Episode 20: Futurefarmers
Amy Franceschini and Lode Vranken represent Futurefarmers, an international group of artists founded in 1995 including anthropologists, farmers, and architects who work together to propose alternatives to the social, political, and environmental organization of space. They are known for long-lived projects such as the flatbread society and the seed journey.
“I think that even if it's a small interaction with tools, the muscle memory is a very important thing not to ignore. There's a certain resonance in just that experience. So, the object is very important, in its crafting, its form, and use, it does have an aura.”
There are quite a few gems in this conversation, about making spaces that call for communities; how connections to objects matter; and how to think about the tools we make and use. Futurefarmers invite us to rethink innovation, activism, collaboration. For me, the key takeaway was the correlation between crafting, communities, and form. Hearing about the way they use the material aspects of their work as ‘probes’ to help collectively form communities, and the way this formal dimension or ‘aura’ is key to the process was refreshing.
Episode Notes & Links
Amy is an artist and designer whose work with Futurefarmers facilitates encounter, exchange, and tactile forms of inquiry by calling into question the "certainties" of a given time or place where a work is situated. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Franceschini
Lode Vranken is an artist, architect and philosopher.
For more on Futurefarmers visit https://www.futurefarmers.com/
Antoine Boute is an experimental writer and poet.
Futurefarmers work on a public art program for Bjørvika, Oslo (Norway) named Flatbread Society which examines the interrelationship of food production to realms of knowledge sharing, cultural production, socio-political formations, and everyday life since 2012. http://www.flatbreadsociety.net/
Built at Pollinaria in Abruzzo, Italy, "This is not a Trojan horse" is a large, human-powered, wooden horse designed by Futurefarmers with architect Lode Vranken. http://www.futurefarmers.com/thisisnotatrojanhorse/about.html
The Canoe Project by Flatbread Society is powered by four human legs and it includes a mobile baking oven within the canoe. Stephen Wright's description of the double ontology is perfectly exemplified in this case as flatbread is a conversation topic that is widely accessible while baking, unlike contemporary art is relatable to anybody regardless of profession or background. http://www.flatbreadsociety.net/actions/39/a-boat-walking-on-land
Flatbread Society Bakehouse was built with local boat builders in the form of a vessel. The "ship" hosts three bread ovens for making a variety of bread types. It seeks to point to the past and to the future, extending metaphors of cultivation and sailing to larger ideas of self-reliance and the foregrounding of organic processes in the development of land use, social relations, and cultural forms. https://www.futurefarmers.com/projects/bakehouse
Stanford University is a private research university located in California which was a key factor in the development of the technology enterprise now known as Silicon Valley. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK158815/
Industrial agriculture is the large-scale, intensive production of crops and animals, often involving chemical fertilizers on crops or the routine, harmful use of antibiotics in animals. https://www.nrdc.org/stories/industrial-agriculture-101
Rudolph Steiner (1861 - 1925) was a philosopher, social reformer, architect, esotericist. Apart from the scholarly work and metaphysical practice, he was interested in biodynamic agriculture, a practice similar to organic farming.
Permaculture is an approach to land management and settlement design that arranges a mutually beneficial relationship for land, resources, people, and the environment and employs multidisciplinary methods that source from the knowhow of agriculture, water harvesting and hydrology, energy, natural building, forestry, waste management, animal systems, aquaculture, appropriate technology, economics, and community development. https://www.permaculturenews.org/what-is-permaculture/
Best known as the frontman of the multinational technology corporation Microsoft, Bill Gates is a business magnate and arguably one of the most influential individuals of the 20th century.
Donna Haraway is a writer, educator, and academic within the field of science and technology studies. She authored countless seminal texts among these, Cyborg Manifesto, as well as the Companion Species Manifesto are must-reads for any and all of us.
Founded by Joan Baez, Struggle Mountain is an international community located in California that evolved out of the sixties' counterculture and, most particularly, nonviolence and the draft resistance movement.
Joan Baez is a singer, songwriter, musician, and activist.
Amy teaches at the EcoSocial Design master program at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano. Can was there for a lecture. https://www.unibz.it/en/faculties/design-art/master-eco-social-design/
Co-designed by architects Doğan Tekeli, Sami Sisa ve Metin Hepgüler, İMÇ is an exemplary case within the canon of 20th-century architecture in Turkey as an open-air commercial complex located in the historical center of İstanbul. It was occupied by the record companies, especially during the 1980s upon their booming popularity.
Founded by artists Nancy Atakan and Volkan Aslan, 5533 is a contemporary art space located in İMÇ.http://imc5533.blogspot.com/
Ahali Conversations is the love child of the Ahali Journal and MÇPS, the recording studio Amy mentions. Realized in 2017, MÇPS was an artwork in which Can turned 5533 into a walk-in record studio where local musicians were able to jump in jams and hang around the İMÇ complex once again long after its prime days passed. http://www.local-legends.org/people/2017/11/18/artist-can-altay-on-music-memory-and-imagined-futures-at-istanbuls-mythical-m-building
Radio Ramona is an internet radio station that deals with strange affairs between bread, astronomy, migration, and gossip about old and forgotten communication gadgets by Future Farmers.
Seed Journey is a seafaring voyage connected to a public art project. It occurred in three legs. Set off at Oslo and concluded in İstanbul a rotating crew of artists, anthropologists, biologists, bakers, activists, sailors, and farmers joined the journey and shared their findings at host institutions along the route from small harbors to large ports from barns to museums (contemporary art, natural history and maritime) to social centers. http://futurefarmers.com/seedjourney/
Twitter is a social media platform that serves for microblogging where users express opinions within 280 characters.
Noah Glass is a technology entrepreneur who launched Twitter in 2006.
Episode recorded on Zoom in July 2021.
Interview by Can Altay. Produced by Aslı Altay & Sarp Renk Özer. Music by Grup Ses.