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Short abstract:

The talk discusses an art project conserving biocultural diversity in the Arctic permafrost alongside the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. It challenges the biocentrism of contemporary conservation efforts against biodiversity loss and rearticulates conservation as a practice of mourning ecological loss.

Long abstract:

In the presently unfolding mass extinction we witness a tremendous de-diversification of more-than-human life. In globalized agriculture – a key driver of the techno-capitalist destruction of biological diversity – growing awareness of biodiversity loss comes with increased efforts to conserve ‘plant genetic diversity’ in seedbanks. The pinnacle of this ex situ approach to conservation is the Svalbard Global Seed Vault (SGSV), an international backup storage for the world’s seeds that promises to extend the present of a world on the brink of extinction by making agrobiodiversity loss reversible.

I critically discuss this approach to undoing past and present unmakings through an art exhibition staged in Svalbard in 2019: the ‘Agri/Cultures.Seed-Links Exhibition – Conserving Cultural Connections with Seeds.’ It allows me to question what conservation conserves as well as what for. I show that by conserving a collection of ‘biocultural diversity’ alongside the Arctic seed collection, first, the project illustrates a key reservation about ex situ conservation: its inattention to the ecological and cultural worlds biodiversity arises from, which continue to be destroyed outside the seedbank. Second, I argue that by performing a practice of commemorating and mourning endangered biocultural diversity, the project opens up a fundamentally different understanding of conservation. Insofar as mourning denotes a practice of not only beweeping and letting go of lost lives and relations but fostering new life-sustaining relations, it invites to rethink conservation as a mode of being present in worlds on the brink of extinction by simultaneously turning to lost pasts and open futures.