“The project documents audio conversations with Englewood Elders and activates these memories through installing “little free seed libraries” at corresponding neighborhood sites, stocked with flower/vegetable seeds packaged with collaged ephemera and paired with a QR/digital link to Elders’ conversations, thereby providing residents dynamic entry points to meaningfully engage with narratives of their neighbors.”
Harvest Seasoning:
Story-Banking & Seed-Saving with Englewood Elders
Ms. Barbara Miller
Recorded September 2024 [posting soon]
During Cooperation Racine’s initial 2023 community outreach, two clear themes emerged in conversations with neighborhood Elders:
First, a deep worry that our generations (Older Millennials & Gen Z) will never see the full spectrum of joy and abundance that the neighborhood once had.
Second, the generations coming after us will be unable to imagine neighborhood possibilities beyond the violence and socioeconomic precariousness that decades of disinvestment have reinforced.
A particular urgency underlies these two threads.
Elders yearn to preserve & share these histories during their lifetime.
They are also aware that sharing their stories could potentially change the trajectory of young neighbors and foster deeper care and appreciation for the neighborhood.
Mr. Essell Booker
Recorded August 2024 [posting soon]
Through Harvest Seasoning, Cooperation Racine, LWCA is supporting Elders in documenting their legacies–personal, familial, community–and sharing these experiences with neighbors, K-8 youth, and the broader public. The medium of seeds as a connecting bridge reflects the deep history in Black & Brown communities of gardens as sites of sustenance and resistance.
The tradition of seed saving, wherein Elders protected and preserved the community's seed collection, ensured continued economic prosperity, nutritional variety, and cultural pride as a particular varieties of fruits and vegetables were a source of pride for a family establishing themselves in a new community, during the Great Migration, for example.
Rather than a traditional, linear, scripted Q/A, our time together is structured around a series of “conversation stems”, forming a foundation of the nature, path, and values reflected in the larger project. In contrast to an interview, we encourage Elders to organically flow through these items and partner with us to select excerpts of their conversations to be preserved in the Story-Bank. Elders are given full, unabridged recordings for their personal and family archives.
With generous support from Terra Foundation for American Art’s Art Design Chicago and Hyde Park Art Center’s Artists Run Chicago Fund, we look forward to hosting a Community Harvest Celebration on October 12, 2024. The celebration will be a time to honor Elders featured in the Story-Bank and officially unveil the “little free seed library” on the site of our community arts hub, ‘71st & Racine’.
We hope that every visit to the “little free seed library” and the Harvest Seasoning Story-Bank encourages folks to spread the richness of Englewood throughout your community.