A project entitled 'Poetry in Potato Bags' is promoting the cultural exchange of poetry with the help of potato bags shipped between Malta and the Netherlands. The Valletta 2018 Culture Capital initiative is a collaboration between Potatoes Go Wild, Inizjamed, Appoġġ, and Leeuwarden 2018.
Malta and Leeuwarden share strong agricultural ties, exchanging potato crops and seeds twice a year. From these seeds, Maltese farmers grow potatoes which are then shipped back to Leeuwarden.
'Poetry in Potato Bags' makes use of this relationship by exchanging poetry along with the agricultural produce. This way, eight Maltese and eight Dutch poets will be commissioned to write a poem per year between 2015 and 2018.
Every March, the Maltese poems will be packaged and sent with the potatoes to the Netherlands. Anyone buying a bag of potatoes in the Netherlands will find a Maltese poem (translated into English and Dutch) packaged along with their potatoes.
The Dutch poets repeat this process every October by sending their poetry back to Malta with the seeds. This way over four years, a conversation will be formed between the poets from both regions.
Another aspect of the project is purely an educational one. In collaboration with Appoġġ, children are introduced to the realm of poetry and the world of agriculture, where they learn about local potato farming processes.
For more details about the project, please go to valletta2018.org.
Source: potatobusiness.com