Kern, Amba Sayal-Bennett (2024) (EMPIRE LINES Live at SEEDLINGS, Somerset House Studios)

In this special episode, contemporary artist Amba Sayal-Bennett joins EMPIRE LINES live, to trace the migrations of rubber seeds between South America, London, and British colonies in South Asia in the 19th century, plus the role of soil in anticolonial resistance, through their digital drawing and sculpture, Kern (2024).

Rubber is a commodity that was once so highly demanded that its value surpassed that of silver. In a mission facilitated by the British government, Henry Wickham stole and trafficked 70,000 rubber seeds from the Amazon rainforest in Brazil in 1876. Transported to Kew Gardens in London, they were then dispersed across Britain’s colonies for cultivation. Its plural uses and potential for profit led to its proliferation across the globe - yet the soil in India, then known as the British Raj, refused to take the seeds, which the artist puts forward as a form of environmental resistance to the colonial project.

Amba Sayal-Bennett’s wall-based sculptures Kern (2024) and Phlo (2024) are part of their investigations into the migrations of forms, bodies, and knowledge across different sites. Presented in SEEDLINGS: Diasporic Imaginaries, currently touring Scotland with Travelling Gallery, we discuss this visual research into how colonial practices often decontextualise and appropriate forms. Amba delves botanical and anatomical drawings, and how these illustrations have been used to commodify and control plants, environments, and people. We consider through the construction and overlapping uses of terms like ‘native’ and, ‘invasive’, ‘indigenous’, ‘naturalisation’, and ‘dispersal’, to challenge binaries between human and more-than-human beings, and consider ideas of home, identity, and belonging in the context of diasporas. Amba details her relationship with ornamentation, abstraction, and displacement, and how she translates her digital drawings into sculptural forms, rendered with biodegradable, but ‘unnatural’, industrial plastics. Drawing on her site-specific works for Geometries of Difference (2022) at Somerset House, and Drawing Room Invites... in London, we also delve into Amba’s critical engagement with sci-fi and modernist architecture, travelling to Le Corbusier’s purpose-built city of Chandigarh in Punjab, the birthplace of her maternal grandparents, to explore tropical modernism.

This episode was recorded live at Somerset House Studios in London, as part of the public programme for SEEDLINGS: Diasporic Imaginaries, curated by Jelena Sofronijevic with Travelling Gallery in Scotland. The group exhibition, featuring Emii Alrai, Iman Datoo, Radovan Kraguly, Zeljko Kujundzic, Remi Jabłecki, Leo Robinson, and Amba Sayal-Bennett, is touring across Scotland, culminating at Edinburgh Art Festival (EAF) in August 2025.

For more information, follow Travelling Gallery and EMPIRE LINES on social media, and visit: linktr.ee/SEEDLINGSTG2025

Drawing Room Invites…: Anna Paterson, Alicia Reyes McNamara, Amba Sayal-Bennett is at the Drawing Room in London until 27 July 2025.

For more about Between Hands and Metal (2024), a group exhibition featuring Amba Sayal-Bennett, Alia Hamaoui, and Raheel Khan at Palmer Gallery in London, read my article in gowithYamo:. gowithyamo.com/blog/palmer-gallery-marylebone

For more science fiction and sci-fi films, hear Tanoa Sasraku on her series of Terratypes (2022-Now) at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum (RAMM) in Exeter: pod.link/1533637675/episode/3083096d6354376421721cfbb49d0ba7

For more from Invasion Ecology (2024), co-curated by Jelena Sofronijevic for Radical Ecology, and Vashti Cassinelli at Southcombe Barn, an arts space and gardens on Dartmoor, visit: ⁠⁠⁠⁠radicalecology.earth/events/invasion-ecology-exhibition⁠⁠⁠⁠ and instagram.com/p/C7lYcigovSN

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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