Episode 8: Fritz Haeg
If questions around generating alternatives, and other possibilities of environments for art to foster, intrigue you, make sure you listen to this conversation. Because this episode features artist Fritz Haeg, whose Salmon Creek Farm is a long-term art project shaped by many hands, a sort of queer commune-farm-homestead-sanctuary-school hybrid. Salmon Creek Farm is a re-settlement in a former hippie commune from the 1970's in Mendocino California. With acres of land with orchards, meadows, gardens, and redwood trees, it provides for living, gathering, growing, and consists as an overall art-sustaining environment.
“I was always interested in finding out how I could create an environment, a platform, a situation, a project, where there was enough sense of collective direction. But within that there was enough room for people to feel free, and to contribute, and to alter the direction in some way.”
Fritz studied as an architect and had nourished global attention as an artist with his Edible Estates, which, in its many incarnations had to do with taking yield and growing crops in otherwise unutilized greenery.
Engagement with land and plants is as important as engaging with people, since Fritz has always been bringing people together, in action, in work, and exchange.
The Sundown Salon, a series of meetings in a geodesic dome, or the collective rug-making sessions titled “domestic integrities” are a few projects that come to my mind. And I see the Salmon Creek Farm as the culmination of all these questions and more.
Episode Notes & Links
You can find out more about the Salmon Creek Farm and Fritz Haeg’s work here: http://www.fritzhaeg.com/wikidiary/salmon-creek-farm/
More on Salmon Creek Farm: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/t-magazine/design/fritz-haeg-salmon-creek-farm-commune.html
http://www.sugar-vs-the-reef.net/growing-plants-and-community-at-salmon-creek-farm/
One of the original communards put it this way: It was not ‘‘dropping out,’’ argued River, in her 1974 book ‘‘Dwelling,’’ but an active search for ‘‘a new pattern of living’’ that does not ‘‘rip off the planet or any of her inhabitants.’If you want to learn more about the background story of the farm, listen to interviews with original Salmon Creek Farm communards River and Moonlight from the KZYX series Promise of Paradise.
https://www.kzyx.org/post/promise-paradise-episode-15-river#stream/0
One of the rare video interviews of Fritz is a must see to picture how it's like at the farm. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aPp8z0_OIEw
Ahali communard Derya Yıldız’s writing on Fritz: https://m-est.org/2017/01/05/invented-pieces-of-architecture-estates-of-fritz-haeg/
On the Maintenance Art of Mierle Laderman Ukeles: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mierle_Laderman_Ukeles#:~:text=Mierle%20Laderman%20Ukeles%20
Fritz says that his biggest influence on what to build on the land was artist Andrea Zittel who also focuses on questions of living, habitation, and human nature with her practice. https://www.zittel.org
Episode recorded on Zoom on September 24th 2020. Interview by Can Altay. Produced by Aslı Altay & Sarp Renk Özer. Music by Grup Ses.