Connie Zheng: new yamfish seed exchange (nyse)

speculation: (n), from the Latin speculātiō — exploration, observation.

1. the contemplation or consideration of some subject.
2. a conclusion or opinion reached by such contemplation.
3. conjectural consideration of a matter.
4. engagement in business transactions involving considerable risk but offering the chance of large gains, especially trading in commodities, stocks, etc., in the hope of profit from changes in the market price.

*definition from Dictionary.com (Random House Unabridged Dictionary, supplemented by dictionaries from American Heritage and HarperCollins), accessed June 6, 2021.

The New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) is the world’s largest stock exchange, with billions of dollars in equity bought and sold daily. These investments are made with the intention of private capital accumulation rather than public sustainability or repair. The new yamfish seed exchange (nyse) is a prototype for a different investment ecosystem, rooted in collaborative imagining and play — more speculative fiction than financial speculation. Whether you plant money melons and yamfish or drought-resistant wheat and climate-justice seeds, your mind is fertile. Does it matter that yamfish are not real, if they might help us cross into generative new territory? What divisions would you bridge? What inequities would you repair?

The nyse is a creative laboratory, functioning as both genesis and scaffolding. Just as a seed contains the past and the future, this exhibition hopes to reimagine the present as soil composed of both the past and the imagination. A wall-sized map documenting migrations of major food plants over the past several millennia accompanies mixed-media prints suggesting speculative germination sequences. Meanwhile, two short experimental films about mysterious seeds use improvisational methods to make sense of a shared but uncertain reality. Viewers are invited to take free soil and postcards, seed-making kits and non-GMO seeds sourced from independent growers. In exchange, they leave behind seeds of their own, whether real or conceptual. The nyse encourages the public to re-imagine what exists now, in order to better imagine what exists tomorrow.

This project was made possible by the support of the Minnesota Street Project Foundation and The Space Program San Francisco, with production support from Brian von Bargen, Jud Bergeron, Ivana Colendich, and Lindsay Albert.

Connie Zheng

Connie Zheng is a Chinese-born visual artist, writer and filmmaker based out of Oakland, California. Her multidisciplinary work primarily examines diasporic memory, ecological elegy, and divergent articulations of hope from an environmental justice perspective. Rooted in the idea of home as a contested space, her practice pays particular attention to nonlinear narratives, speculative archives and the fraught histories and migrations of seeds, as well as their capacity for unexpected transformations. Zheng has exhibited work in the Netherlands and around the United States, and is currently screening a short film at the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco.