Heritage Carrot

A Digital Literature Installation by Maya Chowdhry and Kooj Chuhan. Heritage Carrot is a site-specific augmented reality poem designed for installation at Hulme Community Garden Centre. An open suitcase greets you, in its lid is a view of the garden centre.

By using your own smart-phone combined with a free app, HP Reveal, you experience an audio-visual journey resonating with the migration of carrots from Persia to England, hinting at other migrations – human, plants and other. From industrial suburbia through countryside the journey is imbued with magic realism. We explore heritage, genetics and biodiversity; carrot domestication from a wild plant; the migration from wisdom to neoliberalism. The suitcase bottom is filled with sand, specimen jars, coloured soils and spices, suggesting the problems of land-based categorisation for both humans and seeds.

Commisioned by and presented as part of The Black Writers Conference, Commonword, 2018