Consuming Nature. (Public Domain Photos of Public Domain Seeds)
The Luminary. St. Louis, MO
Curated by Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz. 2020

Consuming Nature is a series of site-specific billboards along the roadsides from Sauget, IL (formerly Monsanto) driving towards St. Louis, MO. The location is also a few miles from Cahokia Mounds, the site of the largest, most populous Native American urban settlement north of Mexico. The billboards are  accompanied by a sound work, and an essay published by MARCH. 

The images on the billboards are simple and nondescript—photos of hands holding wild, public domain, and open-source seeds, such as amaranth; a picture of health, collaboration, and lush nature in the contrasting landscape. The verb "to colonize" is derived from the Latin word colonus meaning "farmer, tiller, or planter,” linking colonialism to land and land use. Through Consuming Nature, Bergman and Salinas consider the contrast between food production as the most important technological project in civilization and the severing of people from their ability to produce food, thus destroying sovereignty. The Spanish conquistadors knew this, and soon after their conquest, they outlawed the Inca, Maya, Aztecs, and all indigenous conquered peoples from cultivating their most important, nutritious, and sacred crop: amaranth. Amaranth survived its colonial prohibition because it was a beloved, sacred, and resilient crop. In a turn of schadenfreude, wild amaranth developed into a “superweed” that grows quickly and adapts easily, choking out fields of modern agro-tech.

With accompanying audio and essay.