Songs to Earth, Songs to Seeds

Helsinki Biennial 2023 presents Sepideh Rahaa’s installation comprising a multichannel video, Tarom Hashemi rice plants in a pot decorated with ancient natural elements of Iran-e-bastan, and handmade rice dolls. The work highlights issues of food security, access to clean water and nourishment as well as the importance of the traditions of sustainable cultivation in the current climate emergency. It brings to the fore the often invisible and inaccessible process of rice cultivation, the second most important staple food in the world.

She invites the audience to experience a process in which stories, water, paddy lands, rice grains and women’s labour – and their songs to the Earth and to the seeds – are intertwined with consumer life in our contemporary world.

The work’s visual narratives are interwoven with the local songs sung by women workers. The workers’ songs contain stories of their daily struggles in Mazani (one of the indigenous Iranian languages of the North) and are passed from grandmothers to mothers and daughters and sung during the cultivation and harvest seasons. The poetic piece connects cultures, languages, geographies, politics, and people through the portrayal of the process of labour and cultivation. It further hints at contemporary neo-colonial food politics and how Iranian farmers are forced by sanctions to use toxic chemical fertilizers, as well as the ongoing environmental crisis, in particular water shortages and soil contamination.

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