Earlier this year, radio artist Martín Rodríguez transformed the SBC Gallery into an actual garden. During three months, the exhibition NOUS/OTRXS¹ combined ancestral Mesoamerican seeds with Québec-native crops, using sound, light and water to nourish them. Through this gesture, Rodríguez created a space for sharing interspecies care and intergenerational knowledge, and a place to reflect on migration, territory and the possibility of imagining shared futures.

Lynn Kodeih: We enter the gallery, and we find ourselves in a garden, with plants growing, feeding on sound signals. How did this all start?

Martín Rodríguez: The project really started with the idea of bringing seeds from Mexico and planting them here in Montreal. The metaphor is already there: moving a seed to a territory it’s not originally from, where it doesn’t “naturally” belong, and seeing what happens when you try to grow it anyway.

An important part of the project was the methodology, or how to grow the seeds. I wanted to grow them from the perspective of Indigenous knowledge, one that the plants are more naturally accustomed to, rather than in an industrial, capitalist way. I drew inspiration from the systems that the chinampas in Mexico City use: waterways with “islands,” or floating permaculture gardens, what are basically complete water ecosystems, with fish providing fertilizer, and plants growing. A full cycle.

LK: And you fed these seeds with

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