Collecting Seeds, Assembling Worlds

How has the world lost three quarters of its crop diversity in less than a century? How does a collection of seeds frozen in the Arctic help face this loss and the growing threat of food insecurity? And how can Indigenous knowledges and artistic interventions inspire modes of dealing with agrobiodiversity loss that respond to contemporary socio-ecological transformations with care rather than techno-salvationism? Franziska von Verschuer traces these questions from the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the world's stronghold against agrobiodiversity loss, to divergent worlds and modes of world-making that it assembles along with seeds – showing that the future is more open than the popular story of the ›doomsday vault‹ suggests.