MEDINA — A seed exchange will precede community planting aboard Floating Garden, an industrial barge that’s being turned into a living ecosystem as part of the Medina Triennial, on Saturday.
Medina Triennial artist-in-residence Mary Mattingly, the creator of Floating Garden, will preside over the community seed exchange at Canal Village Farmers Market, 127 W. Center St., from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Community members are invited to bring heirloom and other seeds to share and take home, and contribute varieties to the artwork.
Community planting aboard the barge will take place from 2 to 4 p.m. in the Erie Canal basin behind Medina Triennial Hub, 345 N. Main St. Participants should bring hand tools and gloves.
Following the planting session, at 4 p.m., the film Seed Stories (42 minutes, 2024) will be screened at the triennial hub.
The film by journalist/documentarian Chitrangada Choudhury explores how traditional farming knowledge and biodiversity are challenged by the rapid spread of industrial agriculture. In a village in eastern India, ecologist Dr. Debal Deb and his team are conserving more than 1,000 endangered heirloom varieties of rice in-situ, the world’s largest project of its kind. Odisha’s Eastern Ghats region is one of the world’s surviving biodiversity hotspots, with farmers and shifting cultivators, particularly from Indigenous communities like the Kondhs possessing the knowledge of growing multiple crops with their own seeds, evolved over centuries. But the village and the wider region is changing irreversibly with the coming of genetically modified Bt and herbicide-tolerant cotton seeds and associated agrochemicals. The film invites viewers to reflect on the question, what is sustainability?
The Medina Triennial, initiated by New York Power Authority and the state Canal Corporation, is an exhibition of curated public art that’s planned to occur every three years. The inaugural edition, slated June 6 through Sept. 7, 2026, is to feature more than 50 art works by local, national and international artists and collectives at about a dozen indoor and outdoor locations in the village, all showing how contemporary art can live in, and grow from, a rural environment.
Leading up to the summer of 2026, Medina Triennial Hub is hosting public programs and events — artist talks, workshops, screenings and panel discussions — around themes of community, ecology and place, in collaboration with art institutions across Western New York.