Agri_culture

In its first edition, agri_culture questions the politics of agriculture and diversity in everyday life or in the burning collective property called “Planet Earth”. In the last six months, we set out to sow wheat in a field of 10 by 10 meters. The journey in this cycle is accompanied by various groups of students, farmers, gardeners, a biologist, and other artists who participate in workshops and many-voiced conversations around a field. Challenging one-dimensional views of one’s own cultivation by planting an unusual field of wheat is a way of politically questioning work, agro-toxics, supply chains, crisis, food and the cycles of non-human bodies, while the body recovers and stretches its hands in the face of the blaze. In this edition, we construct a space for personal and collective performative actions to emerge effectively as possible responses to a future social balance between species and the limits of a field that simultaneously becomes a provocative garden.

On the green stretch of Zukunftshof in Favoriten, a district that combines large textile industries, semi-urban agricultural areas, generations with different geo- graphical origins, and various social groups of cooperative labourers, wheat in its fragile yet resilient appearance leaves its trail as a symbol of crowds gathered and simultaneously disengaged by ruthless capitalism. Which geographies harvest and possess large stocks of wheat and which countries will be able to buy them? This is another echo of the acoustic field in a global discussion. The current situation of agriculture confronts us with the lack of critical attitude of the big landowners. On the other hand, farmers or peasants separated from the food they harvest are dispossessed of both the food and the life they themselves cultivate.

agri_culture expanded is a programme that inhabits the garden and straw forum, becoming another acoustic layer of the vestiges of the culture that has passed: autumn and the cycles of time are an intermediate field between wheat and living beings, organic and inorganic. With interventions, performances and readings by artists and architects on the vestiges
of situated artistic experience, we are presented with different relational tactics of the inside and outside of this space, which in turn invites us to look at its micro- parts but also at a macro-campus of geo-aesthetics of landscape, future work, unconventional sites for planting and the links between soil, matter, bad herbs, bugs and human labour.

Credits

Researcher and executive production: Maria Sanhueza and Salma Shaka
General production: Johannes Wiener and Luis Prager
Field work: Johannes Wiener and groups that participated in the workshops organized by agri_culture between April and September 2022
Photography and video: Lukas David Beck
Curator: Lorena Salamanca
Participating artists: Rosie Benn, Diana Buitron, Imayna Caceres, Elena Kristofor, Alfredo Ledesma, Daniela Medina, Marlene Wagner, Johannes Wiener