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‘Avocado Seed Economy’ is a speculative design project imagining an economy centered around avocado seeds, not as a commodity, but as a raw material to innovate and transform with.

Utilizing vernacular technology, the project re-imagines avocado seeds into a wide range of materials, objects and applications spanning all sectors of the economy. From an alternative clay to make bricks and adobe, to plastic, leather and glass substitutes, electricity and even oil for powering vehicles.

Likewise, the project explores possible jobs and trade associations for this post-extractivist economy (and society). From avocado seed collectors and researchers, to the OANEC, the Organization of Avocado Non-Exporting Countries. The later, centering non-exporting as a strategy to ensure food sovereignty and to promote the secondary and tertiary sectors of the economy.

The project is part of a larger work, La Rentrada, which explores the idea in the context of a post-petroleum economy in Venezuela, Pombo’s country of origin, where the singular dependence on petroleum has contributed to unprecedented economic instability and one of the world’s greatest migrant crises. La Rentrada explores infitinte ways in which the return of this diaspora might be possible. The project borrows its name from the French rentrée and transforms it into Spanish, a wink at the transformative possibilities explored through the avocado and that of those who return

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