At Food Culture Days 2025, we had the pleasure of attending Alexandra Baumgartner’s intimate performance Spill the Beans, which invited participants into dialogue with her curated collection of legumes. Through the poetic evocation of fava, lupin, peas, lentils, lablab, and more, Alexandra shared her deep love for these seeds—celebrated for their role in climate-resilient farming. In her hands, they became storytellers, carrying traces of ancestral knowledge, colonial histories, scientific inquiry, and emerging agricultural practices.

Baumgartner's work, which spans photography, sound, installation, performance, and gardening, delves into the intertwined relationships between humans and plants. By co-creating transdisciplinary spaces for tasting, listening, learning, and sharing, she fosters a deeper understanding of agro-biodiversity and its role in sustainable food futures.

We absolutely love Cooking as an act of Arting! At Food Culture Days 2025, Seeds4All joined Koma Culture Estudio to prepare traditional Central American tamales. Koma Culture Estudio is an interdisciplinary collective linking South America and Switzerland, blending agriculture, gastronomy, art, and design to promote sustainability, decolonial thinking, and intercultural dialogue.

By reclaiming corn’s place in European kitchens, the collective builds a bridge between ancestral traditions and contemporary food transitions. Their work shows how diasporas, flavors, and stories weave connections across territories, fostering a food sovereignty rooted in solidarity and shared knowledge. The culinary workshop culminated in vibrant, appetising plates that celebrated the craft of tamale-making—using maize varieties specially selected for their dough-making qualities and sourced from a Swiss farmer dedicated to growing corn for human consumption!

These seed postcards were created in collaboration with Brussels-based artist Agathe Payen and printed using the art of risography. Each card features a poem that honors the significance of seeds and emphasizes the importance of nurturing and propagating them. The cover is adorned with a handmade, natural paper seed circle, embedded with organic watercress seeds.

At the 2024 Rural Resilience gathering in Grzybow, Poland, we distributed these postcards as part of an interactive and sensory experience with attendees. To our surprise, we soon learned that by doing so, we were echoing a Polish tradition, where watercress is sown at Easter as a symbol of good luck and renewal!

Meet Talú Earth, an Irish natural dye house and educational hub rooted in regenerative practices. One of the key aspects of Talú Earth’s work is the promotion of native dye plants from Ireland, advocating for their reintroduction in fields, gardens, and artisanal textile workshops.

At the 2023 edition of the Feeding Ourselves event in Cloughjordan, Ireland, Seeds4All invited Talú Earth to lead a public natural dye workshop. The event was a huge success! For over three hours, participants discovered and experimented with various natural dyeing techniques using flowers, roots, and avocado pits. The results were impressive: deep indigo tablecloths made from a local variety of indigo, and rainbow-colored t-shirts created using the shibori technique and local plants like chamomile, birch bark, and dandelion roots.