Seedman         2007

Schrebergartens exist throughout Berlin. Essentially they represent both a desire for space and a desire for diversity of experience. This diversity extends to the ability of individuals to grow alternative food, meet a range of new acquaintances, and involve themselves in an environment closer to nature than their alternative home dwellings and apartments.

The roots of this phenomenon were accelerated in the deprived years following World War 1 and the subsequent deprivation of the Berlin blockade after World War 2.

In our current environment, and post unification, the gardens live on, not only as petty bourgeois playgrounds but as a potent symbol of a bio-diversity which is now threatened by globalisation and multinational feedlots.

As a result, all our tomatoes might eventually be cloned from one seed. Although this doesn’t happen yet, we are moving inexorably towards this destination.
Seedman is a character created to ride a very particular motor-scooter with a set of seed collecting side-cars.

Distinguished by his science fiction helmet and rubber fishing pants, Seedman and his exoskeleton motor-scooter become known in Berlin as the font of bio-diversity, via his Seed Bank. His existence echoes the specimen collecting antics of the Apollo mission astronauts  on the Moon.

Seedman collects seeds of up to 207 species, as listed below.

His journeys through Berlin are divided into trips of collection and trips of distribution.
Sidecar Pods are filled and detached from the motor scooter for incubation within the Seedbank Building and distribution at another time.

Trips of distribution are characterised by the offering or sale of new seeds to Schrebergarten inhabitants for planting in the appropriate calendar times.

The resulting plants maintain and create bio-diversity within the alternative market gardens of Berlin and become both a symbol and a practical example of how the totality of the Schrebergarten system works as an organism within the urban structure of Berlin.
Seedman is both performance art and the manifestation of an environmentally sustainable structuring device for the city.
Plus the tomatoes will taste better.