Public Talks with scientists, law professors, farmers, artists and poets. on seeds, patents and traditional knowledge

The Commons: towards reclaiming collective power, series hosted by Bergman & Salinas in parallel to Contra el Bien General exhibition at Artspace New Haven. The series featured scholars, poets, knowledge keepers, and local partners whose work expand affinities and perspectives of seed sovereignty and ecologies. Participants include: Doreen Abubakar, Urban Environmentalist and Founder and Executive Director of the Community Place-making Engagement Network; Jack Kloppenberg, Professor Emeritus of Community & Environmental Sociology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison; Gerald Torres, Professor of Environmental Justice at the Yale School of the Environment; Vishwas Satgar, Associate Professor of International Relations at the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa; alongside Ronny Lec, Mayan Ancestral Knowledge keeper from the Instituto Mesoamericano de Permacultura (IMAP); and poets Rae Armantrout, Adjua Gargi Nzinga Greaves, and Sky Hopinka, Harvard.

De Gran Valor, talk in parallel to De Gran Valor public artwork. at Centro Cultural de Espana La Paz, Bolivia as a continuation of Bergman & Salinas' research in under-appreciated native plants. The talk was on Tarwi, a pre-Hispanic Andean legume with high cultural importance, that has been in decline as a staple ingredient in recent generations. Bergman & Salinas invited María Eugenia Galarreta, producer and processor of Tarwi, José Vicente Rojas, agricultural engineer, professor of Experimental Designs and Biostatistics in the Agricultural Engineering Program at the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés and Universidad Pública de El Alto. Agustina Huajlliri, Tarwi producer in Carabuco, Bolivia and Leslie Salazar, executive director of the Bolivian Food and Gastronomic Integration Movement (MIGA), a non-profit civil entity that seeks to enhance the value of Bolivian Food Heritage.