biblioteca de semillas
community
oaxaca, mexico
RECORD
Title
RECORD
overview
The Biblioteca de Semillas, inspired by the Oaxaca’s annual Feria de Agrobiodiversidad and Jardin Etnobotanico, is an anticapitalist community space for moneyless exchange of native seeds, supporting ethnobotanical literacy, resilience through biodiversity, abundance and seed sovereignty, while platforming indigenous seed and soil stewards and their local projects. On its off days, the space operates free community space for locals who want to exhibit, hold workshops, circles or healing sessions. The Biblioteca is a seed sanctuary, and a replicable strategy for climate resilience that has inspired similar libraries in surrounding communities.
notions
@bibliotecadesemillas.oax
bibliotecadesemillas.com
Mexico is one of the most diverse places in North America, and the state of Oaxaca has the most endemic species in the country. Preserving and sharing this life-giving biodiversity is a strategy for climate resilience and cultural preservation. The Agrobiodiversity Fair is held only once a year, but with a space to access the ancestral harvest throughout the year, oaxacan seeds can move more widely, more frequently.
The space we hold seeks to increase and support ethnobotanical knowledge, deepening our connection with the plants that support us as we support them. we collects plant stories rather than focus on formal testing and classification, centering the connection more than the science. seed displays include origin and location information, time stamp, care advice and donor data.
TAKE A HANDful OF SEEDS TO THE LIBRARY, LEAVE WITH A HANDful OF NEW SEEDS for your garden. herbs, medicines, vegetables, ancestral natives, pollinators, flowers, fruits, fibers, wood, dyes. teach, learn, share. support abundance and community, and increase diversity for a resilient future.
In addition to its function as a public library, in its off days, the space operates as a community space, available free of charge to oaxacans who need space for their workshops, classes, healing sessions, group facilitations, circle conversations, small events, dinners or ceremonies, especially those that center women, ecology and healing practice
seed sovereignty and equity, abundance and anticapitalism
we do not have to be enslaved by the industrial food or medical complex that patronizes and infantalizes us by creating false need, false scarcity, and obscuring knowledge. we hold the keys to food, medicine, ceremony and care, because they are contained with seeds. all people should be free and able to provide for themselves, and growing your own food and medicine is one way in which indigenous national sovereignty expresses itself. no one should be reliant on high priced products or the manipulation of transnational companies who attempt to patent and withhold what madre tierra gives freely. we don’t need to charge each other money for what the earth shares with us abundantly and generously. capitalism creates a climate of lack, competition, and resource hoarding. when we embrace the abundance that madre tierra provides, and view ourselves as stewards and proliferators, rather than manipulators, we do better to honor each other and all our non-human kin. this space upholds these values in always making use knowledge and seeds available to all people at no cost.

























