Ballast flora is a category of plants that has become part of the English landscape. It refers to the product of seeds which were brought to this country in the ballast on ships, particularly between the 18th and early 20th century when it was commonly used in mercantile shipping. Ballast generally consisted of sand, stone, earth, pebbles, shells or other cheap materials that came to hand, which was used to balance ships if their cargo was too lightweight. Arriving in port the ballast was unloaded (often clandestinely to avoid taxes), and with it came seeds from all around the world. These ‘ballast seeds’ can sometimes lie dormant for hundreds of years in the mudflats of tidal rivers.
In Bristol, the Brazilian artist, Maria Thereza Alves has researched the sites where ballast would have been off-loaded around the Floating Harbour and along the Avon River, digging up samples of earth in which seeds might lie dormant. With the help of local individuals and groups (many of whom have family links to the port cities Bristol traded with), these ‘ballast seeds’ have been germinated. The resulting array of plants, which have grown up from these small plots of the local terrain, could thus be seen as a living embodiment of the port’s history of trade, reflecting the different routes travelled by Bristol merchants worldwide. Alves says, “Seeds of Change: BRISTOL is an attempt to re-establish the histories of complexities of ballast flora and the potential of individual histories that these plants were witness to, previously isolated from their intimate connection to the economic and social history of Bristol.”
Maria Thereza Alves has also developed a proposal to create a semi-permanent Ballast Garden and the English Landscape Research Institute on Wapping Quay, beside the new Museum of Bristol.
Maria Thereza Alves (1960, Brazil) lives and works in Berlin. She attended the Cooper Union School of Art in New York and was awarded a DAAD scholarship (Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdients/German Academic Exchange Service) in 2000. She has had shows across Europe and North America and has recently exhibited at: Manifesta 7 (Trentino – Alto Adige), 2008; Greenwashing (Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin), 2008; Port City. On Mobility and Exchange (Bristol), 2007; Quanahuac (Kunsthalle, Basel), 2006; Liverpool Biennial, 2004; Rest in Space (Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin), 2003; Venice Biennial (2001). She was co-founder of the Green Party in Brazil.
Maria Thereza Alves researches social and cultural phenomena; working particularly with situations which question social circumstances about what we think we know and who we think we are instead at where and how we actually are at this time.
http://project.arnolfini.org.uk/cgi-bin/wiki/history.cgi?section=BallastGarden&page=Home&hv=20080218112552
http://www.amaze.it/eng/?q=node/241
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