What makes the seed sprout?

2025

Exhibition at the Canónica of Santa Maria de Vilabertran, Catalonia.
As part of the Terrer Festival

Leaving the last sheaf in the field for the ants and birds, hanging a braid of wheat in the window to ask for good luck with the harvest, or creating octahedral himmeli structures, typical of Nordic countries, as an omen of prosperity; these are small links to a heritage that maintains the circularity of the times and symbols of traditional agriculture in the face of the prevailing materialist conception, blind to the magic of the germination of a seed, which lives only in the world of visible things, signified by their very nature.

Agrarian cults signal the devotional bond of a civilization with its land and a way of living in cohesion with nature; they are atavistic signs of the ancient cults of trees and agrarian deities, which sought the renewal of nature in uninterrupted movement; protectors of fertility and, at the same time, of life after death.

The group of pieces presented draws on the study of the symbolic ark that protects life, in substance and essence, until a new rebirth. The ark, like a berry that protects seeds from the elements, saves or preserves the seeds—and all life—during the universal flood. This is a story that goes back to the megalithic ships of the Bronze Age, and which we can recognize in the stories of traditions that precede us: in Noah’s Ark of the Old Testament, which, like a womb, preserves life on the planet; or in the Greek epic poem The Odyssey, where the ship is presented to us as another metaphor for the human desire to survive.

The evocation of this mythical world places us on the side of the enigma of the world; in addition to cultivating respect for the land we inhabit and an ethical attitude, it echoes some truth from the ancient correspondence between culture, cultivation, care and honour.