Lecture-performance & participatory workshop / 2024-ongoing / in collaboration with Martina Melilli
Did you water your plants? is an ongoing collaborative research project by Alyona Larionova and Martina Melilli exploring motherhood, ecology and care through seeds, storytelling and collective acts of planting. The project begins in autumn with a lecture-performance and a writing workshop. Participants write stories of care onto handmade seeded paper. Their stories are kept through the winter and planted together in spring, where they eventually grow into a meadow or garden.
The lecture-performance opens with the Haudenosaunee creation story of Skywoman, as told by Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass. Skywoman falls from the Skyworld carrying a bundle of seeds from the Tree of Life. She scatters them onto the newly formed earth and tends them until the ground turns from brown to green. From Skywoman’s bundle, we turn to our own bundle of seeds. For the first public presentation of the project at Bolzano Art Weeks 2026, we were given a Nützlingswiese (“beneficial-insect meadow”) seed mixture containing around seventy species of grasses, herbs and flowers. On the packet the plants appear simply as names. We followed some of those names a little further.
What travels with a seed and what is left behind?
Some things travel easily. Names. A seed packet. Instructions for how and when to sow. Other things are harder to carry. Stories about how a plant was tended and by whom, how it was shared, prepared, offered, remembered – and who, in turn, it cared for. After the lecture, participants are invited to think of an instance of care and write it onto seeded paper made with the seeds from our bag. The seeded paper is a container. The fibres of the paper physically hold the seeds. Those seeds have stories of their own. Some we have been able to trace, others we haven’t.
What happens when one story touches another? Not through naming, but through writing something lived.
This is the moment when the stories touch. Months later, the paper is planted. Water dissolves the writing, and soil, microbes and roots take over. What emerges is a meadow or garden that holds these different stories together.
The project will continue through future iterations with different communities, institutions and seeds. In some places the seeds will be selected by us; in others, as in Bolzano, they may come to us through the particular context in which we are working. Each new bundle brings different histories and relationships into the research, while the seasonal structure remains: writing in autumn, holding through winter, planting in spring.
The lecture-performance opens with the Haudenosaunee creation story of Skywoman, as told by Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass. Skywoman falls from the Skyworld carrying a bundle of seeds from the Tree of Life. She scatters them onto the newly formed earth and tends them until the ground turns from brown to green. From Skywoman’s bundle, we turn to our own bundle of seeds. For the first public presentation of the project at Bolzano Art Weeks 2026, we were given a Nützlingswiese (“beneficial-insect meadow”) seed mixture containing around seventy species of grasses, herbs and flowers. On the packet the plants appear simply as names. We followed some of those names a little further.
What travels with a seed and what is left behind?
Some things travel easily. Names. A seed packet. Instructions for how and when to sow. Other things are harder to carry. Stories about how a plant was tended and by whom, how it was shared, prepared, offered, remembered – and who, in turn, it cared for. After the lecture, participants are invited to think of an instance of care and write it onto seeded paper made with the seeds from our bag. The seeded paper is a container. The fibres of the paper physically hold the seeds. Those seeds have stories of their own. Some we have been able to trace, others we haven’t.
What happens when one story touches another? Not through naming, but through writing something lived.
This is the moment when the stories touch. Months later, the paper is planted. Water dissolves the writing, and soil, microbes and roots take over. What emerges is a meadow or garden that holds these different stories together.
The project will continue through future iterations with different communities, institutions and seeds. In some places the seeds will be selected by us; in others, as in Bolzano, they may come to us through the particular context in which we are working. Each new bundle brings different histories and relationships into the research, while the seasonal structure remains: writing in autumn, holding through winter, planting in spring.
All images © Fanny Fazekas