimedia web project that maps different varieties of rice and the ways in which they bring together bio-cultural entanglements and political economies. Artist-writer-critic Mathias Viegener will give a presentation on “Feral, Wild, Domestic and Social.” The symposium will include an installation by Fallen Fruit at UCLA Art/Sci Center + Lab . The event’s diverse presenters illuminate the inter-connections between individuals’ experiences working with seeds, plastic pots for planting and broader social and cultural systems. For example, Lucilia Martinez will give a co-presentation about her family’s development of a successful maize farm with ethnoecologist Daniela Solieri. Solieri works collaboratively with scientists and practitioners to analyze small-scale, local food systems, identifying key biological and sociocultural processes that may increase their resilience. The symposium will examine the ways in which seeds lead to the creation of social, political and artistic movements that intertwine with issues of gender, ethnicity, and race. It will explore how seeds become entangled with issues such as globalization, global climate change, and developments in genetic engineering and commodity markets. Finally, it will provide a forum for integrating research, policy, activism, and art practice.

According to Carruth, “The symposium brings together an exciting group of scholars in the fields of cultural geography, gender studies, comparative literature, anthropology, environmental studies and science, and plant science along with the three co-founders of LA-based Fallen Fruit as well as longtime urban agriculture and food justice activist Tezozomoc. We are fortunate to have had support from across campus to make this interdisciplinary conversation on the cultural politics of seeds possible.” “The Cultural Politics of Seeds” symposium is part of CSW’s multi-year “Life Ltd” research project, which is addressing the question of what impact recent developments in the bio-sciences and biotechnology have had on feminist studies. In this year, the group, led by Principal Investigator Rache Lee, is exploring the rich connections between food, ecology, propagation, and metabolism. Cosponsors of the symposium include University of California Humanities Research Initiative, Institute for Society and Genetics, Division of Life Sciences, Division of Humanities, Division of Social Sciences, Institute of American Cultures, Department of English, Institute of the Environment and Sustainability, School of Law, Chicano Studies Research Center, and Charles E. Young Research Library.How do people engage with fruit, and how does fruit engage with us? In what ways does fruit erect or problematize social boundaries? How can fruit bring people together, or tell us about the lives and behaviors of individuals? If fruit is endlessly intertwined with social and cultural politics, how can it become a means of positive change? These are some of the many questions raised by Fallen Fruit, a long-term art collaboration between visual artist David Burns, artist-writer-critic Mathias Viegener, and portrait photographer video artist Austin Young. Viegener will speak about one of the collaboration’s latest projects at the “Cultural Politics of Seeds” symposium hosted by CSW on May 17. Concurrently, an exhibition by Fallen Fruit will open at UCLA Art/Sci Center + Lab. Fallen Fruit began when the members of the group mapped fruit trees growing on or over public property in Los Angeles and it remains one of their core projects. In order to map local fruit, they explore neighborhoods to which they have been invited, creating maps of all the publically available fruit. The maps are hand drawn and distributed free from copyright as jpgs and PDFs. Several of these maps will be on display at Art/Sci. Since first embarking on the fruit mapping project, the collaboration has expanded to include serialized public projects, site-specific installations, and happenings in cities throughout the world. Fallen Fruit’s projects cover all media .

Through its happenings and museum exhibitions, the group takes particular interest in working with public space and those who travel through it. At the symposium, Viegener will talk about Fallen Fruit’s pending public art project titled “Feral, Wild, Domestic and Social,” a one quarter-acre watermelon patch in the center ofa small town in rural Alabama. During a brief residency in Fall 2012, the group learned that watermelons had once grown on vacant lots throughout the town, partly as the result of people spitting watermelon seeds in the vicinity. Over the years the lots became bare as the result of industrially produced seedless minimelons , sold in supermarkets nationwide. “Mother Patch” will be a public watermelon patch in which visitors will be encouraged to “spit their seeds” as they please, in the hopes that the land’s legacy of natural, community rooted watermelon production may begin again. “This narrative links to the variety of feral stone fruit we’ve found growing in Copenhagen, Northern California and Santa Fe, New Mexico,” says Viegener, in correspondence. “These plants have a symbiotic relationship with us, but a happier one than feral dogs or cats. We’re interested in this kind of peripatetic communal culture that not only links communities but also plants, animals and humans in significant relationships.” In addition to creating public spaces and events built upon the growing and harvesting of natural fruit, Fallen Fruit comments on the broad social implications of these events through the use of mixed media. Fallen Fruit’s 2008 video Double Standard, currently featured on their website, exemplifies how the collaboration melds real time public happenings with various forms of media in order to chart different ways in which fruit functions in society’s social and geographical structures, illuminating issues of sexuality, race, class, and the mediation of “public interaction.” The video juxtaposes unedited footage from two video cameras, documenting one of Fallen Fruit’s Neighborhood Fruit Forages, an event at which people gathered to take a tour of Los Angeles, exploring public places where fruit grows. The videos are overlaid with a text block of comments from a short public television video of the same event that was posted on YouTube. The comments range from insightful to homophobic and racist, drainage for plants in pots creating what the group’s website calls “an alternative, cynical narrative to the events.” The Neighborhood Fruit Forage was an effort to bring people together and consider the roles that fruit plays in public urban space. Double Standard incorporates the event with mixed media in order to challenge participants’ and viewers’ experiences. Fallen Fruit’s website points out that the video probes “at the correspondence between the public walking on the tour and the anonymous public of the internet.” This year, the group was also invited to do a project with TED Active. They devised “The Banana Hotline,“ wherein the public is invited to follow a set of instructions, record a memory, and email the audio or video to the group, who will then put together “a living monument of sound.” The exhibit at Art+Sci will also include The Loneliest Fruit in the World . This video portrays the human activities, interactions, and explorations that spring up around a stand of arctic berries growing near Tromsö, Norway: “Against a beautiful, spare landscape peppered with tiny blueberries,” according to the website description, “the video follows a group of Norwegians who while picking negotiate the relation between solitude, gleaning and company.”During early stages of growth and development, fruit present a higher number of functional xylems, which decreases toward fruit maturation possibly due to the accumulation of substances, such as callose, leading to physical blockage , embolism, and loss of the hydrostatic gradient between the peduncle and distal ends of the fruit .

Indeed, studies have found a decrease in xylem flow in the developing sweet cherry , grape, orange, pear , tomato , and apple . The decrease in xylemic flow starts from minor veins in the distal portion of the fruit towards the major bundles at the proximal end, and at maturity, xylem transport is restricted to a small portion of tissue located between the receptacle at the pedicel end and the cavity just proximal to the seeds, making it impossible for water and particularly Ca2+ to reach the distal portion of the fruit . Furthermore, studies in tomatoes revealed that cultivars with long shaped fruit, like ‘San Marzano’ and ‘Banana Legs’, are more prone to lose xylem functionality during fruit growth and have increased BER incidence than round shaped genotypes . These studies have suggested that the higher the rate of fruit xylem functionality loss, the lower fruit Ca2+ uptake and the higher fruit susceptibility to BER. One approach that has being used to increase and/or maintain higher xylem functionality during fruit growth and development is the application of abscisic acid . ABA is a well-studied plant hormone, and its concentration rapidly increases during stress conditions. ABA signaling induces stomata closure, decreasing plant water loss via transpiration, leading to an increased plant water use efficiency , in ABA over expressing lines, which can also help mitigate the negative effects of drought and high temperatures on fruit production . During plant stress conditions, there is a decrease in auxin and an increase in ABA biosynthesis, inhibiting growth and changing plant morphology, such as increasing the number of xylem vessels to overcome the restrictive environment . Many genes have been shown to control plant xylem vessel differentiation in response to ABA, including CELLULOSE SYNTHASE, LACCASE, XYLEM CYSTEINE PEPTIDASE, as well as genes encoding transcription factors MYB46, MYB83, VND2, VND3, and VND7 . Thus, ABA plays an important role in controlling xylem differentiation. However, there are no studies identifying genes that could maintain xylem differentiation in the fruit under high ABA biosynthesis. Although exogenous ABA applications have been shown to increase plant resistance to abiotic stresses, an interesting alternative to external ABA application is the manipulation endogenous ABA concentration within plant tissues. ABA content can be controlled by manipulating expression of genes coding for enzymes involved in ABA biosynthesis, mainly its rate-limiting enzyme 9-cis-epoxycarotenoid dioxygenase . Previous studies had success on controlling NCED expression using either a constitutive promoter or an inducible system, such as the tetracycline , dexamethasone , rbcS3C promoter , ecdysone receptor and methoxyfenozide , stress promoter RD29A and RD29B genes , all of which resulted in higher ABA synthesis, as well as morphological and physiological changes. However, those approaches present some technical problems to study BER. First, constitutive promoters, like Cauliflower Mosaic virus 35S , directs gene expression uniformly in most tissues, cells at all stages of plant growth and development , and a varied expression effects result from its interaction with environmental factors and the physiological state of the plant’s development . In addition, the ability of constitutive promoters to direct high levels of transgene expression can be a limiting factor when temporal and spatial gene expression patterns are required to achieve manipulation of specific plant organs or developmental stages . Inducible promoters, triggered by physical or chemical factors, have been shown to be a powerful tool to regulate the expression of genes at certain stages of plant or tissue development . In Arabidopsis, an example is RD29 genes, in which two genes, RD29A and RD29B, are stress induced, where RD29A is induced by drought and cold and RD29B by salt stress .