Estados Generales imagines the return journey of a sample of seeds from Madrid’s Botanical Garden to the southwest coast of Peru, in an Afro-Peruvian village. How did the project come about?
The project began as I was completing my previous film, Interspecies Architecture, commissioned for the Taiwan Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. During production, I spent time in Taipei’s forest, researching relationships between architectural layers: membranes, and the erasure of visible and invisible boundaries. In Taiwan, I’d research on different parallels with Peru: colonialism, systems of power, overlapping historical layers… That film unfolded as a journey, in the forest following characters who gradually merged with their surroundings. I explored human dissolution into the environment, blurring limits through the concept of opacity.
Back in Madrid, I started writing Estados Generales, transposing these ideas to a more personal context. Madrid’s Botanical Garden had always attracted me, and I was drawn to connecting two seemingly unrelated territories and timelines through an inverted journey.
The particularity of this sample is that the seeds are unidentified and therefore not catalogued. Why did you choose these particular seeds? Could you comment on this aspect?
While scripting, I planned to work with Peru-sourced colonial specimens from the Garden’s official historical archive from the Ruiz and Pavón expedition that came to Peru around 1777. But weeks before shooting, while scouting herbarium locations, I noticed antique boxes labelled Frutos sin nombres (“Nameless Fruits”). Staff explained these were damaged materials slated for restoration, discards stored in Deposit S59, a 15m² basement room housing unarchivable items.
Gaining their trust, I secured keys to visit S59 twice weekly that summer. I photographed contents, even discovering unopened boxes dating to the 1800s. When asked when this material couldn’t be archived, reasons varied: missing data, contamination, or simply lacking “scientific value”, yet it couldn’t be discarded as Spanish state heritage. The oldest specimens were turning to dust. I documented this, cataloguing particulate matter using grids to quantify and scale it.
This non-archive materialized the contradictions I was investigating: the fusion of modernity’s scientific method and colonialism’s flattening gaze, which discards anomalies through a paradoxical process. As the herbarium director states in the film, “Archiving is the way we order the world’s complexity.” Here, the archive operates by producing dead artefacts: it extracts and destroys agency in the name of preservation, thereby erasing alternative futures and eliminating the capacity to conceive that the past could have been different. Its hegemonic narrative sells us the idea that ‘there is no alternative,’ never has been, never will be.
Different narrative and visual writing styles are interwoven: the imaginary return of the seeds, documentary sequences, scientific shots filmed in macro. How did you conceive this interweaving in terms of narrative structure? What were the writing stages?
Writing, production, and editing overlapped as a layered process across an extended timeline. Visually, I studied botanical representation systems.
The narrative has three parts. The first one in the Botanical Garden, that opens with a kiss on the street. Static, centred shots gradually pull viewers into the herbarium’s architecture, destabilizing control.
After this, starts the Seeds’ imagined journey. When it arrives to the south coast of Peru in Chincha, the camera moves constantly, tracking characters through fields where seeds likely originated but now amid farmland. Colonial botanists Ruiz and Pavón collected in this area botanical materials in 1786 that he later sent to the botanical garden in Madrid, in their journals note: “Chincha and Ica, though seemingly arid lands, are gardens of plants useful to Commerce. […] The Natives convert sandy wastes into orchards with canals bringing waters from the mountains. […] Their practices in Botany, though skilled at discerning Plants, lack scientific method; their medicinal applications are superstitions requiring the rigor of Europe’s Enlightened Science.¹”
In the tangerine factory in Peru, we hear about the global standards imposed on fruit and, in this sense, the persistence of a system of domination through globalization. What was at stake for you in this sequence?
This Peruvian coast nurtured pre-Columbian Chincha and Nazca cultures, whose agricultural technologies wove complex relationships with the world –practices documented in colonial records that understood farming as regenerative, inseparable from entities like the past, future, mountains, and community. Colonizers discarded everything they couldn’t comprehend or extract for profit. Today, this same region is dominated by agro-export corporations like the one depicted in the film. Most production relies on foreign species for global markets. Estados Generales begins in a colonial archive filled with seeds and concludes in these industrial landscapes, where seedless fruits, monocultures, pesticides, and technology-driven processes perpetuate destructive capitalism. Workers (primarily women) endure precarious labour, poverty wages, and environmental degradation.
The film installs a spectral presence, notably through a subjective night camera. The point of view of the seeds? Could you elaborate on this dimension?
I embraced night, ghosts, and spectrality as aesthetic and political gestures. These seeds are ghosts: dormant carriers of neglected futures. In an era obsessed with apocalypse, spectral imagination becomes resistance, a way to haunt the present, where the spectre acts as a return of absent presence, destabilizing the now. Like a ghost-hunter, it translates imperceptible forces into visible representations.
The materiality of 16 mm is very important in this respect. Could you tell us about the image work and the use of coloured lights, which recur at key moments in the film?
I envisioned this as a film project, a material resistance to immediacy and imposed limits, where light, darkness, and colour function as narrative architectures. The chromatic light sequences emerged from witnessing the Botanical Garden’s Christmas spectacle: historic trees engulfed by cables and projections, plants masked beneath synthetic radiance. This decadent image crystallized the Garden’s hidden machinery, where colonial extraction continues to obscure living bodies and knowledge beneath aestheticised control.
Through the question of the conservation in Europe of goods looted from the colonies, the film proposes a reflection on neocolonialism, and offers an emancipatory counter-narrative. How did you approach this dimension? What were your references, both textual and cinematographic?
Fantasizing about the seeds’ return, their latent potential to regerminate responds to our contemporary slide toward fascist-imperial revivals. The film exposes capitalism/colonialism’s entwined powers. Europe’s foundations are colonial; these discarded seeds propose buried alternatives. Capitalism’s categorizing drive has trapped us in a dead end. The film urges recovering other visions to reimagine worlds beyond it.
Could you explain the title of your film, Estados Generales?
It references the États Généraux of May ’68, a moment when unions organized protests, igniting Europe’s last great utopian surge (later echoed in Spain’s 15M movement). Today, as fascism co-opts change, the title demands urgent rethinking of the structures hurtling us toward the collapse of alternatives futures.
1. Ruiz, Hipólito. “Memoria sobre la Vegetación de la Costa Peruana y sus Utilidades” [Memoir on the Vegetation of the Peruvian Coast and Its Uses]. 1786. Fondo Ruiz y Pavón, Carpeta 18, Documento 7. Archivo del Real Jardín Botánico, Madrid.
Interview by Louise Marie Papasian
