The Great Decline, 2019
125 x 214 x 8 cm, Printed circuit boards (PCB), various seeds

Biodiversity is decreasing at a dangerous speed among both animals and plants. With the development of gene banks in seed vaults and time capsules, an attempt is made to safeguard the survival of as many species of plants as possible. In 2008, the Svalbard Global Seed Vault opened in Norway, where spare copies are stored of all seeds that are contained in gene banks elsewhere in the world, a kind of extra backup in case of a regional or worldwide catastrophe.

The work The Great Decline by Maarten Vanden Eynde shows the floor plan of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, visualised as a copper memory chip, on which a large variety of seeds, collected from different parts of the world, have been placed. Its design is reminiscent of a lukasa, an ancient memory device that was used by the Mbudye council in the Luba kingdom – nowadays part of the Democratic Republic of Congo – to record topographical and historical knowledge about political events, important people, places and mythical migration routes.