A catalog to accompany the Germinations exhibition, including photographs of the installation, while also pulling back the view to share more of the artist’s conceptual framework for the project.

In a series of recent projects, artist Ximena Garrido-Lecca has followed the trail of different common plants that were originally domesticated by Andean and Mesoamerican cultures. For Germinations, at the Renaissance Society, she brought a familiar character to center stage: the potato. Now found all over the world, the potato was first cultivated thousands of years ago in the Altiplano region, which includes modern-day Peru, where the artist was born. In Chicago, Garrido-Lecca produced an installation that brought a huge expanse of raw earth—and thousands of potatoes—into the gallery, and drew inspiration from Andean cosmology, planting and harvesting as ritual events, and different ways of observing space-time.

Alongside photographs of the exhibition, this book includes a trove of visual material from the artist’s own research dossier, such as historical botanical drawings, photos of ritual objects and potato fields, and modern cosmological diagrams The book also offers readers an introduction to aspects of Andean cosmology: in a new essay, anthropologist Leonora Arriagada Peters gives a concise scholarly primer on the Andean concept of Pacha as a unified, cyclical space-time. Also appearing is an excerpt from the Huarochirí Manuscript, a lively compilation of myths that is one of the few surviving written records of Quechua worldviews from the Andean region. This publication also includes two new essays that reflect on the exhibition more directly. One by art historian T.J. Demos offers a critical-theoretical reading of the exhibition that situates Garrido-Lecca’s work within lineages of eco-aesthetics and botanical installation art, and draws out the potato’s political ecology. In the second, exhibition curator Karsten Lund considers how the installation’s various elements serve as sculptural instruments for measuring and inhabiting time, as Garrido-Lecca recasts the exhibition format as an experience that is changing continually.