Art, Farming and Food for the Future: Transforming Agriculture 2022010361, 2022010362, 9780367433697, 9781032322889, 9780367433710

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Art, Farming and Food for the Future

This book explores the impact of artistic experiments in inspiring people to turn away from current food consumerism and take an active role in preserving, sustaining, and protecting the environment. As artists are expanding their practice into social justice and community concerns, erasing traditional forms of expression and integrating others, the culture around food and its production has been added to a new vocabulary of experiential art. The authors measure the impact of such experiments on local food consumption and production, focusing on education and youth, both in the surrounding community and culture at large. They suggest how these projects can be up-scaled to further encourage sustainable solutions for our environment and communities. The book explores the ref lections and motivations of case study practitioners in urban and rural areas and, through interviews, engages with artists who are pioneering a new trend to create hubs of activity away from traditional art spaces in cities to follow a nonhierarchal practice that is de-centralized and communally based. This book will be of great interest to academic readers concerned with issues related to environmental aesthetics, eco-design, eco-criticism, culture, heritage, memory, and identity, and those interested in the current debates on the place of aesthetics and culture in sustainability. Barbara L. Benish is an artist and Founding Director of ArtMill, Czech Republic, and Fellow at the Social Practice Arts Research Center at the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA. Nathalie Blanc is a CNRS Director of Research at Paris Cité University, France.

Routledge Explorations in Environmental Studies

Sociology Saves the Planet An Introduction to Socioecological Thinking and Practice Thomas Macias Polluting Textiles The Problem with Microfibres Edited by Judith S. Weis, Francesca De Falco and Mariacristina Cocca Biocultural Rights, Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities Protecting Culture and the Environment Edited by Fabien Girard, Ingrid Hall and Christine Frison Rethinking Geographical Explorations in Extreme Environments From the Arctic to the Mountaintops Edited by Marco Armiero, Roberta Biasillo, and Stefano Morosini Governance Networks for Sustainable Cities Connecting Theory and Practice in Europe Katherine Maxwell Nature and Bureaucracy The Wildness of Managed Landscapes David Jenkins Art, Farming and Food for the Future Transforming Agriculture Barbara L. Benish and Nathalie Blanc

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Explorations-in-Environmental-Studies/book-series/REES

Art, Farming and Food for the Future Transforming Agriculture

Barbara L. Benish and Nathalie Blanc

First published 2023 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2023 Barbara L. Benish and Nathalie Blanc The right of Barbara L. Benish and Nathalie Blanc to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Benish, Barbara L., author. | Blanc, Nathalie, author. Title: Art, farming and food for the future : transforming agriculture / Barbara L. Benish and Nathalie Blanc. Description: Abingdon, Oxon : Routledge, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022010361 (print) | LCCN 2022010362 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367433697 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032322889 (paperback) | ISBN 9780367433710 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Artists and community. | Art and social action. | Sustainable agriculture. | Food consumption. Classification: LCC NX180.A77 B46 2023 (print) | LCC NX180. A77 (ebook) | DDC 700/.46—dc23/eng/20220707 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022010361 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022010362 ISBN: 978-0-367-43369-7 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-032-32288-9 (pbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-43371-0 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9780367433710 Typeset in Bembo by codeMantra

We dedicate this book to our mothers: Dola Mae (Benish) Miller (1924–2015), who always got food on the table before the poker game started, and kept the stories of her childhood farm in Kansas alive for the next generations. . . and Nicole Grandin (1930–2020), anthropologist and historian of Sudan, whose research on the Nilotic Sudan was particularly pioneering in the French academic landscape, between Africanist studies focused on the territories of the former French colonial empire and Arab studies focused on the Maghreb or the Mashreq. She did not like to prepare food but was the one who did it daily to feed her very hungry daughters. . . .

Contents

List of figures

ix

Introduction

1

1 Agriculture in Times of Ecology: A Brief History

13

2 The Honest Aesthetics of Food Representation

27

3 Anarchy in the Kitchen

49

4 Art and Research in Food-Based Situations

67

5 Art-Science Residencies as Experiments

83

6 ArtMill, Rural Residencies, and Environmental Education

100

7 Bread, Grains, and Ancient Cosmologies

133

8 In-Between Places

151

9 Nomads, Shepherding, and Territory

178

10 Poisons

198

11 Decolonizing Land and Body through Food Culture

215

12 The Food of Life

235

Index

241

Figures

0.1

1.1 2.1 2.2 3.1

3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6

The Zone Sensible team in their permaculture gardens with the latest issue of Recites. From L to R: Jessica Leclercq (COAL), Estelle Vanmalle (SILO), Ranwa Stephan (cook and founder of Les Délices de l’Ogresse), Lauranne Germond (COAL, director), Olivier Darné (founder of the Parti Poétique), Nathalie Blanc (LADYSS). Photograph by Andrea Mantovani. Courtesy of Zone Sensible A combine harvester working a monoculture field of wheat. Photograph by Tom Fisk A poster describing the value of learning from our elders. Kultivator, Öland, Sweden, 2019 Herbarium project by Andrea Caretto/Raffaella Spagna at Parco Arte Vivente, Italy, 2021. Photo by authors Helen Mayer Harrison cooking strawberry jam for her exhibition/performance at the Women’s Building in Los Angeles, 1974. Image courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries Strawberry Jam, Helen Mayer Harrison, 1974. Image courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries Strawberry Jam, Helen Mayer Harrison, 1974. Image courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries “Table Langue,” installation by Jorgge Menna Barreto and Joélson Buggilla, Utopiana, Genève, Switzerland, 2019. Photo courtesy of the artist USA postage stamp honoring comedian Lucille Ball from the popular TV show “I Love Lucy,” 1962 People and food in a market, South America. Gordon Matta-Clark, 1972. Collection Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal; Don de la succession Gordon Matta-Clark/Gift of Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark

3 20 41 43

52 53 53 56 60

61

x

Figures

3.7

5.1 6.1a 6.1b

6.2 6.3

7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 8.1 8.2 8.3 9.1 9.2

“Matta Bones” dinner menu at FOOD Restaurant, New York City, New York, 1972. Photo: Cosmos Andrew Sarchiapone (printed in 2006). Collection Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal; Don de la succession Gordon Matta-Clark/Gift of Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark Zone Sensible, with Maria Varela. France. Recittes project, 2021. Photograph by Andrea Mantovani. Courtesy of Zone Sensible ArtMill, summer, 2020. Photograph by Natália Kalná “Food, Partnership, and Value Added: Introduction of Key Concepts to Construct Local Food Platforms in PostSocialist Rural Space,” presentation at the How to Make a Just Food Future: Alternative Foodways for a Changing World Conference, Sheffield, UK, July 8–10, 2019. Source: Smutná, Zdenka A pitchfork ready for use by the ArtFarm Research Collective at ArtMill. Photograph by Gabriela BK Bahar Bahemani’s “Damascus Rose” installation with traditional Bohemian koláče at ArtMill. Traditional Indian textile block prints inspired by koláče patterns made by Meeta Nastani and Sarah K. Khan. Photo courtesy of the artists Maria Varela, Decorated Bread, 2021. Tavros/Locus Athens, Greece Paky Vlassopoulou, Bread, 2020. Tavros/Locus Athens, Greece The Biosentinel solar oven being used to cook food. Hyperkomf, Greece, 2019 Codex Borgia, c. AD 1500, Mexico. Courtesy of Vatican Apostolic Library Ana Quiroz, “Diatrabos Plásticos” installation. Mexico (2001–06) Casa de Campo/INLAND Collective, sheep grazing project by Campo Adentro in Retiro Park, Madrid, Spain The climbing gardens at the PAV center in Turin, Italy. Photograph by authors Permaculture gardens, Zone Sensible, Seine-Saint-Denis, France. Photo credit: by Andrea Mantovani. Courtesy of Zone Sensible A graph of the circular economy behind Campo Adentro’s project. Photo credit by the authors. Madrid, July, 2021 Åsa Sonjasdotter, Heirloom Potatoes project, 2014. Photo by the artist

62 89 101

102 113

122 134 136 138 146 147 155 158 165 181 186

Figures xi

9.3 Restauro, Jorgge Menna Barreto, restaurant food project, Sao Paulo Biennale, 2016. Courtesy of Jorgge Menna Barreto 9.4 “Meat Grinder,” performance at ArtMill, 2020 by Martin Zet, Czech Republic. Photo: Natália Kalná 10.1 Exhibition talk with students at Universidad Technològico de Cancún: “What Will Be” with the U.N.Safe Planet Campaign at 2010 at United Nations, Convention on Climate Change COP16, Cancún, Quintana Roo, Mexico. (Barbara Benish, co-curator, with video by Gilberto Esparza, Mexico). Courtesy of ArtMill Archives 10.2 Nomadic plants/plantas nómadas, Gilberto Esparza (2008–14). Courtesy of the Artist 10.3 Masami Teraoka, 31 Flavors Invading Japan/Today’s Special, 1982. Thirty-five-color woodcut printed from handcarved blocks of cherry wood with natural dyes and with additional hand-coloring on handmade Hosho paper. Numbered edition of 500, plus 33 proofs. Signed and numbered in pencil on the verso. Carved and printed under the direction of Tadakatsu Takamizawa by Hanpei Okura and Kanjiro Sato respectively at the Ukiyo-e Research Center in Tokyo, Japan. Published by Space Gallery, Los Angeles, California. Sheet and image: 11 1/16 x 16 9/16 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco 11.1 Breakfast Series, Sonny Assu, 2009. Courtesy of the artist 11.2a “Mak-huššištak—Our Vision,” Cafe Ohlone, Artwork by Patricia Wakida 11.2b Vincent Medina (left) and Louis Trevino (right), Café Ohlone, Berkeley, California, 2019. Photo: Dierdre Greene 12.1 Harvesting groundnuts (peanuts) at the African Research Exchange Academy, Cameroon, 2020. Photo: Babara Suinyui

190 193

200 201

212 217 225 228 238

Introduction

Food and Agriculture The art of food is an art of everyday life,1 an art of doing that promotes the transmission of knowhow, interpersonal skills, and a Duchampian embrace of the everyday. This art, which is deeply rooted in cultures and natures, encompasses techniques developed over centuries of inherited knowledge. It determines, for example, whether you hold a fork or eat with your fingers. Not just any fork, but perhaps one of silver from your grandmother or one of sustainable bamboo that your granddaughter teaches you can be recyclable. And not just the fingers of either hand, but only of the right hand, for long-enculturated reasons of habitat, tradition, and hygiene. Yet, throughout time, the representation of food in art has also embodied a loaded history of conquest, colonization, power, class, and politics. Recipes and food products travel around the world easily. But recipes, which are carried in memory but sometimes also written down on paper for successful books, are also linked to the reappropriation of knowhow linked to the subjectivities of their authors. Recipes bear witness to cuisines that are largely open to globalization but at the same time remain part of the diversity of landscapes between natures and cultures. Recipes describe material cultures associated with the symbolic character of culinary arrangements. Thus, cooking is a symbolic art that integrates words and stories, smells, touch, and sounds in a layering of affects. Cooking is traditionally a woman’s business. Women play an important role in this ordinary art, but their work is largely invisible if, in fact, it is considered at all. The “ordinary” can be qualified in the field of environmental studies as a collection of animal and plant species that inhabit the land and are not very remarkable. The “ordinary” is also key to the concept of social aid of the nineteenth-century French anarchist thinker Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the idea of mutual aid of the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin. It refers to an understanding of productive activities before they are usurped by capital, in the sense of becoming property and therefore subordinate. This notion of the “ordinary” offers a kind of emancipation through mastery of the conditions of existence and reproduction. Thus, to understand the ordinary, we must look at how it is a byproduct of capital, the remainder or waste, DOI: 10.4324/9780367433710-1

2  Introduction

the ignored or overlooked part of a process of production made visible in whatever is monetized. This view of the ordinary amounts to giving a place to a number of experiments or mobilizations that are anchored in concrete practices and materially anchored in the local landscapes. The research presented here is very much about the colonization of food production, a history that has inordinately affected marginalized and Indigenous peoples, people of color, and women. We focus on the resilience of these sectors as they grow food in the jungle of reclaimed urban spaces, creating alternatives and experimenting with new recipes in concrete spaces that were deemed inhabitable, both physically and emotionally. The adaptability of artists in colonizing seemingly unlivable places, reconstructing and reimagining life out of decay, is not unlike the newly discovered planktons and barnacles growing and thriving in the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. Hybrid deep-water and shore-line life forms are now attaching themselves to plastic fishing nets floating at sea, crossbreeding and cocreating new life forms that are adapting to—and destroying—the petrochemical toxins of their habitat. The artists we discuss in this book are also connected to their lands and their habitats in ways that can be uncanny. Our work explores the spirit of an environmental aesthetic that is not satisfied with the spectacular but instead weaves multiple, sensitive links to the environment.2 We look at the ways in which women, when they cook, use both their life stories and their surroundings to transform our daily lives. Though constrained, women in many countries, especially in the South, where they take charge of the local environment as part of a system of extended domesticity, improve on the ordinary by accounting for issues of ecology and collective subsistence. Far from being a subaltern art for subalterns,3 to which it is often reduced, cooking is a powerful way to create a sense of community and bring it to life. In addition, cooking is an art of doing that relies on contextual resources, the very materials that surround us, communities of living and nonliving things—in other words, the earth’s resources. Recipes share stories and geographies with us and in so doing transform us into stakeholders in the collective debate about the future of the very ancient alliance between rich soil and our hunger. This form of experiential art also involves agricultural production methods. Current agricultural practices contribute significantly to the greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions causing climate change. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 17 percent of GHG derive directly from agricultural activities and an additional 7–14 percent from changes in land use. Agriculture is therefore both part of the problem and potentially an important part of the solution. Can artists contribute to a renewal of production traditions by embracing new perspectives on social and ecological change? As famine increases exponentially and food prices climb around the world, the idea of food self-sufficiency is experiencing a revival, although it is still taxed as a dream. People who find it difficult to provide themselves with food are likely to suffer the brunt of the food crisis. So, the involvement of art with agriculture points to a positive transformation of our relationships with places that artistic movements can initiate.

Introduction  3

The long tradition of three-dimensional utopias started in the fifteenth century, with the first utopia invented by Thomas More. However, our approach is somewhat different. We do not explore artistic agricultural utopias as spatially defined organizations setting forth new social relationships with territories. Instead, our analysis focuses on the interfaces or places of mediation between worlds—namely, natures and cultures. We examine, for example, the body as a sensitive tool or agricultural tools and technics which involve relationships with space and lifestyles. Some of the artists whom we study here are reintroducing a kind of pastoralism that transforms both the use of the land and our vision of it. This new pastoralism involves new techniques, relationships, and representations of the production of food.

La Table et le Territoire The modes of engagement described above are favored by approaches located between art and science or between the arts and popular knowledge. This type of research-creation was part of a project known as La Table et le Territoire (The Table and the Territory), which involved both authors and is behind the present book.4 In that project, we explored the way in which participatory art projects make daily practices into the very material of artistic practices.

Figure 0.1 The Zone Sensible team in their permaculture gardens with the latest issue of Recites. From L to R: Jessica Leclercq (COAL), Estelle Vanmalle (SILO), Ranwa Stephan (cook and founder of Les Délices de l’Ogresse), Lauranne Germond (COAL, director), Olivier Darné (founder of the Parti Poétique), Nathalie Blanc (LADYSS). Photograph by Andrea Mantovani. Courtesy of Zone Sensible.

4  Introduction

In our previous book Form, Art and the Environment, our study of artists revealed a surprisingly large number of them crossing boundaries into farming, both because of their political or social engagement with issues of food equity and because of their somewhat Proustian love of the alchemy involved in satisfying the very basic human need for food.5 Like Proust, we asked about the artist’s intention and signature.6 This insight caused us to think about our innate impulse to preserve, sustain, and protect the environment we live in at the same time that we evidently desire to destroy it. At what critical point does each of us turn away from our comfortable, twenty-first-century consumerism, which allows only half of the world’s population to enjoy the luxury of food security, and take responsibility for the future? As we explored case studies of artists working intensively on ecological or environmental issues, we concluded that the paradigm shift necessary for such an enormous change to take place could come only from the creative sphere, from the arts and visionary “makers” of our time who work to change the way we live. For example, to tackle the issue of plastic pollution, consumer John Doe must be inspired to switch from supermarkets that make purchasing easy to alternative shops that sell in bulk or forgo packaging. This switch puts the consumer in the role of artist, “maker,” and activist, and the everyday Duchampian citizen becomes the agent of social change via an informed, deliberate activity. The deliberate gesture of carrying a designed and logoed cloth bag to the market instead of settling for the easy acquisition of a plastic bag at the counter engages the casual activity of shopping with political and environmental significance. The consumer’s effort to bring an attractive glass container to the market for the cheese and thereby opt out of plastic wrapping is a gentle gesture of public performative art. The traveler who brings her own stainless-steel traveling cup on board an airplane and asks for her water to be poured into it rather than the ubiquitous plastic cup engages in a dialogue with other passengers, more often than not to create an event. Or to avoid contaminated drinking water in urban settings, artists call attention to fracking practices in their regions that harm local water tables and reservoirs or to the sale of bottled water. The list goes on. Our earlier book, which we envisioned as a sort of textbook of the “environmental art” movement, presented numerous examples of artist co-ops and projects around the world that created rural gardens and community activity spheres. Many of these model communities not only created food alongside artistic performances, but also exhibitions, interventions, and happenings. We saw that the alternative practices of many artists and art collectives themselves presented concrete alternatives to the systemic, degenerative sociopolitical systems that deny half of the world’s population access to food. In the present study, we return to practitioners through case studies to explore deeper ref lections and motivations. Through interviews, we engaged with artists in both rural and urban areas who are pioneering a new trend of creating hubs of artistic activity away from traditional city spaces for “art.” They belong to a pattern of nonhierarchical practice in twenty-first-century

Introduction  5

art, which is decentralized and more communally based. Even if our notion of what defines an artist still explicitly stems from a 1970s dialectic, our study deals only with artists who make a living from their artistic trades and not with creative individuals as such. While we agree with many thinkers from other cultures, such as Ananda Coomaraswamy, who in the 1930s stated that “every human being is a special kind of artist,” 7 we focus on active artistic “makers” working to transform how and what we eat and grow. So, we define artists as people living mostly from their artistic craft who are able to propose something special, in the manner that anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake describes in her book Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why.8 According to John Dewey, the work of art itself comes from experience. “When artistic objects are separated from both conditions of origin and operation in experience, a wall is built around them that renders almost opaque their general significance, with which esthetic theory deals.” 9 The projects of these artistic makers are not “only” about food and sustenance for the body but are also about the nonmaterial, ephemeral process of people coming together to create something. The result is food, but the acts before that of seeding, planting, plowing, weeding, cutting, debugging, fertilizing, harvesting, and so forth create family and community. This is the key to our research. We investigate founders and creators of local agricultural production, who, against the backdrop of collapsing socio-ecological systems, have committed to publicizing a sustainable approach to agriculture based on creative experimentation and the renewal of local commons. We approach their creative experimentation by measuring the transformation of agricultural production methods against local cultural revivals, a trend highlighted by many authors in the publication Investigating Cultural Sustainability published by the European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST),10 to which Nathalie Blanc contributed, and discussed in the framework of the pan-European network involved, in which both of us participated. In exploring this theme, we aim to inform the issue of creative sustainability insofar as it is rooted in artistic practices nestled within communities of meaning. Ultimately, our study is about producing stories and narratives that illustrate and stage new local communities of agricultural and cultural production. This idea bears witness to possible ways of transforming our relationships with the earth at the same time that it confirms the role of creativity and artistic practice in the sustainable transformation of places and territories. Whether they are local stories or global narratives associated with climate change and biodiversity loss, the overarching goal is to recreate an environmental culture that enables concrete strategies to be developed in such a way as to mitigate and adapt to the massive environmental changes underway. The goal, in a word, is to develop, analyze, and disseminate resolutely participatory joint art and science practices. We hope that this work will also arouse in our readers a familiar sense of their own eating experiences. Every human being has a story from the dinner

6  Introduction

table, a favorite smell from the kitchen, that brings us back to pleasurable moments of shared histories and recipes. Many of us remember the first seeds that we planted as children, when the brain’s neurons connected the process of growth to the life force. And then some of us went on to plant gardens, tend them, or grow trees that became landmarks for the next generation to tend, gather fruit from, and nurture into old age. Many of our readers may have expanded their knowledge to larger possibilities in food forests and farms, exponentially giving back more food to the population than they have ever consumed as individuals. One of the authors, Barbara Benish, a visual artist and a writer living between the Czech Republic and the United States, planted her first garden under the mentorship of her ethnic studies professor at the University of Hawai’i in the early 1980s. As they dug in the deep black volcanic soil behind her student house, he told her stories of land grabs by corporate entities in the pineapple and sugar industries of Hawai’i’s Colonial past. As they planted corn in the garden, she learned about land rights and the sovereignty of Indigenous peoples.11 Gardens are a wonderful place to learn about land and relationships toward nature. Nathalie Blanc, a French geographer with a background in fine arts and very engaged in researchcreation experimentations, learned about plants and food-making from her father, who, after surviving great hunger during more than two years in the Buchenwald concentration camp during World War II, found it impossible to pursue studies commensurate with his ambitions. But he was an amateur naturalist and a fine cook who had inherited a culinary tradition from Eastern Europe. Learning the art of food, even though many members of his family had disappeared, meant passing on a memory that was held together only by the associations that it engendered. The authors’ distinct voices contribute, we hope, to the richness of the book and the different ways in which food matters. These stories are what artists are documenting, repeating, reinventing, and discovering in ways that can change the dystopic systems that currently dominate the sourcing and distribution of food. Sustainable food, an eminently cultural, societal, and ecological subject, is a concern not only in Europe and the Americas but in Africa and Asia as well. A common thread of our investigation is global change, including climate change, biodiversity loss, and soil erosion. Scientific findings regarding food and agricultural systems of the twenty-first century are drastic and foreshadow a dark future.12 Indeed, agricultural systems must offer much more than food: they must realize their potential to support people’s health and well-being. Basically, consumers make food choices that do not always correspond to good nutrition, good health, and well-being, and government policies and private-sector actions do not always adequately adjust food systems to the goal of improved nutrition. How do artists reinvent lifestyles through food production systems anchored in local communities? How do artists address global change through farming and food-seeking and pursue such practices as lifestyles from which the other discoveries emerge? Their

Introduction  7

goal is neither profit nor food production but the renewal of lifestyles through creative exploration. Our assumption that artists reinvent their practices by acting as food producers in response to global change is a major theme of our book. We look at the ways in which the artist seeks to create a new way of living by reinventing the modalities of food production in relation to local communities. We then ask what the artist accomplishes that the farmer does not, examining art and the artist, as well as their definitions, in the context of these renewed practices. Does artistic practice allow new relationships with nature to develop? Does it create better social links, new cultural programs, a fairer distribution of ecosystem services? Does the involvement of an artist mean that the eco-cultural understanding of a place is more profoundly transformed than it would be if a more activist, politically initiated practice took place? Does the artist reenact the connection to nature by caring for the material world and engaging in its co-production or co-creation? Focusing on both urban and rural local connections, we ask how, on the sociopolitical level, such an experiment, located but involving the protection of the earth as a reference, involves utopian goals such as the transformation of society through links to the land. The food that artistic farming practices try to reinvent ref lects new thinking about communities and the development of a perhaps more communal approach to food production. What do these utopias stand for and what are their specificities? Our working hypothesis is the following: that when artists are allowed to develop a global-local project uniting different dimensions (the social, the environmental, the creative, etc.), a certain kind of cosmopolitism is then linked to the artist’s trade. A good example of this is the artist-run restaurant founded by Carol Gooden, Tina Girouard, and Gordon Matta-Clark in 1971. As for the why, the artists themselves have many responses. Most simply: food looks, tastes, and smells good. Beyond that: we interact with food intimately, consume it, ingest it, digest it—and internalize it in multiple senses—and with multiple senses. Food defines ordinary life and special occasions alike. It can create pleasure and provoke shame. A vehicle for stories, it prompts nostalgia and inspires utopian dreams. It embodies generosity, community, culture. It causes pollution and contributes to climate change. It’s in the kitchen, at the drive-through, on TV, filling up Instagram. It is fast and slow, super and junk, street and Michelin-starred. As long as art has been made, artists have found in food an endlessly elastic metaphor, and today’s artists use it for varied investigations of the body, identity, gender, community, the domestic, the sacramental, economics, politics, and the environment.13 In exploring this hypothesis, we focus on case studies of various artists and collectives. Our methodology has been to interview artists and research collectives and communities on site in France, the Czech Republic (at a

8  Introduction

facility operated by Barbara Benish), Spain, Greece, Brazil, England, and the United States (including communities of Indigenous peoples of California, the Dakotas, and Hawai’i). We posed questions about the ways in which our interlocutors became involved in their projects, their interactions with surrounding communities (or not), their choices of food to focus on, their consumers, and finally, the ways in which their projects amount to artistic experiments. Each artist project is discussed in comparison to others and as a study in and of itself. To increase our understanding of these experiments, we draw on the knowhow of a wide network of actors, scientists, cultural professionals, and locals. We seek to showcase the importance of the socioecological transformation of the territories by exploring the ways in which the integration of cultural contributions into participatory approaches mobilizes citizens to renew the culture of food while inventing new fields of action and sources of funding for culture through “culture-based solutions” (similar to nature-based solutions). In conclusion, we measure the impact of such experiments on local food consumption and production in both the surrounding communities and the culture at large. Ultimately, our study celebrates the culture surrounding food while exploring the inherent justice of food equality and the ways in which artists engage with and call attention to issues of food production. The chapters ref lect a symbolic order rooted in basic ecological structures that support the growing, naming, distribution, and consumption of food. We focus on case studies spanning the east-west as well as the north-south axes to understand how differing stakes play out around the world. As both authors are white women specializing in the fields of art and geography, we relate both subjectively and objectively to the drivers linking art and sustainability in the production, distribution, and consumption of food. During our research, we participated in experimental local performances, community farms, conferences, and workshops, all of which mixed themes of food sustainability with artistic practices, innovative methodologies, and public discussions and thus enabled us to develop an engaged position on art and food. Our case studies ref lect the living experiments made by artist collectives, individuals, and communities seeking to address the climate crisis globally. Chapter 1, “Agriculture in Times of Ecology: a Brief History,” outlines a history of farming and culture, including the shift from hunting and gathering to food production and the “making” rather than “finding” of food in contemporary food politics. Chapter 2, “The Honest Aesthetics of Food Representation,” offers a brief historic survey of major inf luences in this field, including Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, Hans Haacke, Mel Chin, Agnes Denes, and Joseph Beuys. Chapter 3, “Anarchy in the Kitchen,” discusses the way in which the kitchen is an indoor invention and the scene of culinary experimentation, community, family, and, at times, the enslavement of women. We consider how, from ancient times through recent works and manifestations, artists working with food and its production have used the kitchen as a place for creative fermentation.

Introduction  9

Chapter 4, “Art and Research in Food-Based Situations,” discusses the creation of conceptual tools and relates stories that enable us to collectively recognize food landscapes as a common good rather than merely the product of industrial needs. Chapter 5, “Art-Science Residencies as Experiments,” is devoted to research-creation and explores the ways in which collective work at the level of the territory obliges us to rethink definitions of research and creation, since both are needed to effect socio-environmental changes. Chapter 6, “Art Mill, Rural Residencies, and Environmental Education,” looks at the ArtMill Center for Sustainable Creativity, a small cultural center and farm near the Czech-German border established by Barbara Benish after the political changes of 1989. Chapter 7, “Bread, Grains, and Ancient Cosmologies,” looks at artists in different cultures who create artworks from bread and thereby explore the cultural equivalents of grain-based staples or the ideas that bread-making fosters. Our examples confirm the universality of bread and other baked and cooked grains, which underlies its popularity as a symbol for so many artists today. Chapter 8, “In-Between Places,” looks at the urban farm of Saint-Denis, a suburb of northern Paris. This farm is the perfect outcome of the work of a collective on biodiversity and aims to create a circular economy with a future academy of cooking—that is, to cook at the academy the fruits, vegetables, and plants grown on the farm and then reuse the organic waste from the academy to produce again on the farm. Chapter 9, “Nomads, Shepherding, and Territory,” details a visit to a shepherds’ school in the mountains above Madrid, which is run by the Spanish organization Campo Adentro and offers demonstrations to the public of the ancient ways of animal husbandry and inter-species connections. Chapter 10, “Poisons,” discusses the way in which artists have been dealing with our toxic society and consider the Earth as a laboratory of dangerous experiments. Recent food practices involve chemicals and plastic components that harm biodiversity and raise strong health issues. Chapter 11, “Decolonizing Land and Body through Food Culture,” discusses changes that Native Americans underwent through decades fighting colonization and their regaining of power with a growing population and a renewed way of seeing their culture, among which food traditions is an important part. Chapter 12, “The Seeds of New Communities,” concludes our study by arguing that commons are a way of reclaiming territories for egalitarian food production, distribution, and consumption. Finally, we would like to define the word “territory” as used frequently through the book. We intend territory to be understood as a delimited space that is appropriated by an individual or a community to exercise power over it. Territorialization is a process consisting of an appropriation that can be legal and economic (ownership) or symbolic (the feeling of belonging, of a special relationship). This notion of territory implies, in principle, the existence of precise limits. But in some of its usages, whether symbolic or functional, territory can have more blurred limits

10

Introduction

or can correspond to a reticular organization: for example, territories of mobility, of community belonging (diasporas), or virtual territories. Thus, we use the word loosely to mean a land appropriated by all kind of social practices for different ends. We would like to thank all of the participants in the Table and the Territory program, which was co-funded by the Creative Europe program via the European Union, as well as Jessica Leclercq and Lauranne Germond of COAL, an organization focused on artistic practices and environmental issues, without whom this book would never have seen the light of day. Thanks to all of them, five various organizations working at the intersection of art and food were brought together, to create workshops, festivals, and dialogue. Under the auspices of France’s COAL organization, the environmental art initiative directed by Lauranne Germond, partners in Spain, Greece, France, Czech Republic, and Italy, participated in three years of events and exchanges. Our territories are defined and delegated by fences and borders as well as history and heart. In our EU project Table and Territory, of which this book is a partial outcome, we have shared our connections and projects with very different territories across the continent. Each partner in the project has a different history and connection to place, which is sometimes but not always rural. Each of the five art centers has connections in turn and works with others in its home countries and beyond to expand into a much larger movement of art practices connected to ecosystems, both literally and figuratively. These connections are not just about growing organic food or making cheese or bread, but also about building a much larger community of artists and practitioners who have the common goal of inspiring a global movement working with “slow food,” fighting big agriculture, and staying carbon neutral. It is in local stories and histories that each place, whether in Italy, Greece, France, Czech Republic, or Spain, reveals a living habitat that is worth documenting, celebrating, and recording to keep alive. Such artistic practices, which are newly founded on the art of “doing” in society, play on a conception of art as a body of historical habits and not as an essence. Thus, to change art involves transforming art practices. We would also like to thank Coline Biot for her analysis of the case of SaintDenis and, more broadly, her work on artistic practices related to agriculture, as well as Pauline Le Bras, who has helped us better understand the place of these artistic practices within local communities. We are grateful for the wonderful editing and proof-reading by Dr. Marilyn Wyatt, as well as her insightful feedback on the manuscript. She has been more than an editor, but a contributor. Gabriela B. Kalná was fundamental not only in photo editing and editorial input of the book, but invaluable as an inspiring young bio-farmer, artist, and co-creator, along with her sister Natalia, at ArtMill during this project.

Notes 1 Michel de Certeau and Luce Giard, L’invention du quotidien, vol. 2, Habiter, cuisiner (Paris: Gallimard, 1994).

Introduction

11

2 Nathalie Blanc, “Towards an Environmental Wholistics Aesthetics,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Environmental Science (forthcoming). 3 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 271–313. 4 Artistic and scientific direction of The Table and the Territory is provided by the laboratory LADYSS (see www.ladyss.com) and the COAL association for the crossings between the arts and ecology (www.projetcoal.org). Nathalie Blanc and Marine Legrand, “Vers une recherche-création: textes, corps, environnements,” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 18, no. 1 (2019): 49–76, https://www.acme journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1625. 5 Nathalie Blanc and Barbara Benish, Form, Art, and Environment: Engaging in Sustainability (London: Routledge, 2017). 6 “And when all these had been eaten, a work composed expressly for ourselves, but dedicated more particularly to my father, who had a fondness for such things, a cream of chocolate, inspired in the mind, created by the hand of Francoise would be laid before us, light and f leeting as an ‘occasional piece’ of music, into which she had poured the whole of her talent. Anyone who refused to partake of it, saying: ‘No, thank you, I have finished; I am not hungry’ would at once have been lowered to the level of the Philistines who, when an artist makes them a present of one of his works, examine its weight and material, whereas what is of value is the creator’s intention and his signature.” Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. C.K. Scott-Moncrieff (London: Chatto & Windus), 1922. 7 Ananda Coomaraswamy, The Transformation of Nature in Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934), 64. 8 Ellen Dissanayake, Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes From and Why (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 1995), 58: “The concept of making special, in the behavioral view of its being the core defining feature of art, casts a new light on previously troublesome questions about the nature, origin, purpose, and value of art, and its place in human life.” 9 John Dewey, Art as Experience (London: Penguin, 2005), 2. 10 J. Dessein, K. Soini, G. Fairclough, and L.G. Horlings, eds., Culture in, for and as Sustainable Development. Conclusions from the COST Action IS1007: Investigating Cultural Sustainability ( Jyväskylä, Finland: University of Jyväskylä, 2015), http:// www.culturalsustainability.eu/conclusions.pdf. 11 “Hawaii” Islands Under the Inf luence” by Noel J. Kent, was first published by University of Hawai’i Press in 1982. 12 Agriculture, which is the source of a significant part of GHG emissions, must face a social demand to transform its agricultural model toward agro- ecology. In addition, climate change has a considerable impact on agriculture with droughts, f loods, and unpredictable temperatures. The agricultural sector, while continuing to have to feed billions of people, will have to face major challenges. 13 Kevin West, “Will Work with Food,” Surface, December 8, 2017, https://www. surfacemag.com/articles/artists-using-food-in-art/.

Bibliography Blanc, Nathalie. “Towards an Environmental Wholistics Aesthetics,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Environmental Science (forthcoming). Blanc, Nathalie, and Barbara Benish. Form, Art, and Environment: Engaging in Sustainability. London: Routledge, 2017. Blanc, Nathalie, and Marine Legrand. “Vers une recherche-création: textes, corps, environnements,” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 18,

12

Introduction

no. 1 (2019): 49–76. https://www.acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/ view/1625. Certeau, Michel de, and Luce Giard. L’invention du quotidien. Vol. 2, Habiter, cuisiner. Paris: Gallimard, 1994. Coomaraswamy, Ananda. The Transformation of Nature in Art. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934. Dessein, J., K. Soini, G. Fairclough, and L.G. Horlings, eds. Culture in, for and as Sustainable Development. Conclusions from the COST Action IS1007: Investigating Cultural Sustainability. Jyväskylä, Finland: University of Jyväskylä, 2015. http://www. culturalsustainability.eu/conclusions.pdf. Dewey, John. Art as Experience. London: Penguin, 2005. Dissanayake, Ellen. Homo Aestheticus: Where Art Comes from and Why. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1995. Kent, Noel. Hawaii: Islands Under the Influence. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1982. Proust, Marcel. Swann’s Way. Translated by C.K. Scott-Moncrieff. London: Chatto & Windus, 1922. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, eds. Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1988, 271–313. West, Kevin. “Will Work with Food,” Surface, December 8, 2017. https://www. surfacemag.com/articles/artists-using-food-in-art/.

1

Agriculture in Times of Ecology A Brief History

We need to provide certain elements of a story. This particular story concerns the evolution of agriculture as well as the relationship between the city and the countryside. If we choose to begin this chapter with a discussion of context, it is because artists and their ideas are also part of this history, and their works represent responses to choices made over centuries.

The End of Modernity Most accounts of human progress over more than a dozen millennia place agriculture at its heart. The invention of agriculture is commonly dated to between 10,000 BC and 3000 BC and is thought to have occurred simultaneously in several centers of civilization in the Europe, the Americas, Asia, and elsewhere. This major development was first evident in the Mediterranean Basin sometime between 9500 BC and 8500 BC, where wheat was domesticated in about 9000 BC, peas and lentils in about 8000 BC, and olive trees in about 5000 BC. Parallel developments occurred in the Andes with potatoes, pimento, and quinoa and slightly later in Central America with maize, squash, avocados, cotton, and tobacco. Horses were tamed about 4000 BC in Eurasia, and goats not long after that. Grapes for wine were cultivated starting in about 3500 BC in the Mediterranean Basin. The emergence of agriculture allowed Neolithic societies in various parts of the world to exert more control over the reproduction of plants and animals to meet their needs, especially for food and clothing. It revolutionized the hunter-gatherer way of life, which until then had been based on harvesting plants and hunting animals in the wild. As Marcel Mazoyer and Laurence Roudart discuss in their book, even today more than 90 percent of the calories that feed humanity come from the first plants that our ancestors domesticated, including wheat, corn, rice, potatoes, and millet.1 Such is the standard narrative of the history of agriculture. But in examining it, one cannot ignore that it corresponds to an elaborate narrative of civilization deeply rooted in our cultures.2 Some authors, such as James C. Scott and David Graeber and David Wengrow, believe that it is possible to interpret this history differently.3 Scott postulates that the successive stages of

DOI: 10.4324/9780367433710-2

14  Agriculture in Times of Ecology

this history should be read as a series that allow us to see social evolution at work as civilizations advanced from a state of anarchy, or social relationships described as primitive or even barbaric, to sophisticated social organizations harnessed to ideas of progress. Thus, humans started as hunter-gatherers and then became nomadic pastoralists and later horticulturists and itinerant cultivators. Sedentary fixed-field agriculture gave way to irrigated agriculture using the plough and finally to industrial agriculture. For human society, the pattern is one of progression from small strips in the forest or savannah to hamlets, then to villages and towns, and finally to metropolises. Each stage of this story is a milestone of progress, capped by the establishment of nation-states that now govern all regions of the world. Implicitly, we mean to say that individuals and nonformalized collectives cooperate with difficulty and that only states or similar forms of organization guarantee effective cooperation between human beings. As Scott claims, this reading of human history plays off of a view of populations that resist incorporation into states. Commonly seen as rebellious, anarchist, or anarchic, such populations seem unable to cooperate and have largely been ostracized along with individuals who think along the same lines. For Graeber and Wengrow, such a reading forgets numerous versions of the art of being governed throughout historic and prehistoric times that involved neither hierarchy nor patriarchy. The authors describe how some societies were extremely egalitarian while depending on both agriculture and hunter-gatherer practices. For some researchers, the great history of agriculture also raises questions about the benefits of increasingly settled populations.4 In addition to the relative fragility of populations that are dependent on crops that themselves are subject to climatic hazards, these writers point out that taking care of a field is more labor intensive than obtaining food as a hunter-gatherer. In addition, the food intake that fields yield has less caloric value than the diversity of foods acquired through hunting and gathering. Moreover, the greater volume of food obtained through agriculture did not translate into more free time. On the contrary, this greater volume of food enabled populations to explode and led to increasingly arduous, unequal, and hierarchical work practices unevenly distributed between the tillers of the land and the elites who were the primary beneficiaries of such an arrangement. Gilles Hottois analyzes this evolution in terms of technology. “In the Neolithic period,” Hottois writes, a major change took place as human beings were transformed from nomadic predators to sedentary producers. This means that humans’ relationship to nature changed completely. From being integrated with nature almost as much as an animal, human beings began to manipulate nature, to channel it, and to integrate it into the environment that they inhabited. The first form of “technogeny” appears at the same time as the first technocosm.5

Agriculture in Times of Ecology  15

In short, the transition from hunter-gatherer to farmer can be seen as the early development of technical utopias rooted in habitat. With technical achievement, a habitat free of the idea of nature appears, that is, a habitat removed from natural hazards. This development ensures autarky in the functioning of the habitat, particularly in urban areas. In this sense, a critical history of the transition from hunting-gathering to farming provides a critical perspective on modes of food production, which can help us understand the need for plural visions of the development of artists and the artistic utopias that link artists’ gestures to the places to be reinvented. These interpretations force us to revisit a few moments in the history of food production. Indeed, several millennia passed between the invention of agriculture—if this is not a deceptive term—and the invention of modern agriculture. It is important to stress that the artistic proposals presented in this book do not attempt to rewrite the history of agricultural practices. Rather, they propose ideas about those practices and the histories of territories as they relate to forms of social organization, as well as ideas not merely about food production but also about lifestyles rooted in a renewal of techniques. Many contemporary commentators critique the destructive and profoundly alienating nature of agricultural practices in modernity. Indeed, along with the standardization of farming resulting from the development of inputs, including chemical products such as pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and fertilizers designed to increase yield per acre, modern agricultural practices are strongly associated on a global scale with the destruction of natural habitats. They are also linked to the destruction or degradation of traditional village artisanal lifestyles, which were generally less predatory vis-à-vis their environments than the agricultural practices that followed them. Let us look at the effects of the industrialization of agriculture. According to Marcel Mazoyer and Laurence Roudart, during the second half of the twentieth century, a revolution in agriculture took place, which emphasized high motorization–mechanization, plant varieties and animal breeds with high yield potential, the widespread use of fertilizers, concentrated livestock feeds, and the use of plant and animal treatment products. This revolution spread rapidly throughout developed countries and a few limited sectors in developing countries.6 In the latter, from the 1960s onward, the Green Revolution, a variation of the revolution but without extensive motorization–mechanization, spread much more widely. A brainchild of the American Norman Borlaug and financed by the United States Agency for International Development and the Rockefeller Foundation, the Green Revolution was heavily reliant on chemical-dependent systems. Through the selection of potentially high-yielding varieties of rice, maize, wheat, soybean, and a few major export crops, as well as the extensive use of chemical fertilizers and treatment products, and, where appropriate, the effective control of irrigation and drainage, the Green

16  Agriculture in Times of Ecology

Revolution was joined by farmers able to access these new approaches to production and even make them profitable. According to Mazoyer and Roudart, from the twentieth century on, the productivity gains of the second agricultural revolution were so enormous that they led to a very significant drop in real prices of most agricultural commodities. The ratio of labor productivity between the world’s least productive manual agricultural systems and the most productive motorized and mechanized systems increased 50-fold, from 1:10 at the beginning of the century to about 1:500 today. Faced with such tough competition, not to mention falling prices, the most poorly equipped and least productive farmers have seen their incomes plummet. Unable to invest and develop, they have been condemned to regression and elimination. This is why tens of millions of small- and medium-sized farms in developed countries have disappeared since the beginning of the twentieth century. In developing countries, the same causes have had similar effects, with hundreds of millions of poorly equipped peasant farms plunged into crisis or eliminated, fueling an exodus from agriculture, unemployment, and rural and urban poverty. Indeed, for the world’s active agricultural population of 1.3 billion people—half of the world’s total working population—there are currently only 28 million tractors, a number equivalent to merely 2 percent of the number of agricultural workers.7 Here we can highlight three main themes to guide our understanding of the critical perspectives introduced by artists who link ecology and the art of food. The first theme, which is central to the history of agriculture, concerns the progressive standardization of farming approaches and techniques, including the shape of fields and ploughing methods. The reasons for this standardization range from cultural and technical to economic factors, but they all mainly reinforce the effectiveness of cultivation practices at the national level. In his studies of the countries of Southeast Asia, Scott highlights the important role of the state in its various forms between the tenth and sixteenth centuries in unifying the rice-based agriculture of valleys. It is important to note that valley farmers were under the control of the state or local despots, while hunter-gatherers or small farmers in the mountains were often peasants f leeing state control, including taxation or enslavement. These mountain farmers often relied on slash-and-burn cultivation and had access to different raw materials than farmers in the valleys. For example, root vegetables such as yams and tarot adapted to mountain conditions were rapidly cultivated as crops, while rice continued to be grown mainly in the valleys. This example shows, among other things, that agriculture is not simply the practice of food production but part of a larger socio-economic complex also composed of political, linguistic, cultural, and lifestyle dimensions. According to Anna Tsing, “scalability,” which prescribes illusory qualitative continuity to whatever is increasing in scale, is an art that would be no more corrupted by global success than by national glory.8 By aligning the conquest

Agriculture in Times of Ecology  17

of large scales with efforts at colonization, Tsing portrays the aesthetic order of modernity as an inexorable march to globalization. In Scott’s words: Since to a Western eye the fields were obviously a mess; the assumption was that the cultivators were themselves negligent and careless. The extension agents set about teaching them proper, “modern” agricultural techniques. It was only after roughly thirty years of frustration and failure that a Westerner thought to actually examine, scientifically, the relative merits of the two forms of cultivation under West African conditions. It turned out that the “mess” in the West African field was an agricultural system finely tuned to local conditions. The polycropping and relay cropping ensured there was ground cover to prevent erosion and capture rainfall year-round; one crop provided nutrients to another or shaded it; the bunds prevented gully erosion; cultivars were scattered to minimise pest damage and disease.9 In this sense, whether according to the logic of a Ford or a McDonald, the move toward standardization represented an attack on the unpredictable movements of living beings, and any consideration of a plural vision of creative modes of operation was to delay overall efficiency. Once “scalability” is guaranteed without adverse impact, it favors the biggest operators, assuming that essential technical success is found in the greatest possible volume of production with the broadest dissemination. Tsing also develops the idea that modern agriculture has a twofold specificity: first, it results from modeling production conditions, particularly with the progress of agronomic sciences; and second, ignoring the role of scale and local production determinants, it has standardized its models from the smallest to the largest farm. In other words, modern agriculture is indifferent to specific local circumstances. In this book, we will take a view opposite to that of modern agriculture. When Karen Barad emphasizes the importance of scale, she calls for analyzing one scale through another by “diffraction.” She replaces a metric analysis of scale, whereby global phenomena account for local phenomena, with overlapping analyses of phenomena in which global scale is but one among many. It is possible to see the cockroach under the refrigerator in the context of global warming or the transformation of the city of Paris. In other words, materialities, individuals, and social groups interact: for example, the perception of grass as dirty prevents people from sitting on the ground, which makes the grass itself less subjected to the burden of slumped bodies, making it easier to rest and grow. All of these elements in the environment act and create actions that have considerable impact on any analysis of environments and their materiality.10 We can therefore speak of a polycentric capacity for action. Instead of dissociating spaces that produce norms from spaces that receive them (with

18  Agriculture in Times of Ecology

possible bifurcations), we must produce a theory of agency focused on the relationships between these materialities. It renews with the idea of entangled paths and organic and institutional logics of transformation in the field of agriculture. The revival of the idea of the local or terroir can be applied to the heart of the city, as with the urban farm of Saint-Denis located in the suburbs of Paris. This terroir can be defined as the result of soil fertility at the juncture of population and crop movements over hundreds of years and progressive artificialization of the landscape. We are not trying to promote the idea of terroir in its traditional sense but to review notions of scale, authenticity, and permanence. We need to move toward a well-understood hybridization or experimentation that has been thought out in democratic terms and collective and open commitments. In short, the production of a rich food resource is caught between the generic nature of its production in the framework of globalized f lows of goods and a dynamic ecosystem at the local level designed to relocate f lows of goods and achieve food security and self-sufficiency. Such a trend, which has recently begun to develop alongside the ecological crisis (which is even more perceptible during the current pandemic as we write this book), points to the necessary ecologization of food production while avoiding any kind of conservatism. We should not overlook the importance of nostalgia or conservatism, which was strongly expressed in representations throughout the twentieth century and before. In his seminal work La fin des paysans, the French sociologist Henri Mendras remarked: The peasant values so vaunted since Xenophon and Virgil, which are at the very heart of our Western civilization, cannot survive the shaking up of this ancient stability. The eternal “peasant soul” is dying before our eyes, along with the family and patriarchal domain based on a food-producing polyculture. This is the last struggle of industrial society against the last remnant of traditional civilization. The study we are undertaking is therefore not simply that of a new agricultural revolution, but the disappearance of traditional peasant civilization, a fundamental building block of Western civilization and Christianity.11 The second theme of modern agriculture that is important for understanding the renewal of agricultural practices, particularly those initiated by artists, is the role of agricultural inputs—that is, chemicals, pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and fertilizers. The use of these inputs to develop profitable agricultural production platforms multiplied 100-fold between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Although critics of an ecologically conscious agriculture claim that neither agro-forestry nor agro-ecology can provide sufficient quantities of food to feed the world’s burgeoning population, most of the artistic practices that we study in this book are part of a protest against the massive use of chemicals in modern agriculture. Artists’ collectives such as Bureau d’Études, for example, which have projects focused on

Agriculture in Times of Ecology  19

eco-toxicology, denounce the role of food that transmits endocrine disruptors. In this context, it is surprising to note the relative indifference to diseases resulting from agrochemicals, especially Parkinson’s disease and cancer, in comparison to epidemics, particularly viral epidemics such as COVID-19. We need to rediscover the meaning of practices that take advantage of locally fertile conditions—that is, production conditions associated with land in all its richness. The third theme characterizing modern agriculture and constituting a milestone in historical terms is the new recognition of the role of living things. Whether human life, domesticated animals and livestock, or “life’s auxiliaries,” such as earthworms and other insects that promote bio-fighting control, everyone and everything is now recognized as having a huge role in the production of food resources. In this sense, the differentiation of food production and agriculture is a sign of mourning for so-called agricultural modernity. In recent decades, the process of agricultural modernization has led to a growing dissociation of agricultural and food issues. This is particularly ref lected in the fact that, despite their close links, agriculture and food are most often treated separately both in scientific studies and the application of new concepts. For example, the idea of “autonomous food spaces” developed by Amanda DiVito Wilson in 2013 describes territories in which food production activities are set up as a critique of capitalist systems of agribusiness.12 These spaces are created by communities that seek to open up possibilities for experimentation independent of the capitalist model and to build relationships based on mutual aid and nonmarket exchanges (nonmarket in the sense of not obeying mercantile logic). Many activities carried out in these spaces, whether they are gardens or large farms, emphasize sharing and other forms of exchange and sociability that are not defined by monetary value.13 Living beings and non-humans are a crucial part of these processes. These models are distinct from both the capitalist market and models of state redistribution insofar as they create new approaches and propose analyses through the prism of artistic practice. The notion of “food culture” and the development of “food studies” are part of this trend and allow us to better understand the relationship between table and territory and to shift the debate about the conditions of food production to the various roles and places of food in human societies.14 Given that products often travel great distances via global food circuits, the promise of modern agriculture, insofar as it is streamlined, industrialized, colonizing, and even imperialistic, is generally to meet the needs of the world’s growing population—that is, feed everyone and overcome malnutrition.15 We are still waiting for this promise to be fulfilled, but in the meantime we face the direct results of this increasingly intensive system of agriculture. Whether the fault is pesticides, deforestation (which not only affects large forests but also hedges, which have disappeared in huge numbers), or greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, industrial agriculture plays a massive role in our ecological crisis.

20  Agriculture in Times of Ecology

Figure 1.1 A combine harvester working a monoculture field of wheat. Photograph by Tom Fisk.

A Tense Relationship between Town and Country There are other elements to take into account in this history of agriculture. We need to take stock of the symbolic and material discontinuities between city and countryside, since they have played and continue to play an important role in the artistic dynamics linking art and food production, especially as artists f lee cities to create ecological communities in the country. The growing urbanization of Europe, especially since the eighteenth century, has been accompanied by a shift in views of the city as an unloved place to a place of freedom. The city was intensely criticized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who echoed a common eighteenth-century ideal in lauding the benefits of nature and its representation of all that is beautiful, including evidence of the divine hand. Rousseau presents the city as the “least beneficial” place to observe the genius of a nation. In his view, human nature is most apparent in the provinces, especially the remote provinces: All nations observed seem to be much better the closer they come to nature and the more goodness predominates in their character; it is only by shutting themselves up in the cities and altering their behavior through a base culture that they become depraved and acquire pleasant and pernicious vices, certain defects that are more vulgar than evil.16

Agriculture in Times of Ecology  21

The city perverts human beings whose fundamental nature is good. It makes them evil. Only in the countryside do peasants make use of “the inventive genius given to them by nature,” Rousseau writes in his letter to d’Alembert published in 1758.17 Nature is even a useful model for the government of men because, according to Rousseau, “the first movements of nature are always right.”18 These words imply that an attraction to nature means a rejection of the city, which at the time was undergoing profound change. For Rousseau, freedom can be found only in nature, wild nature, as represented by the mountains and the sea. The widespread rejection of the city ref lected a need for solitude, a theme that Rousseau helped propagate, and also a willingness to escape increasingly busy streets and factories, particularly in England.19 Uncultivated nature, in which one can cut oneself off from the world, constitutes an indispensable spiritual resource. These ideals also marked the advent of a relationship with nature which, until the end of the eighteenth century, remained constant and unaltered. It eventually fostered the transcendentalist movement in the United States, which inspired writers such as Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman, who furthered the romantic view of nature. At the dawn of the twentieth century, the German philosopher Georg Simmel, whose theory of sociology was highly inf luential in Germany and Anglo-Saxon countries, also saw the city as a specific social structure driving particular social behaviors and mindsets. However, while Rousseau presented the city in a negative light, Simmel saw it as a place of freedom. For Simmel, the city rather than nature or the countryside allows freedom to develop; it is the place where individuality, a form of freedom, can be expressed and translated into a specific lifestyle and mentality. This freedom makes it possible to distinguish one individual from another: “it is our irreplaceability by others which shows that that our mode of existence is not imposed upon us from the outside.”20 Before the big city appeared, Western culture struggled with nature to subsist. In cities, benefit was derived not from the struggle with nature but from a struggle with other people. Therefore, characteristics appear that make it possible to differentiate between rural and urban societies, which the German philosopher Oswald Spengler would explore from a moral perspective.21 For Spengler, a student of the natural sciences, the development of human culture is the story of the progressive dominance of technical fact and its physical culmination in the city. The city is born, grows, and develops a soul and a face. All history is comprehensible only if one accepts that the city, which is being increasingly separated from the country, determines the progress of mankind and the meaning of higher history in general. That makes the history of cities a universal history. Thus, the city excludes the country and nature from its foundations. The urban morphology contradicts the forms of nature, replacing them with abstract artifices. It is no longer the soil, a natural reality, but money that counts. The giant city, the metropolis, alone in the landscape, destroys the countryside (that is, meadows, forests, and mountains) and builds the urban space as artificial nature.

22  Agriculture in Times of Ecology

Spengler’s idea that true freedom can occur only in our re-relationship with nature will play out in later chapters of this book, as we look at artists who embrace the natural world and call attention to this connection. Yet only the plant is wholly and entirely what it is; in the being of the animal there is something dual . . . The plant is something cosmic; the animal has an additional quality; it is a microcosm relation to a macrocosm . . . seeking to return out of the life of freedom into the vegetal servitude from which [it was] emancipated into individuality and loneliness.22 The difference between the country and the city translates into differences in lifestyles and even in modes of reproduction. In a fundamental way, nature gives meaning to living. The house in the country obeys rules of construction related to the land. But in the city only housing exists: the house disappears as a dwelling, and only the city as a whole retains meaning. This separation of city and the country was taken up by Henri Lefebvre, whose thinking about nature revolved around the division of city and country, which informs a more theoretical division of city and nature. The social division of labor between the city and the countryside corresponds to the separation between material and intellectual labor, and consequently, between the natural and the spiritual. The city is responsible for intellectual work: organizational and leadership functions, political and military activities, and the development of theoretical knowledge (philosophy and science). The totality is divided; separations are established, including between physis and logos, between theory and practice . . . The countryside, simultaneously a practical reality and a representation, will project the images of nature, of being, of the original. The city will project the images of effort, subjective will, and ref lection, without these representations being dissociated from real activities.23 For Lefebvre, nature is not the sum of elements, nor is it the sum of a material reality independent of human activity; it constitutes the original, essential dimension of certain objects or elements. It refers to what is material, to the corporeality of beings. The country therefore projects representations of nature. A theme that has been used and abused through superfetations and extrapolations, namely “nature and culture,” derives from and diverts the relationship between the city and the countryside. There are three terms in this relationship. Similarly in today’s reality, there are three terms (rurality, urban fabric, centrality) whose dialectical relationships are concealed— and revealed—by the oppositions between the different terms. Nature as such escapes the grip of rationally pursued action, both in terms of domination and appropriation. More precisely, nature remains

Agriculture in Times of Ecology  23

outside of its clutches; it is what f lees, it is reached by the imaginary; one pursues it and it is reached in the cosmos, or in the subterranean depths of the world. The countryside is a place of production and works.24 But rurality is accomplished on land consecrated especially by “the obscure and threatening presence-absence of nature.”25 There are, however, possible mediations between the two worlds of nature and the city. Studying these mediations means studying representations linked to certain objects. “Art farms” can be one of these hybrid outposts in terms of their role and functioning between town and country. They can also be places in which to rewrite the importance of reconnecting to land-based ties at the heart of the urban world and values linked to artificialized ways of living. In 1898, Ebenezer Howard 26 published Tomorrow: a Peaceful Path to Social Reform, in which he set out the theory of new utopia, the garden city, which was to become a reality in 1903.27 The author proposes to create a garden city—in reality, a small community—in which the houses, while complying with guidelines for hygiene, result from individual initiatives and thus are each different, unlike the housing modeled in some industrialist utopias.28 With garden cities, Howard, a self-taught activist and socialist, launched a great theme of contemporary urban planning: a limited urban space existing in a new relationship to nature. The garden city, which is tied to the English predilection to create nature in the city,29 proposed to solve “the problem of rural depopulation and the overpopulated and oversized city.”30 It was to be neither city, which is attractive because of the social life it allows, nor the country, which provides pleasure thanks to its “fragrant forests, its fresh air, the murmur of the waters.” Neither the city nor the countryside alone are enough to make human beings happy: “Neither the city-magnet nor the country-magnet fully achieves the goal of a life that is truly in harmony with nature. Man must enjoy both society and the beauties of nature. The two magnets must become one.” In addition to individual houses, tree-lined avenues and streets, the waste products of the city, will be found in the agricultural parts of the property, which are cultivated individually in large and small farms, tenant farms, and pastures. Artistic endeavors linked to food production are part of a history punctuated by milestones that need to be challenged in terms of political ecology. A form of challenge is artists’ resistance to a history of agriculture that is synonymous with human progress and culminates in modern agriculture. A second challenge is the city–country opposition, which makes art farms part of an effort to reinvent the rural within the urban or a place of culture in rurality. We are interested in the role of artistic gestures in food production not so much for their innovation but for the possibilities they open up of separating the issue of food from effective agricultural production. Later, we will look at the temporal and spatial aspects of artistic gestures, which help produce ways of living in local places. We will also focus on the different facets of food production and the ways in which artistic gestures modify them.

24 Agriculture in Times of Ecology

Amid today’s extremely troubling deterioration of ecological living conditions, increasing anxiety about risks can lead to collective psychosis or fears of a hopeless future. It is important to pay attention to alternatives put forward by artistic practices in unusual areas, such as agriculture and food production. We aim to provide diverse examples of ways to measure known realities, which should provide ideas for proposing and implementing bifurcations in the field of food production. Our work focuses on overlapping practices in art, agriculture, and ecology that deal with the renewal of food production, whether in agriculture or in other breeding, hunting, and gathering activities. Importantly, many activists are also tackling the issue of a new agriculture and food culture. Vandana Shiva’s renowned commitment to agro-ecology is seen in Navdanya, a network of seed owners and organic producers spread across 22 Indian states. By 2019, Navdanya had helped establish 122 community seed banks across India; trained more than 9 million farmers in seed sovereignty, food sovereignty, and sustainable agriculture; and helped establish the largest direct marketing and fair-trade organic produce network in the country. Navdanya also established a learning center, Bija Vidyapeeth or “School of the Seed,” at Earth University on its organic and biodiversity conservation farm in the Doon Valley in the northern state of Uttarakhand. Activists and artists, long compatible bedpartners, are working in aestheticized environments to bring agricultural issues to the forefront and disseminate them in global contexts.

Notes 1 Marcel Mazoyer and Laurence Roudart, Histoire des agricultures du monde. Du néolithique à la crise contemporaine (Paris: Seuil, 2002). 2 Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997). 3 See James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (London: Yale University Press, 2019); David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (London: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021). 4 Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (New York: Harper, 2015). 5 Gilbert Hottois, “Le technocosme urbain. La ville comme thème de philosophie de la technique,” in Penser la ville: choix de textes philosophiques, ed. Pierre Ansay and Roger Schoonbrodt (Brussels: Ed. AAM, 1989). 6 Marcel Mazoyer and Laurence Roudart, Histoire des agricultures du monde. Du néolithique à la crise contemporaine (Paris: Seuil, 2002). 7 Mazoyer and Roudart, Histoire des agricultures du monde. 8 Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, “On Nonscalability: The Living World Is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales,” Common Knowledge 18, no. 3 (2012): 505–24. 9 James C. Scott, Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaning ful Work and Play (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 48. 10 Karen Barad, “La grandeur de l’infinitésimal. Nuages de champignons, écologies du néant, et topologies étranges de l’espace-temps matérialisant,” Multitudes 65 (2016): 64–74.

Agriculture in Times of Ecology

25

11 Henri Mendras, La fin des paysans (Arles: coéd. Actes Sud-Labor-l’aire, 1992), 28, as quoted by Pierre Palliard, L’ordre domestique. Mémoire de la ruralité dans les arts plastiques contemporains en Europe (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006), 32. 12 Amanda DiVito Wilson, “Beyond Alternative: Exploring the Potential for Autonomous Food Spaces,” Antipode 45, no. 3 (2013): 719–37. 13 Victoria Sachsé, Les jardins partagés, terreau de participation citoyenne: de l’appropriation de l’espace public à la construction de commun(s). Regards croisés entre la France et l’Italie (PhD diss., Université de Strasbourg, 2020). 14 Gilles Fumey, Peter A. Jackson, and Pierre Raffard, “Introduction: Cultures alimentaires et territoires,” Anthropology of Food 11 (2016), http://journals. openedition.org/aof/8048. 15 Cameron Muir, The Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress: An Environmental History (London: Routledge, 2014). 16 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile ou De l’éducation, livre V (Paris: GarnierFlammarion, 2009), 679 (authors’ translation). 17 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, A Letter from M. Rousseau of Geneva to M. d’Alembert of Paris Concerning the Effects of Theatrical Entertainment on the Manners of Mankind (London: J. Nourse, 1759), 75 (authors’ translation). 18 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Émile ou De l’éducation, livre II, 111 (authors’ translation). 19 Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500– 1800 (London: Penguin, 1991), 348–49. 20 Georg Simmel, On Individuality and Social Forms (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1971), 335 (authors’ translation). 21 Oswald Spengler, “Le déclin de l’occident, traduction française de M. Tazerout, NRF Gallimard, Paris, 1976, pp. 84–85, 86–87, 88–90, 91–92, 93–99,” in Penser la ville: choix de textes philosophiques, ed. Pierre Ansay and Roger Schoonbrodt (Brussels: Ed. AAM, 1989), 448–65 (authors’ translation). 22 Oswald Spengler, Decline of the West (London: Random Shack, 2014), 1263–64. 23 Henri Lefebvre, Le droit à la ville suivi de espace et politique (Paris: Anthropos, 1968–72, 2009), 26–27 (authors’ translation). 24 Lefebvre, Le droit à la ville suivi de espace et politique, 74 (authors’ translation). 25 Lefebvre, Le droit à la ville suivi de espace et politique, 74 (authors’ translation). 26 Françoise Choay, L’urbanisme, utopies et réalités, une anthologie (Paris: Seuil, 1965), 277–90; Marcel Roncayolo and Thierry Paquot, eds., Villes et civilisations urbaines—XVIIIe-XXe siècle (Paris: Larousse, 1992), 252–55. 27 Ebenezer Howard, Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Social Reform, reissued as Garden Cities of Tomorrow, with prefaces by F. Osborn and L. Mumford (London: Faber & Faber, 1946), 15–26, 83–84, 77–79, 81, 128, 134. 28 Yves Botineau-Fuchs, “Les cités-jardins d’Ile-de France,” Architectes architectures 151 (October 1984). This hygienic focus would inf luence the design of many garden cities even in France: the buildings were designed in relation to sunshine; the volumes of air per room took account of the respiratory mechanisms. All these elements would be ref lected in the architectural field. 29 Cf. Keith Thomas, Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800 (London: Penguin, 1991), 277. 30 The garden cities would be an English idea responding to growing poverty and overcrowding in London’s slums. While the founder of the garden cities was aiming to replace existing cities with a limited network of green cities, the idea was subsequently to promote low-density urban planning in the suburbs of existing cities.

Bibliography Ansay, Pierre, and Roger Schoonbrodt. Penser la ville: choix de textes philosophiques. Brussels: Ed. AAM, 1989.

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Barad, Karen. “La grandeur de l’infinitésimal. Nuages de champignons, écologies du néant, et topologies étranges de l’espace-temps matérialisant,” Multitudes 65 (2016): 64–74. Botineau-Fuchs, Yves. “Les cités-jardins d’Ile-de France,” Architectes Architectures 151 (October 1984): 22–25. Choay, Françoise. L’urbanisme, utopies et réalités, une anthologie. Paris: Seuil, 1965. Gilles Fumey, Peter A. Jackson, and Pierre Raffard. “Introduction: Cultures alimentaires et territoires,” Anthropology of Food 11 (2016), http://journals.openedition. org/aof/8048. Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. London: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021. Harari, Yuval Noah. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. New York: Harper, 2015. Hottois, Gilbert. “Le technocosme urbain. La ville comme thème de philosophie de la technique,” in Penser la ville: choix de textes philosophiques, eds. Pierre Ansay and Roger Schoonbrodt. Brussels: Ed. AAM, 1989. Howard, Ebenezer. Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Social Reform, reissued as Garden Cities of Tomorrow, with prefaces by F. Osborn and L. Mumford, London: Faber & Faber, 1946. Lefebvre. Le droit à la ville suivi de espace et politique. Paris: Anthropos, 1968–72, 2009. Mazoyer, Marcel, and Laurence Roudart. Histoire des agricultures du monde. Du néolithique à la crise contemporaine. Paris: Seuil, 2002. Muir, Cameron. The Broken Promise of Agricultural Progress: An Environmental History. London: Routledge, 2014. Palliard, Pierre. L’ordre domestique. Mémoire de la ruralité dans les arts plastiques contemporains en Europe. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006. Roncayolo, Marcel, and Thierry Paquot, eds., Villes et civilisations urbaines—XVIIIeXXe siècle. Paris: Larousse, 1992. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. A Letter from M. Rousseau of Geneva to M. d’Alembert of Paris Concerning the Effects of Theatrical Entertainment on the Manners of Mankind. London: J. Nourse, 1759. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. Émile ou De l’éducation, livre V. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 2009. Thomas, Keith. Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500–1800. London: Penguin, 1991. Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. “On Nonscalability: The Living World Is Not Amenable to Precision-Nested Scales,” Common Knowledge 18, no. 3 (2012): 505–24. Sachsé, Victoria. Les jardins partagés, terreau de participation citoyenne: de l’appropriation de l’espace public à la construction de commun(s). Regards croisés entre la France et l’Italie. PhD diss., Université de Strasbourg, 2020. Scott, James C. The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. London: Yale University Press, 2019. Scott, James C. Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaning ful Work and Play. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019. Simmel, Georg. On Individuality and Social Forms. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1971. Spengler, Oswald. Decline of the West. London: Random Shack, 2014. Wilson, Amanda DiVito. “Beyond Alternative: Exploring the Potential for Autonomous Food Spaces,” Antipode 45, no. 3 (2013): 719–37.

2

The Honest Aesthetics of Food Representation

The relationship of art and food is an ancient one, at least as old as reproductions of food dishes, banquets, and still lifes. It is a subject often dealt with in mosaics, ceramics, and even the most contemporary art. But do artists depict food or the act of producing it? In our opinion, without banishing the question of food as gourmet art or even forgetting artists trying to renew their ties to the land, it is rather a question of how artists forge a link to the land and territory to produce a culturally renewed food territory. In this sense, more than about the act of consuming food—except when it is explicitly linked to these ties—the question is about how artists reconnect with the idea and practice of productive territories. Our main hypothesis is that artists, when confronted with changing lifestyles over centuries, have promoted either urban or rural worlds, as these terms are qualified by social, political, economic, and even civilizational factors. The examples below provide useful illustrations. They include English ruralists, Russian “ambulantists,” and more recent artists such as Gerard Gasiorowski, Bernard Pages, and Giuseppe Penone. Our thesis is that ecological artists engaged in the production of “food lifestyles” reinvent territories symbolically and technically by weaving together the urban and the rural, the artificial and the natural. Moreover, they often treat food from the standpoint of everyday popular art. More precisely, the issue is how art forges places according to not a territorial marketing approach, but an environmental aesthetics that includes the living and the lived. Indeed, the democratic future of these places depends on how they recreate—or rather highlight—relationships in a multi-scaled dynamic way based on exchanges with local authorities and other stakeholders in civil society. The people affected by their immediate environment play on spatiality and territoriality as well as temporality to produce artistic works. The environmental aesthetics rooted in creative research force us to question the idea that the author is the origin of the artistic work and to think of nature embedded in culture and sensibility as the transformative aspect of space and materiality. In these innovative places, we wish to go beyond the Land Art model to invent and implement a new field of practice. According to Coline Blot, these places participate in the conservation of knowhow and in the networking of

DOI: 10.4324/9780367433710-3

28  Honest Aesthetics of Food Representation

various activities related to environmental and landscape activism in artistic processes.1 Reinaart Vanhoe suggests interpreting spaces as “also-spaces” to encourage artists to consider their production in relation to the different communities to which they belong (artists, neighbours, social classes, activities, professions, knowledge) . . . Today, critical citizens like artists should not make the mistake of isolating themselves in these “alternative” spaces. What they are currently looking for looks more like an “also-space” or a possible construction of everyday life . . . People understand that a substantial change is necessary, but the obstacle is always cultural.2 “Also-spaces” are both immaterial and material, composed of narratives of the place and the physicality of the farm. In this sense, we will not deal in depth with representations of food art. We will evoke them only as important representations in art history and, in addition, will see how many recent works of art, aside from depicting food and meals, criticize productive agriculture. In a second step, we will see that the artists who depict food may differ from those with a political-ecological perspective who are critical of the indifference to material conditions of resource production. In this field, the pioneering work of Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison, Hans Haacke, Mel Chin, Agnes Denes, and many others is important.3 Although these ecological artists depict different aspects of political ecology with regard to agriculture, they do not develop utopian spaces. We believe that artistic food spaces embedded in territories enable us to appreciate and engage with their meaning, especially their productive meaning, in a different way.

Food Stories Let us take Arcimboldo, born in Milan of modest origins, who painted delightful portraits composed of fruits and vegetables, such as the portrait of Emperor Rudolf II reimagined as Vertumnus, Roman god of gardens and orchards (1590). Or Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who in northern Europe dreamed of a Land of Cockaigne (1567), where naps took place under the shade of pine trees. Or even Jacopo Bassano, painter of The Last Supper, an iconic artwork of the most important meal of Christian culture. From the darkness of Georges La Tour’s works to the sunshine of those of Claude Le Lorrain, French painting, like other European pictorial traditions, rarely depicts peasants and farmers, with the exception of the paintings of brothers Antoine, Louis, and Mathieu Le Nain (including Peasant Meal, 1642). The rare exception is the Northern European painters, whose rural and agricultural landscapes represent peasants at work along with village communities. But from the nineteenth century onward, attention was focused on the gestures of agricultural workers. Gustave Courbet, for example, in The Wheat

Honest Aesthetics of Food Representation  29

Sifters (1854), was infatuated by an earth-colored realism similar to that in the paintings of Jean-François Millet. Camille Pissarro devoted himself to painting rural workers starting in the 1870s. In both their male and female figures, the paintings are tantamount to anarchist rejections of urban bourgeois society experienced as artificial. In contrast to realist paintings, Pissarro depicted a simple and pleasant rural life and a new pastoral approach. Following in the footsteps of Millet, who was considered a true peasant, Vincent van Gogh lauded a healthy life in contact with the land. According to van Gogh, “One must work as hard and with as few pretensions as a peasant if one wants to last.”4 He also writes: I meant how this ruin shows that in this place, for centuries, the peasants have been resting in the very same fields they have ploughed—I meant how dying and being buried are simply like the fall of autumn leaves— nothing but a bit of returned soil.5 This statement reveals an aesthetic of simplicity and rusticity that is still present today in environmental movements advocating frugality and a return to the land and agricultural values. In the twentieth century, food was often used as a model. Whether the artists of Futurism with their experimental banquets and sculpted and perfumed dishes, Marinetti’s 1930 Manifesto of Futurist Cooking, or the Surrealists and Dadaists who integrated organic materials into sculptures linked to desire, dreams, the unconscious, humor, and the unusual, food lies at the heart of the production of representations. In a lesser-known assemblage work by Marcel Duchamp, Sculpture-morte (1959), Arcimboldo’s famous food portraits are appropriated into a surrealistic play of words and meaning. Instead of the Renaissance display of richness and conquest, Duchamp’s twentieth-century version presents the fruits and vegetables of the “portrait” in marzipan, that ubiquitous French sweet representing the bourgeoisie of the previous centuries. The artist further plays with art history and representation in his play on the words nature morte, which literally means “dead nature” but is translated into English as “still life.” His tongue-in-cheek critique is further complicated by the embossed paper underlying the sculpture, which bears the name of the candy maker, Mr. Bonnevie of Perpignan. “Bonne vie” in French means “good life,” which again entangles the meaning of a “still life.” Thus, the classic Duchampian title Sculpture-morte harkens back to the original still lifes of the Renaissance, which were in fact “dead lives” and are now displayed in a twentieth- century iconography of food. In this piece, the artist sums up class, colonialism, art tropes, and culture in a humorous jab at us as sensuous, imperfect, consuming humans. The transitions of Western art to a more participatory and engaging stage are vital to understanding the aims of contemporary social practice and art-farmers today. Artists like Duchamp were dismantling the paradigms of

30  Honest Aesthetics of Food Representation

a 2,000-year-old definition of art and experience. Just prior to producing his Sculpture-morte, the artist explained in 1957 that the onlookers make the picture . . . All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.6 This participatory engagement with the audience as an a priori gesture toward the “complete” artwork would continue to bring art into the everyday world on the table, in the fields, and out of the kitchen. After the World War II, consumer society arrived with its proverbial supermarkets, shelves, multiple and varied products with colorful packaging, and advertisements. In their rejection of Abstract Expressionism, American Pop artists created popular art reproducing the notable elements of daily life in a consumer society (TV stars, advertising) and opted for figurative art evoking food (such as fast food) and its packaging (tin cans, wrappings). Their works both celebrate and critique American consumer society and, like advertisements, endow the time’s leading fast-food products (Coca-Cola, Campbell’s soup, hot dogs, hamburgers, ice cream, etc.) with iconic status in paintings, silkscreen prints, collages, relief paintings, installations, and films. American hyperrealist artists shared the same fascination with shops, objects, shop windows, and restaurants and competed with photography in realistically depicting figures and real objects in painting and sculpture: we could think, for example, of Claes Oldenburg’s Pastry Case I, produced in 1961–62. On the other hand, it is rare to find paintings of food production: upstream processes remained hidden or masked by ruralist nostalgia. For example, among English artists, the ruralist painters Peter Blake, Graham Ovenden, Annie Ovenden, Graham Arnold, David Inshaw, and Ann Arnold met in 1974 to form a “brotherhood” in the pre-Raphaelite tradition that would defend the traditions and knowhow of the rural past in an often naïve and critical conception of modernity associated with the city. It was not until English artist Sue Coe created the Orwell’s Animal Farm series (2014–21) that contemporary art began to critique the industrialized food industry in no uncertain terms. In Europe, food was also the subject for many artists. While some, like their American counterparts, celebrated the abundance of consumer society, more preferred to focus on the problems of recycling, reuse, and the diversions of objects and waste, using food as a material rather than a subject matter. Raw, cooked, and rotten food become materials for sculptures: fat, milk, sugar, salt, and rice were used in installations that displayed their materiality, color, smell, and ephemeral qualities as metaphors for human life, thus challenging the viewers to interact with the work. However, it was not until the 1960s, with the widespread deployment of artistic works around links to the land and rural worlds, that other forms of artistic expression f lourished. The originality of the Arte Povera movement

Honest Aesthetics of Food Representation  31

was to reconnect with craftsmanship, land, and rusticity and contrast these— as in the works of Mario Merz—with artificiality or techniques identified with urban space, such as the neon tube. Giuseppe Penone draws heavily on materials, techniques, and tools specific to the rural world, especially dead and living plant material. Wood is the most important of these, as well as vegetables such as caulif lower, squash, peppers, potatoes, and squash. In his open-air installations such as Bread Alphabet (1969), which birds came to peck, Penone left part of the work to natural agents. According to Germano Celant, primitive thought forms a substratum of Penone’s work.7 Being of rural origin, it is Penone himself who as early as 1969 made his work part of the peasant family effort. The artist claims that his work is a form of craftsmanship and a way of life. As for Richard Long, his references lie not in urban civilization but in peasant culture, which asserts itself as the opposite of urban civilization. Among French artists, Gérard Gasiorowski uncovers and works with many images of rurality, which he incorporates into his work. He aspires to a philosophy of exchange with the land, appreciating the slow rhythms of agricultural cycles. Wishing to rediscover radicality in art and artistic expression, his paintings are part of the agricultural cycle and highlight elements of daily farm life. He thus is part of a broader intellectual movement that recounts the history of individuals and ordinary events rather than the history of heroes and kings and great events such as battles. Gasiorowski’s work depicts the social and economic dimension of the behavior of agricultural workers, a daily reality of food production underpinned by many challenges. In addition to rediscovering the authenticity of art faced with harsh living conditions, Gasiorowski wishes to reach out to sections of the population that are largely undervalued today. In the manner of Luce Giard and Michel de Certeau,8 he highlights innumerable tactics employed by people to contend with the harshness of the countryside. From an urban perspective, in line with the idea of the ordinary human condition, the work of Daniel Spoerri has made food production an art of the ordinary. His work is at the heart of an artistic revolution across many contemporary forms of production that emerges in community art or banquets or relational aesthetics. In the 1960s, he invented his first “snare picture,” on which he glued everyday objects to form a representation focused not on creativity but on documentation. In 1963, while in contact with members of the Fluxus movement, he began collecting the remains of his meals at Galerie J in Paris. He opened the Restaurant Spoerri in 1968 in Düsseldorf, where he prepared the food himself, and then the Eat-Art-Gallery at the same site, where the public was invited to participate in the preparation of food. The leftovers were glued onto snare pictures. He also collected cooking recipes and invented gastronomic rituals, as in J’aime les keftédès (1970). The theme of the shared meal was further developed by many contemporary artists. In the same vein, American Allan Kaprow organized “Eat: an Environment,” a performance in New York cellars on the last two weekends of

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January 1964. Visitors with reservations could wander through the cellars while offered wine and food (fried bananas, hanging apples, boiled potatoes, bread and jam) by performers. Gabriel Orozco created Home Run in 1993, in which he encouraged residents living across from New York’s Museum of Modern Art to place oranges in their windows every morning. Only the caption is present in the museum, directing visitors’ attention out the windows. The artist thus orchestrated a work created by people living opposite the museum, thereby taking the spectator’s gaze out of the place traditionally devoted to art. Recent examples of artists focused on food include Wolf Vöstell, who from November 7, 1970, to November 7, 1971, transported 25 crates of salads from Cologne to Aachen and back to Cologne by train—365 days of sad railway journeys—and exhibited the result in the René Block Gallerie in Berlin. The installation, Salat, consisted of two superimposed boxes, one of which contained residues of salads with the inscription “Happening salat—6.11.1970–6.11.1971—Koeln-Aachen.” The other box contained a paper envelope holding the documentation of the happening (concept, plan, certificate, timetable, photographs, diagrams, biographical examinations, testimonies, participants’ X-rays, etc.) and, wrapped in a folded white cloth, the bronze casting of a dehydrated salad after 92 days of happening. Paul McCarthy, in his 1974 Hot Dog performance in his studio, shaved his body and dressed his penis like a hot dog, with bandages and mustard, before stuffing his mouth with real hot dogs and ketchup until he choked and swallowed. In a similarly provocative vein, during the Venice Biennale of 2001, Maurizio Cattelan f lew nearly 150 collectors to Palermo, Sicily, to the heart of the island’s largest garbage dump, dominated by white Hollywood letters, to share a fancy meal with the dump’s workers. Vanessa Beecroft put together a performance at the Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art in Turin, which she described as follows: At a glass table, a group of 30 women, naked models, veterans of previous performances, women connected to the castle or local aristocrats. The women, following a diet that I had created, ate for three consecutive days food served and divided by colour: yellow, orange, red, purple, brown, white, green, brown and multi-coloured. My mother was part of the performance and there were different mother-daughter relationships. The audience, which was not allowed to eat, watched the group and its interaction with the food. This performance is a reference to my food book, a food journal I kept from 1983 to 2003, in which I obsessively wrote down everything I ate as proof that I had not committed any crime. Eat Art, literally “the art of eating,” puts the meal and food in the spotlight with the intention of desacralizing the artistic process that makes the object immutable. As food is perishable, Eat Art does not aim to produce objects but exists mainly through repeat performances (as at the Spoerri Restaurant

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in the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 2002). Coming from a completely opposite cultural experience and history, Rirkrit Tiravanija, a Thai artist born in Argentina, has been creating Thai meals shared by visitors since the early 1990s. According to this artist, a sense of community is essential to human beings and therefore setting up these meals in galleries or museums allows us to question the production of literal and interpersonal spaces in which visitors create a kind of hospitality and social sculpture architecture. In his Soup/No Soup event in 2012, Rirkrit transformed the Grand Palais in Paris into a huge banquet hall, where he served tom kha soup for 12 hours. Some artists work closely with processes of organic decomposition. Michel Blazy, for example, who works with the process of decay, created a fruit installation titled Orange Bar in 2012 for the exhibition Le Grand Restaurant at the Plateau Art Space in Paris. Visitors were invited to squeeze themselves an orange juice with fruit that was in the process of decaying, thereby playing on the odor, f lies, spiders, and other insects present in the food chain. In 1976, when he was 18, Miquel Barcelo exhibited Cadaverina 15 at the Palma de Majorca Museum, The installation consisted of 225 small boxes (15 series of 15 boxes during the 15 days of the exhibition) containing organic elements (egg, fish, soup, liver, banana, boiled rice, spaghetti, bread, etc.).9 The artist continued this food theme in 1992 with Goat and Goat (Cabrit i cabrida), painting his canvases on the ground with a thick paste of acrylic and oil to create a crust in which the other items were mixed with sand, dust, small items such as leaves, cigarette butts, seaweed, as well as f lour, rice, pulp and fruit juice, and leftovers from meals, all on a collage of waste, cardboard, and fingerprints. Jana Sterbak exhibited Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorexic, composed of stitched raw beef, at the Galerie René Blouin in Montreal in 1987.

The Precursors Since the 1960s, ecological art and theoretical thinking about environmental aesthetics have been challenging, among other things, agricultural and food production that previous art did not take into consideration. Helen Mayer Harrison and Newton Harrison have been interested in ecological and food issues from their early days, as evidenced by Full Farm, commissioned in 1974 by the Houston Museum of Contemporary Art. Full Farm: Survival Piece #6 includes Portable Orchard, Potato Farm, Flat Pastures, Upright Pastures, and Worm Farm. The first Survival Pieces (1970–72) consisted of The Hog Pasture: Survival Piece #1, The Shrimp Farm: Survival Piece #2, The Portable Fish Farm: Survival Piece #3, and The Portable Orchard: Survival Piece #5. The latter work provides a good example of an artwork focused on agricultural issues. A harvest and feast installation funded by the California State University Gallery, The Portable Orchard, consisted of 12 boxes planted with lemon, lime, kumquat, orange, mandarin, and avocado trees. Because of the loss of Orange County’s orchards and farms to ongoing suburban and industrial development and smog, the work was predicted to be the last orange orchard in the county.

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Its purpose was to test the living character of the installation. Apart from the avocado tree, the other trees fared pretty well. A citrus fruit feast was held. Twenty years later, a few trees that had been moved outside were still bearing fruit. However, articles and comments in the art world showed a certain lack of interest. Conversely, Newton Harrison and Helen Mayer Harrison’s Portable Fish Farm: Survival Piece #3 created for the 11 Los Angeles Artists exhibition in London about the same time caused a stir by highlighting animal suffering. This installation featured six large rectangular rubber-lined pools, each 8 feet by 20 feet by 3 feet, filled with catfish, shrimp, and lobster and lit from above. In addition to the installation, two performances—a fish harvest and fish consumption—addressed the issue of fish farming in relation to social ritual and agricultural behavior. Whether by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which called for catfish to be electrocuted by professionals in this type of farming, or media outcry, sensitivity to the conditions under which animals are killed was widely expressed. The British Arts Council was threatened with a reduction in its subsidies if even one of these catfish was killed in this way. Scientists and artists came to the rescue of this work, defending the ordinariness of killing these animals. In the end, the fish were harvested, skinned, and filleted and a large meal of catfish was presented at the opening of the exhibition. Another proposal by Harrison in 1970 to introduce a pig to a grazing area at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts for the exhibition Earth, Air, Fire, Water: Elements of Art was initially refused. In a piece presented by video in 2013, Wilma the pig was finally grazing under the benevolent gaze of spectators. For the Harrisons, this piece was a first work to focus on prairies, a theme continued with Art Park: Spoils’ Piles Reclamation (1977), The Endangered Meadows of Europe (1996), and Greenhouse Britain (2007). Despite appearances, and because his work is about developing a new vision of the meaning of at the center of sculpture, Mel Chin is an important artist in the relationship between art and ecology. He designed Revival Field (1991) as a 60-by-60-foot square, in which a circle is divided into 96 plots containing a selection of “hyper-accumulative” plants, soils, and fertilizers with varying pH, to provide information about the effectiveness of different combinations. The area between the circle and the square, which is the same size as the circle, is planted with native “control” plants. This is the creation of scientific “phytoremediation” technology, comparable in the artist’s view to traditional sculpture, in which material is sculpted in order to get the finished sculpture. In this case, the material is contaminated soil, the plants are the carving tool, and the remediated site restored to its natural state is the finished sculpture. Under the inter-arts program of the National Endowment for the Arts, in a category implicitly designed to encourage innovative projects from artists who could incorporate new technologies, a grant of $10,000 was awarded to Revival Field despite debate and criticism of its use of invisible aesthetics.10 This installation or sculpture may be considered far removed

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from the idea of agricultural and territorial production. However, it allows us to think of the ways in which plants can potentially work miracles in the wake of the damage and pollution done to the earth and are in fact the sculptors of a living earth—just like earthworms, as Charles Darwin would say. Agnes Denes, an important artist in renewing links to living nature, planted two acres of wheat on the Battery Park landfill in Manhattan in the summer of 1982. Two hundred truckloads of soil were brought in and 285 furrows were hand dug and cleared of rocks and debris. Seeds were sown by hand and the furrows were covered with soil. The field was maintained for four months, cleared of smut, weeded, fertilized, and treated for mildew, and an irrigation system was deployed. The crop was harvested on August 16 and yielded over 1,000 pounds of healthy, golden wheat. Planting and harvesting a wheat field on $4.5 billion worth of land created a powerful paradox. The wheat field was a symbol, a universal concept; it represented food, energy, commerce, world trade, and economics. It highlighted mismanagement, waste, world hunger, and environmental concerns. It drew attention to our misplaced priorities. The harvested grain was transported to 28 cities around the world as part of an exhibition called The International Art Show for the End of World Hunger organized by the Minnesota Museum of Art (1987–90). The seeds were given to people who planted them in many parts of the world.

Farms as Art Places Aside from one-off performances or works of art intended for public commission, many artists are taking over food territories where they transform ways of living. Artists’ ways of “living,” which include both professional strategies and individual trajectories, are requalifying rural and urban spaces (squats, for example). These are not only spaces but also informal communities, groups, or collectives. Today, many emerging and established artists are choosing to work with food as process, subject, metaphor, and praxis. Often categorized as relational aesthetics, these civic and social practices transgress both disciplinary divisions and the boundaries between art and everyday life.11 They are also a way of revisiting the highly deterministic issue of agriculture. In truth, these food or farming art spaces force us to change the way we look at these activities and to produce new images or representations created by farmers themselves. The participants in these agricultural or food spaces help renew the image of the farm. A farm aesthetic is born out of diversified practices and creative postures adopted by participants or visitors. In discussing these artistic experiments, Sigrid Holmwood explains that we need to turn away from the figure of the passive farmer in art toward image-making peasant figures in order to be able to imagine alternative trajectories for contemporary art.12 In 2016, Caroline Blais defined community art as “collaborative and co-creative work between an artist and a community where participants come from an oppressed community.”13 In short, revisiting the relationships between art, agriculture, and food requires us to think about “agri-culture.”

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According to Coline Blot,14 the exhibition Agricultural Landscapes in Transformation organized in 2017 in Montreal sought to create bridges between city and country by bringing together scientists, farmers, artists, and the public around issues related to agriculture. These artistic orientations invited the use of new technologies. However, the exhibitors seemed a long way from community-based commitments in failing to consider their technical aspects. The work of Mexican artist Gilberto Esparza explores the relationship between contemporary art, science, and new technologies in ref lecting upon the impact of human activity on nature. Created in tandem with researchers (for example, engineers, biologists, and roboticians), his works are hybrid entities—half-devices, half-organisms—which address various aspects of the environmental crisis. An exhibition of the artist’s work in Canada is devoted to auto-photosynthetic plants with which he has been experimenting since 2013 in contexts specific to different metropolises (Lima, Linz, Mexico City, Ljubljana, and Athens). He invites us to consider sewage networks crisscrossing the cities’ underbelly as systems of real-time energy and light production that keep ecosystems in balance. There are many artists today who focus on the paths that cut across territories, art, and food from a perspective of ecological transition. We can examine the links between the nascent ecology of the 1960s (recalling that Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was only published in the early 1960s and describes the deserted countryside resulting from agricultural chemistry and the mechanization of agriculture) and the celebration of rural socialism. It is also possible to link these political-ecological perspectives with the move toward a primitivism that no longer thinks of living beings in terms of their differences in order to laud some original human species, assimilated with Indigenous peoples or prehistoric tribes. The so-called abilities of these people to relate to nature are also a way to deny them sophisticated social structures. However, it is important to stress that art close to these trends, together with ecological and scientific expressions of the environmental humanities, underpin a shift toward materiality understood in a new way, as borne out by the New Materialisms movement. This shift leads at times to a metaphysics of matter beyond its transformation and forms to the point of conferring supreme value on the figure of the earth or Gaia, notably as developed by James Lovelock or Lynn Margulis. It also expresses the idea of a dogmatic break between an art of knowledge that starts from materials, something like a “respectful craftsmanship” approach, and an art of knowledge that starts from techniques and science to lay down rules, standards, and techniques and impose them on a nature identified with material in the form of f lows. We propose a healthy critique of each camp. Similarly, we may question a certain type of “primitivism”, although it is already being criticized in the wake of decolonial studies. Indeed, aesthetic primitivism, which was present from the beginning of the twentieth century and even in the nineteenth century in the celebration of rural life, gives an important, mythical place to expressions of the colonialist primitive, who

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had a major inf luence on modern painters such as Picasso. What matters, in our opinion, is the focus on links to materiality as opposed to the virtual and to the development of extractivism in the middle of an era described as Anthropocenic. This criticism, based in particular on New Materialisms, which is powerful on the level of political ecology, must not go so far as to become a mystique of materiality that is confused as an end in itself. Indeed, it is easy to ignore the consequences of such a position. We must also be wary of identifying craftsmanship and material practice as holding potential truths and solutions to the massive ecological crisis underway today. Yet we also acknowledge contemporary inf luences of indigeneity and living systems as represented by traditional holders of culture in various places around the world, from Peru to Cameroon to Inuit lands. And, in fact, such earth-based experiences and ways of being are not so far removed from the Western-based philosophy of New Materialisms. Notwithstanding these preliminary reservations, the importance of art farms is unquestionable. These artistic practices have historical roots in many experiments, among which Brook Farm is notable. Brook Farm was a communal experiment founded in 1841, whose purpose was to bring together transcendentalist intellectuals and artists of varying practices (writing, painting, music, sculpture, etc.) in a harmonious working society. The farm, located in West Roxbury (today a suburb of Boston), consisted of 200 acres and four buildings to house its residents (others were later built by its members). The farm provided housing for its residents on the condition that they work there 360 days a year. Everyone, of course, made their own contributions to the community. There were those who milked the cows, those who plowed the land, some cooked for the whole commune, some washed the laundry, there were gardeners and shoemakers, even makers of lampshades and Britannia guillotines. Later there was a printing house. Despite this, Brook Farm never seemed to stabilize financially, and it closed in 1847. Although it lasted only six years, Brook Farm is remembered for its members and visitors. Its members included George and Sophia Ripley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Charles Dana, and its visitors included Margaret Fuller, William Henry Channing, Albert Brisbane, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Joseph Beuys (1921–86) is of course another precursor. According to Pierre Paillard, whose arguments we draw on, when Beuys tackles the city and converses with modern life, he has the critical purpose as a “miracle worker” or healer. Beuys derived his vocabulary from a personal artistic reinvention as a shepherd or fisherman, as evidenced by his clothing. The landscapes of the Lower Rhine region made a deep impression on him as a child. Imbued with the ideas of German Romantic thinkers and poets and the “anthroposopher” Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), Beuys lived in a world in which living beings ref lect the complexity of active nature. According to Beuys, human beings, who have caused great evil, are destined to become great miracle workers, and for this reason democracy must be as broad and direct as possible. Steiner,

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an Austrian scientist and philosopher, is generally credited with bringing the ideas of biodynamics to the public, f lowing from his “anthroposophical” approach. Biodynamics strictly forbids the use of chemicals and valorizes a metaphysical approach to the land and plants, inspired by Steiner’s religious fervor for the earth, sun, moon, and stars. Steiner’s commune of likeminded practitioners, who helped build his complex of gardens, houses, and landscapes in Bavaria, has had lasting inf luence on today’s organic farming movement. Steiner’s all-encompassing cult of mind–body–spirit integration eventually formed into today’s Waldorf schools, which offer an alternative education to youth that leans heavily on art and organic gardening. Unfortunately, Steiner’s racist leanings were later taken up by the Nazis, who based their philosophy partly on eugenics and Nietzsche’s idea of the Übermensch or “the overman”, also distorted in their fascist views. Beuys famously embraced Steiner’s teachings, culminating with Directive Forces for a New Society, his blackboard series of performative diagrams which were part of the exhibition Art into Society, Society into Art at the Institute for Contemporary Art in London in 1974. Steiner’s esoteric drawings with colored chalk on black paper inspired not only Beuys’s two-dimensional works but also his overall commitment to what became known as “social sculpture.” The ideas inherent in Steiner’s anthroposophy–philosophy were intended as inspirational measures to connect the human spirit to that of the universal (he delivered more than 2,000 lectures on the topic over his lifetime and had an international following). Nature plays a critical role in this transaction. Beuys’s 7000 Oaks: City Forestation Instead of City Administration, planted at the documenta 7 in Kassel in 1982, was a moment in art history that helped mobilize what would become the environmental art movement and much of what we today call “eco-art”: a community-based public intervention acknowledging the agency of the natural world. This impulse comes directly out of Steiner’s ideas of engaging the arts to change society, recognizing the power of nature, and gardening. Dornbach, where Steiner eventually settled, became a hub of the Anthroposophical Society, which eventually spread across Europe. The site itself, still open to the public today, is an historic declaration of the utopian society that Steiner and his followers envisioned. Art, music, and dance are combined with biodynamic agriculture (which relies on lunar and solar plantings, the zodiac wheel for a farmer’s almanac, etc.) to create a new society. The animism promoted in such rural communes was not lost on Beuys. There must be a great work, and animals that are lifelong companions in the artist’s oeuvre, whether in his drawings, installations, actions, or performances, bear witness to the need for a shared adventure: I don’t subscribe to Darwinism either . . . I don’t think that man is descended from the animals. From the beginning, man was the idea, but to realize the idea on earth, experiments had to be carried out. Because

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the idea of human beings does not exist in a physical context. So, animals are victims, because they have made a sacrifice for human beings as they appear physically today . . . That is why animals must be our friends.15 According to Beuys, humans, animals, and plants are organs of each other that form a natural body. According to Paillard, who describes Beuys’s adventure in the field of agriculture in great detail, Beuys, greatly inf luenced by Steiner, believed that any cultivation amounted to being a conductor of cosmic inf luences and highlighted the complex links that make each object, each substance, the vector of energy circulation. It is conceivable, therefore, that this approach made him sensitive to the development of an ecology and led him to innovate in his relationship with nature to the point of performing astonishing actions. Steiner wrote: “If we could combine ordinary manure with what I would like to call this ‘spiritual manure,’ we would see how fruitful it will be.”16 How do you actually get a few handfuls of spiritual manure? In short, you plunge a cow’s horn filled with traditional manure into the ground and let it stay there so that it experiences maximum vitality and then, once dug up, you spray the liquid on ploughed land. According to Paillard, Beuys also undertook agricultural work on a closed 15-hectare estate made available in Abruzzo, which he visited in 1976. Italy had had its own utopian artists since the 1970s. Let us recall that between the 1970s and 1980s, Gianfranco Barucchello created his “para-political happening” by cultivating a garden he called “Agricola Cornelia,” which generated the text How to Imagine: a Narrative on Art and Agriculture.17 Beuys initiated several cultivation and fertilization systems as well as plantations of various species. Organic ploughing, or preparation of the land, was carried out in the same year as the planting of the 7,000 oak trees at documenta 7 in Kassel. According to the German artist, the trees and shrubs planted on the farm were supposedly endangered species. Beuys wrote a four-page list, ending with a “hat signature” and the words “7000 Bolognano trees.” In spite of the admiration inherent in these words, Paillard asserts that little is known of this adventure, or the number of hectares actually cultivated, or the associations of preferred species and how they related to the existing vegetation.18 In truth, all that is known is what Beuys himself said he intended to create in Bolognano: a small paradise to study plants in danger of extinction and to create an ecological bank on the lands of the Durini family. These plants will be preserved and protected. This action is not limited to Bolognano because I want to create a network of similar initiatives in other places.19 Thus, other events should have taken place as a continuation of this project— for example, an old farm machine was supposed to be exhibited at the International Contemporary Art Fair (FIAC) in 1986. All of these measures

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and protocols inspired by Steiner were accompanied by public events, during which the agricultural transformation program was discussed, including in open markets attended by farmers. The events and partially implemented projects took place in a sensitive German context, as evidenced by the rise of a green conservatism that expressed, in particular, the rejection of modern civilization. However, we should not think that it was a great time for political ecology in Germany. Rather, the 1980s marked the beginning of the excesses of liberalism and financial capitalism. Another example from the United States is offered by Bonnie Ora Sherks’s Crossroads Community (The Farm) (1974–80), a pioneering community meeting place for urban agriculture, environmental education, and multiple arts according to Coline Blot.20 The Farm was located on over seven acres in San Francisco, where four low-income multicultural communities (Mission, Bernal Heights, Potrero Hill, and Bayview) came together at the major highway interchange of US Route 101 at Cesar Chavez and Potrero Avenues. The Farm required significant land transformation work, including the integration of disparate abandoned parcels of land into a new urban culture and ecology park at the convergence of three hidden creeks (Islais, Precita, and Serpentine). Known as the Farm to thousands of participants from all walks of life, the community was entrusted with an educational mission focusing on ecology and natural systems. Local residents, local schools, and the visual and performing arts communities were invited to participate in the Farm’s interdisciplinary and ecological educational programs and activities. The Farm was a good example of urban agriculture and a precursor to many contemporary programs. It was also one of the first alternative arts spaces in the United States.21 More recently, the same artist-landscape architect created a “Living Library,” a term that designates an environment that includes collective and community programs. Today, the Farm is known as Potrero del Sol Park. In Japan, the dancer Min Tanaka and his company moved to the village of Hakushu near Tokyo in 1985 and created the Body Weather Farm, a space dedicated to collective farming, communal living, and choreographic creation that links the body and the environment according to Coline Blot.22 Body Weather advocates an approach to living and horticulture understood as the art of cultivating gardens, vegetables, f lowers, or trees. As Jules Janick writes: One of the unique characteristics of horticulture as an agricultural discipline is that it has an aesthetic component. There are two approaches to the aesthetics of horticulture: (1) art in horticulture, the direct use of plants alone and in groups as pleasing visual objects, and (2) horticulture in art, the use of horticultural objects as a basic component of artistic expression.23

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Figure 2.1 A poster describing the value of learning from our elders. Kultivator, Öland, Sweden, 2019.

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By the 2000s, the art of agriculture, or agriculture as art, developed by these artists gave way to hybrid artistic and agricultural communities as well as new artistic, scientific, organizational, and other techniques. For example, Kultivator, an experimental cooperative, was founded in 2005 by artists Mathieu Vrijman, Malin Lindmark Vrijman, and Marlene Lindmark and farmers Henri Stigeborn and Maria Lindmark in the rural village of Dyestad, on the island of Öland on the southeast coast of Sweden. It is now an open group whose members vary from project to project. In setting up certain activities in abandoned agricultural facilities close to an active farming community, Kultivator creates a space for collaboration and work that emphasizes the parallels between supply production and artistic practice and between concrete and abstract processes of survival. The Digital Farm Collective, founded in 2009 by Phoenix, Arizona, resident Matthew Moore, consists of a network of farmers who, at his initiative, began creating images of agricultural processes using time-lapse photography. The short films show a production cycle from seed to harvest for each crop. Weather stations integrated into the photography units collect real-time environmental data catalogued with each film. The filmmaker also conducts interviews with farmers about their cultivation techniques, historical relationships to food growing, and general philosophy and hard-won wisdom from farming life. This ethnological and artistic approach resonates particularly well with our field of research. According to Moore, agriculture and art provide new visions of our human beings fit in the world and how they should develop. The value of his approach lies in the fact that he produces art based on the intangible heritage of agricultural knowhow. According to Coline Blot,24 the Sugar vs the Reef? project initiated by artists Lucas Ihlein and Kim Williams is one of the most recent examples of food artivism. Since 2014, Ihlein and Williams have focused on the sugar industry while exploring the ways in which artists and farmers can address common ecological problems in the Murray-Darling Basin, Australia’s largest river system. It is a socially engaged art project that addresses the complex relationship between the region’s agriculture and the fragile ecology of the reef. The artists drew on the work of John Sweet, an artist who quickly understood the importance of farmers surrounding themselves with artists to support the movement toward regenerative agriculture. In July 2017, the Sunset Symphony in the Sunf lowers event was presented in collaboration with Mackay farmer Simon Mattsson. The idea was to carve an amphitheater from a crop of sugarcane and sunf lowers and to organize a concert celebrating local culture and regenerative agriculture. The team is currently working on the Watershed Land Art Project, which involves planting an experimental crop of sugarcane and sunf lowers in Mackay’s Regional Botanical Gardens. This project is a joint initiative with farmers and members of the Australian South Sea Island community. Specific dynamics are emerging from the farmers themselves as they embark on artistic projects to transform the representations and practices of their activity.

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Figure 2.2 Herbarium project by Andrea Caretto/Raffaella Spagna at Parco Arte Vivente, Italy, 2021. Photo by authors.

In a similar vein, Parco Arte Vivente (PAV) is an experimental contemporary art center designed by the artist Piero Gilardi and directed by Enrico Bonanate. PAV includes an open-air exhibition site of 23,000 square meters and an interactive museum, which are designed to serve as a meeting place and laboratory for dialogue between art and nature, biotechnology and ecology, and the public and artists. PAV presents creations by Italian and international artists, contemporary artworks and installations, and permanent and temporary works on the art of living, bioart, biotechnological art, transgenic art, and ecological art in outdoor and indoor exhibition spaces. The educational activities include workshops, laboratories, seminars, guided tours, and training for teachers, operators, the public, and students. Within the framework of Pedogenesis, which they developed especially for PAV, Andrea Caretto and Raffaella Spagna, regular collaborators since 2002, use the language of science and techniques from different disciplines (biology, anthropology, etc.) to stress the relationship between a human being and her natural environment. Pedogenesis is a system comprising two closely connected installations: Trasmutatore di Sostanza, a transmitter of organic matter, and OrtoArca, a vegetable garden arch, which act as catalysts for relationships between people (especially those living in the surroundings), places, and matter.

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Recent “artistic” urban farms in France are a continuation of the first cultural forms designed to bring contemporary creation closer to rural areas. In the 1960s, the first social and cultural activities in agricultural education appeared under the impetus of the government. The aim of “socio-cultural education” was to encourage farmers to open up to the world of agriculture in a context of agricultural modernization. Today, it continues to pursue this objective by focusing on societal issues, educational projects, and artistic education as part of an interdisciplinary approach. Signed for a period of three years, a “culture-agriculture” convention brings together regional government agencies to address the common objective of developing cultural initiatives and artistic education in rural and peri-urban areas in France. To this end, a contemporary art cycle was organized on the Vernand livestock farm on May 18–21, 2018. How can urban farms remain autonomous from a programming and aesthetic standpoint in the face of these societal injunctions? Farms that started out as rural have become “urban” because they have been caught up in the city and in social and political issues that are themselves changing. Artistic action highlights all of the complexity of human interaction with its environment. These location-specific projects coexist or are intrinsically linked to regional and local heritage and are compatible with “ecomuseum” approaches. Born in the 1970s and based on an idea partially nurtured by Georges-Henri Rivière, founder of the Musée des Arts et Traditions Populaires in Paris, ecomuseums anchor their actions within a given territory with the gradual creation of regional nature parks. Three dimensions of the traditional museum are modified: The building is replaced by the territory, which is that of the community. The collection comprises everything the territory implies: a living heritage, in a constant state of change and creation. Finally, the public is the population of the territory concerned, to which visitors from outside the community may be added on a secondary and incidental basis.25 In ecomuseums, exhibitions are based on local heritage history. Some are characterized by the presence of artists’ residences, which form part of the ecomuseum dynamic. In the same way, local history is also of interest to the Parti Poétique, an art group that seems to want to make new use of agricultural spaces and objects by reinventing them as places of memory. An object “becomes a place of memory when it escapes oblivion, for example, with the placing of commemorative plaques and when a community reinvests it with its full meaning and emotions.” 26 “Heritage spaces would then become the places where new forms of public expression could be staged, ensuring the transition from our democracies of opinion to ‘democracies of emotion.”27 We need to ask ourselves whether these new research-creation spaces, linked to specific approaches to food, are trying to fit into a territory and

Honest Aesthetics of Food Representation 45

by what means. We will also seek to understand the ways in which the status of these farms may change in terms of artistic programming, openness to the public, and general interest. We will identify international projects focused on ecology and local action, such as ArtMill in the Czech Republic and Inland in Spain. We will note that while these projects deal with different issues, such as large-scale agriculture and soil pollution (art and industry), immigration and diversity in territories “neglected” by public (art and local), or planning policies, they share a main focus on food and culture. But before we look at the macro-level of food production, aesthetics, and politics, let us begin at the micro-level: in the kitchen. For it is here that a revolution occurred in food and art, generated by women and queer interventions beginning in the postwar era of geopolitics.

Notes 1 Coline Blot, Urban Farms: Places of Artistic Experience and Heritage (Master 2 City Architecture Heritage, Université Paris 7, 2018–2019). 2 Reinaart Vanhoe, ed., “Also-Space, from Hot to Something Else: How Indonesian Art Initiatives Have Reinvented Networking,” Onomatopee 136 ( July 20, 2016). 3 Nathalie Blanc and Barbara Benish, Form, Art, and Environment: Engaging in Sustainability (London: Routledge, 2016). 4 Marie-Pierre Salél and Louis Van Tilborgh, Millet, Van Gogh (Paris: Éditions RMN, 1998), 21. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title organized by and presented at the Musée d’Orsay, September 14, 1998–January 3, 1999. 5 Salél and Tilborgh, Millet, Van Gogh, 87. 6 Dalia Judovitz, Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 149, http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft3w1005ft/. 7 Germano Celant, Giuseppe Pennone (Milan : Electa, 1989). 8 Michel de Certeau, L’invention du quotidien: arts de faire (Paris: Folio Essais, 1990); Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol, L’invention du quotidien: habiter, cuisine (Paris: Folio Essais, 1994). 9 In an interview with Nicolas Tremblay, Barceló offered the following comments: Many of your works are altered or evolve over time . . . From now on, I hope they will not deteriorate too much. But when I was 18, I made a work called Cadaverina 15, named after the chemical compound produced by the decomposition of animal f lesh. This work was presented in small boxes: fifteen series of fifteen elements that rotted in an exhibition for fifteen days. There were fifteen ox hearts, one was fresh and one was fifteen days old. I learned a lot; it was like having a window on the beauty of carrion. I have often cited this work as the beginning of my resumé. I still look at it, it changes much more slowly now. It is true that everything is changing, especially us. But my paintings will still look very good when my bones are dust. I work with very strong pigments and materials, but I have often made ephemeral works. I like large, monumental works to last only a few days, hours or moments. The most beautiful works last only a moment. Afterwards, you just have to believe they really existed. It’s like a little poem that has been recited before being forgotten.

46 Honest Aesthetics of Food Representation Nicolas Trembley, “Du Mali a Majorque, voyage avec Miquel Barcelo,” Numeró Art 26 (December 26, 2019), https://www.numero.com/en/node/10076. 10 Peter Boswell, “Invisible Aesthetic: Revisiting Mel Chin’s Revival Field,” Walker (October 9, 2017), https://walkerart.org/magazine/mel-chin-revivalfield-peter-boswell-rufus-chaney-eco-art. 11 Liena Vayzman, “Farm Fresh Art: Food, Art, Politics, and the Blossoming of Social Practice,” Art Practical (November 14, 2010), https://www.artpractical. com/feature/farm_fresh_art_food_art_politics_and_the_blossoming_of_ social_practice/, writes: What to offer in a space that is looking to designate the next? / How to keep nurturing the intersection of training, making and performing? / How to avoid conditioning and not to fall into the trap of training for improvement? / How to connect my own with existing practice and the context/site? 12 Sigrid Holmwood, as quoted in Myvillages, The Rural: Documents of Contemporary Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018), 41. 13 Caroline Blais, “The Role of Artists in Community Art and the Empowerment Process: A Study of Artists and Participants in Quebec,” Intervention 145 (2017): 31–42, https://revueintervention.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/ ri_145_2017.1_blais_et_mensah.pdf. 14 Blot, Urban Farms, 2019. 15 Joseph Beuys, Par la présente, je n’appartiens plus à l’art (Paris: L’Arche, 1988), 202. 16 Rudolf Steiner, Agriculture. Fondements spirituels de la méthode biodynamique (Geneva: Éditions Anthroposophiques Romandes, 1993), 127. 17 Gianfranco Baruccello and Henry Martin, How to Imagine: a Narrative on Art and Agriculture (New York: Bantam Books, 1984). 18 Pierre Palliard, L’ordre domestique. Mémoire de la ruralité dans les arts plastiques contemporains en Europe (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006), 133. 19 Lucrezia De Domizio Durini and Antonio D’Avosa, J. Beuys. Operació Difesa della Natura (Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, Departament de Cultura, 1993), 148. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title organized by and presented in the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica, October 29, 1993–Feburary 28, 1994. 20 Blot, Urban Farms, 2019. 21 Marco Scotini, ed., Vegetation as Political Art (Torino: PAV, 2014); Jeffrey Kastner, ed., Nature (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012); Will Bradley and Charles Esche, eds., Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader (London: Tate Publishing, 2007); Peter Selz and Kristine Stiles, eds., Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). 22 Blot, Urban Farms, 2019. 23 Jules Janick, “Horticulture and Art,” in Horticulture: Plants for People and Places, vol. 3, Social Horticulture, ed. Geoffrey Dixon and David E. Aldous (Dordrecht: Springer, 2014), 1197: One of the unique characters of horticulture as an agricultural discipline is that it has an esthetic component. There are two approaches to the esthetics of horticulture: (1) art in horticulture, the direct use of plants alone and in groups as pleasing visual objects, and (2) horticulture in art, the use of horticultural objects as a basic component of artistic expression. 24 Blot, Urban Farms, 2019. 25 Joëlle le Marec, “Philosophie de l’écomusée. Hugues de Varine: L’initiative communautaire,” Culture & Musées 2 (1992): 173–76.

Honest Aesthetics of Food Representation 47 26 Nathalie Blanc and Marine Legrand, “Vers une recherche-création: textes, corps, environnements,” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 18, no. 1 (2019): 49–76, https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1625. 27 Blanc and Legrand, “Vers une recherche-création.”

Bibliography Baruccello, Gianfranco, and Henry Martin. How to Imagine: A Narrative on Art and Agriculture. New York: Bantam Books, 1984. Beuys, Joseph. Par la présente, je n’appartiens plus à l’art. Paris: L’Arche, 1988. Blais, Caroline. “The Role of Artists in Community Art and the Empowerment Process: A Study of Artists and Participants in Quebec,” Intervention 145 (2017): 31–42, https://revueintervention.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/ ri_145_2017.1_blais_et_mensah.pdf. Blanc, Nathalie, and Barbara Benish. Form, Art, and Environment: Engaging in Sustainability. London: Routledge, 2016. Blanc, Nathalie, and Marine Legrand. “Vers une recherche-création: textes, corps, environnements,” ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies 18, no. 1 (2019): 49–76, https://acme-journal.org/index.php/acme/article/view/1625. Blot, Coline. Urban Farms: Places of Artistic Experience and Heritage. Master 2 City Architecture Heritage. Université Paris 7, 2018–2019. Boswell, Peter. “Invisible Aesthetic: Revisiting Mel Chin’s Revival Field,” Walker, October 9, 2017. https://walkerart.org/magazine/ mel-chin-revival-field-peter-boswell-rufus-chaney-eco-art. Bradley, Will, and Charles Esche, eds., Art and Social Change: A Critical Reader. London: Tate Publishing, 2007. Celant, Germano. Giuseppe Pennone. Milan: Electa, 1989. Certeau, Michel de. L’invention du quotidien: arts de faire. Paris: Folio Essais, 1990. Certeau, Michel de, Giard Luce, and Pierre Mayol. L’invention du quotidien: habiter, cuisine. Paris: Folio Essais, 1994. De Domizio Durini, Lucrezia, and Antonio D’Avosa. J. Beuys. Operació Difesa della Natura. Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya, Departament de Cultura, 1993. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title organized by and presented in the Centre d’Art Santa Mònica, October 29, 1993–Feburary 28, 1994. Janick, Jules. “Horticulture and Art,” in Horticulture: Plants for People and Places, vol. 3, Social Horticulture, eds. Geoffrey Dixon and David E. Aldous. Dordrecht: Springer, 2014. Judovitz, Dalia. Unpacking Duchamp: Art in Transit. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995, 149, http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft3w1005ft/. Kastner, Jeffrey, ed., Nature. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2012. Le Marec, Joëlle. Philosophie de l’écomusée. Hugues de Varine: L’initiative communautaire,” Culture & Musées 2 (1992): 173–76. Myvillages. The Rural: Documents of Contemporary Art. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018. Palliard, Pierre. L’ordre domestique. Mémoire de la ruralité dans les arts plastiques contemporains en Europe. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2006. Salél, Marie-Pierre, and Louis Van Tilborgh. Millet, Van Gogh. Paris: Éditions RMN, 1998. Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title organized by and presented at the Musée d’Orsay, September 14, 1998–January 3, 1999. Scotini, Marco, ed., Vegetation as Political Art. Torino: PAV, 2014.

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Selz, Peter, and Kristine Stiles eds., Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art: A Sourcebook of Artists’ Writings. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. Steiner, Rudolf. Agriculture. Fondements spirituels de la méthode biodynamique. Geneva: Éditions Anthroposophiques Romandes, 1993. Vanhoe, Reinaart, ed., Also-Space, from Hot to Something Else: How Indonesian Art Initiatives Have Reinvented Networking. Eindhoven: Onomatopee, 136, July 20, 2016. https://hollis.harvard.edu/primo-explore/search?tab=everything&search_ scope=everything&vid=HVD2&lang=en_US&mode=basic&offset=0&query= lsr01,contains,014983687 Vayzman, Liena. “Farm Fresh Art: Food, Art, Politics, and the Blossoming of Social Practice,” Art Practical, November 14, 2010, https://www.artpractical.com/feature/ farm_fresh_art_food_art_politics_and_the_blossoming_of_social_practice/

3

Anarchy in the Kitchen

In traditional food production sites, the kitchen is an indoor invention. It has been the territory of culinary experiment, community, family, and, at times, the enslavement and servitude of women. From ancient times until recent manifestations of political and social activism, artists working with food and its production have used the kitchen as a place of creative fermentation. Their work has been greatly affected by mechanization as well as changes in food growing and culinary expectations. In 1975, Martha Rosler performed in her groundbreaking feminist short film, Semiotics of the Kitchen, which, with wry humor and deadpan delivery, critiques the contemporaneous status quo of gender-segregated labor. Straight into the camera in a one-shot clip, she deconstructs various kitchen tools. “Knife,” she says in a monotone, holding up a knife, then plunging the blade into the cutting board in a disturbingly violent thrust while intoning the name once again: “knife.” The artist looks directly at the camera without a smile, without any expression, in fact. She is like a schoolchild reciting a new word: stating the word, spelling it out loud, then saying the word again. But the spelling is replaced by Rosner’s action, which is decidedly aggressive and surprising, given the instrument’s potential for dangerously cutting and harming the body. She painfully works her way through each utensil in alphabetical order (A for anvil, B for butcher . . .) until, evidently tired after 22 letters, she ends the performance by saying “w, x, y, z,” simply because she is in charge and she can. The film is a wry critique of the time’s maledominated fields of philosophy and semiotics and an understated manifesto for the feminine reclaiming of naming, materiality, and space. “In an ironic grammatology of sound and gesture, the woman and her implements enter and transgress the familiar system of everyday kitchen meanings—the securely understood signs of domestic industry and food production erupt into anger and violence. In this alphabet of kitchen implements,” states Rosler, “when the woman speaks, she names her own oppression.”1 While Rosler identifies this performance as “anti-Julia Child,” the parody exploits the phenomena of television cooking shows in the 1960s, in which DOI: 10.4324/9780367433710-4

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chefs such as Child became stars by bringing food and celebrity into the homes of millions of viewers around the globe. Child’s brilliant performance inf luenced a generation of foodies as well as artists. The f lat presentation of the interior of a kitchen as stage, the open island counter so that the viewer is “in” the kitchen, the performative aspect of the shows (music, lighting, jokes, props) can be a direct inf luence from cooking shows of the previous television era. This sort of installation can be viewed in works by performance artists of the next generation who grew up on TV, ranging from Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy to Eleanor Antin. Visual artists began to use the idea of the kitchen as a performative place, drawing on the cultural histories that this particular room in a home implies. But it was Rosler’s work that first identified the politics of the kitchen and used the space to deconstruct class and gender identity in America as food became cuisine and the politics of food production and consumption began to accumulate in modern life. Rosler’s earliest work on the topic, A Budding Gourmet, lays out many of the issues that would engage her for decades. In this film, she explores the ideological process through which food preparation comes to be seen as “cuisine,” a product of national culture. Accompanied by the strains of a violin concerto, Rosler’s deadpan narrator explains her reasons for wanting to become a gourmet. Photographs from food and travel magazines alternate as Rosler’s narrator discusses food as a key to refinement, breeding, and, in the case of “Easter” cuisines, spirituality. For her, cooking is a way of accumulating and demonstrating cultural capital, whether it is the haughty elegance of a France she’s never visited, or the fiery exoticism of a Brazil from which she’s just returned and is now “hers” to share with her friends.2 In this way, the artist’s seminal video performances were a precursor to both feminist critiques of gender roles and the commodification of food itself, particularly as it was mass produced and became faster and faster but less available as a healthy diet for poorer populations. We discuss this hierarchy of health in Chapters 9 and 10, where we look at the effects of factory farms and industrial agriculture and the artists who echoed critiques laid out by Rosler nearly 50 years ago. In 1971, pioneering video artists Steina and Woody Vasulka named their experimental space in Manhattan’s SoHo district “the Kitchen” precisely because of the sense of collaborative families that the word evokes. It was both a homage and challenge to the traditions of community, table, chemistry, and, literally, the baking of bread as ideas that artists engage with. “This place was selected by Media God to perform an experiment on you, to challenge your brain and its perception.”3 Over the past half century, the Kitchen has continued, despite the couple’s short involvement with it (from 1971 to 1974), to provide a space for the production of challenging artworks in all media. Branching out from the Vasulkas’ analog and digital processes in the early years, the Kitchen has remained a fertile space for experimentation in visual, media, and performative arts, as place where generations of artists meet and

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exchange ideas, video artists receive funding, and exhibitions are presented. The Kitchen has continued to live in Woody’s home city of Brno, Czech Republic, where the Vasulka Kitchen Brno serves as an archive and exhibition space under the auspices of the Center for New Media Art.4 In a 1997 interview, Steina Vasulka described what she and her husband were trying to achieve in opening the Kitchen as a space for experimentation and the bringing together of like-minded artists working in the avant-garde of experimental electronic media.5 Coming from the “cold East” (as Woody described it), postwar New York was a fertile ground for a “second avantgarde” to develop and replace the first avant-garde in Europe.6 When we started the Kitchen, we wanted to have this place, to entice these people (artists) to come to us . . . all these audio-experimenters. And sure enough it worked, because La Monte Young came . . . Little did he know that there was only Automation House which had only been open for like a year. And there was nothing else . . . They would all f lock to the Kitchen because it became the only showcase for electronic music.7 As Europeans (Woody was Czechoslovak (Moravian), Steina was Icelandic), the Vasulkas brought with them the traditional concept of the kitchen as a place for community and exchange, for creative sharing and a sense of “home.” In this sense their space was a curatorial work. With Woody f leeing a country that had witnessed firsthand the brutal destruction of small farms by the communist regime, the concept of Kitchen resonated as a place where culture could be preserved and cultivated. This was not the American critique of the kitchen already evident in the works of feminists like Rosler, who also performed in video and new media. The Vasulkas contributed to the international avant-garde movement in electronic media and video not only with their own works but also with their understanding of the importance of creating a larger community of like-minded artists who could broaden the concepts and discussions about video art. This was the role of the Kitchen. On the other American coast, in Los Angeles, a young Helen Mayer Harrison (who would later work with her husband, Newton Harrison, to transform what today we call environmental art) was invited to create a work at the newly opened Women’s Building. This space was intended to provide female artists a place to work and exhibit, thereby challenging the overwhelmingly male-dominated art world that surrounded them in the 1970s. Helen Mayer Harrison chose to recreate a kitchen environment in the gallery space, complete with shelves, cupboards, a countertop, and a sink. In her re-creation, the artist also laid the foundation of her long-term collaboration with Newton. While he would “terraform” their future projects, Helen, starting with that early work in the kitchen, maintained the connection to place, an eco-art-home. “If Newton was the sculptor who aspired to ‘terraforming’ (a sci-fi term once reserved for shaping other planets, it is now imagined for rescuing our own), Mayer Harrison was the bio-theorist and planner who

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envisioned the essential step between science and policy as the ‘creation of empathy for a place,’” as curator William Fox put it.8 She “performed” the task of making strawberry jam over the course of seven days, slightly altering the recipe each day. At a time when the food industry was polluting our grocery stores with increasingly chemical-laden processed foods, Mayer Harrison chose to break down the ingredients of each jar she canned by reducing the amount of the sugar called for in the recipe each day. In the archival photos of her performance,9 one can see the familiar pinkand-white box of the American sugar brand C&H, which was on its way to becoming a global conglomerate.10 The artist’s “extraction” of sugar from cane plantations in the newly annexed state of Hawai’i changed the color and consistency of the jam in each jar, which was carefully placed on the shelf behind her in a mock-up of the day’s popular cooking shows. In extracting the processed (deadly addictive) sugar from each glass jar over a weeklong endurance project, she echoed the extractive process of industrial growth and production of the plant in various tropical landscapes across the global south (Hawai’i, Central and South America, and the Caribbean). The color of the fruit changed as sugar in the jar diminished, a reference to the loss of nutrients in the soil after generations of strip-mine-like cultivation of sugar.

Figure 3.1 Helen Mayer Harrison cooking strawberry jam for her exhibition/performance at the Women’s Building in Los Angeles, 1974. Image courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

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Figure 3.2 Strawberry Jam, Helen Mayer Harrison, 1974. Image courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

Figure 3.3 Strawberry Jam, Helen Mayer Harrison, 1974. Image courtesy of the Department of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries.

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Mayer Harrison’s deconstructing recipes created a visual document of ecological, digestive, and social extraction. Her performance reclaimed the kitchen as a place of power for women living in a politically repressive postwar Western society. Like Rosler (with whom the Harrisons were close during their years at University of California, San Diego), Mayer Harrison appropriated the kitchen as the scene of education, community, challenge to tradition, and, in not a small way, geopolitical critique. Like the Vasulkas (with whom she shared a Czech background), Helen also reclaimed the kitchen as a center of common activity and regeneration. The alchemical jars of jam turned a commercially powerful additive to our foods—sugar—into the stuff of a biological petri dish in which the plant turned into the poison that fueled empires, enslaved peoples, and is still a major cause of death from diabetes, cancer, and obesity in the industrialized world. Since Mayer Harrison’s performance in 1974, the number of Americans who are obese or overweight has multiplied nearly 75 percent, bringing the deadly diseases caused by sugar to nearly one third of all adult citizens. These numbers are significantly greater in populations of color, with such diseases occurring nearly one and half times more often in Black men than white men.11 And yet, not coincidentally, Helen’s husband Newton developed the disease. He has stated that in fact her early sugar-eliminating experiments were part of a larger movement at the time toward healthier eating habits, which grew out of the pre-World War II California health-food movement. Despite these statistics and the fact that sugar is one of the most laborintensive plants to grow and manufacture into foodstuffs, the United States alone continues to make nearly nine million tons of it annually (although it is only sixth in global output, behind, for example, Australia, Pakistan, and Mexico). “White gold,” as it came to be called, was part of the recipe for the colonialization of the so-called Americas as the European palate became addicted to the lovely sweetness of Saccharum officinarum. As Khalil Gibran Muhammad states in his fascinating history of sugar: Over the four centuries that followed Columbus’s arrival, on the mainland of Central and South America in Mexico, Guyana and Brazil as well as on the sugar islands of the West Indies—Cuba, Barbados and Jamaica, among others—countless indigenous lives were destroyed and nearly 11 million Africans were enslaved, just counting those who survived the Middle Passage.12 The extractive process of the sugarcane industry globally has contributed to loss of life through labor practices (witness the slave trade to the Americas) and the chemical runoffs of processing plants, which use enormous amounts of water and release dangerous nitrates, carbon compounds, and sulfate emissions into the air. According to the WWF, sugar is among the crops most harmful to the planet. By replacing habitats rich in animal, plant and insect life, sugar plantations destroy the most biodiversity in the world. In addition to its intensive use of water

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and pesticides, the cultivation of sugarcane and sugar beet also causes erosion, such that Papua New Guinea, whose soil used to grow sugar cane, has lost 40% of its organic carbon content, carbon which is now in the atmosphere and contributing to global warming.13 In this way, Helen Harrison’s Strawberry Jam performance was a precursor to much of the Harrisons’ environmental work over the next five decades in that it artistically demonstrated an everyday solution to issues such as global loss of biodiversity, the use of poisonous agricultural pesticides, and even labor issues. Her choice to create a kitchen environment in a gallery context was also prescient, in that it reminded the audience of food’s historical purpose: not only to provide satisfactory caloric intake but also to nurture the immediate and extended clan with visual and sensory beauty. “I believe it is appropriate today to move from a culture of taste, based on an elevation strategy, to a culture with taste, which emphasizes educated nurture.”14 In contrast to the traditional space of the hearth, the heart of the home where the fires are lit and the family gathers, modernism brought us the separate kitchen, which coincided with the peak of industrialization in the West and, not coincidentally, the women’s movement. The kitchen was promoted as a place of liberating technology, where labor was minimized in a social experiment of “re-domesticating” women with more efficient workf low areas, dishwashers, and other labor- and time-saving machines. In a fascinating interview in 1980 with urban researcher Günther Uhlig and radio journalist Bea Füsser-Novy, architect Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky, who set the standard for modernist planning in the late 1920s in her work with the New Frankfurt social housing program, laments that the utopian vision of the Bauhaus era in fact created a kitchen that was even more confining for women.15 Under the aegis of progress and modernization, a largely conservative women’s movement promised emancipation through the professionalization of the housewife, but as Susan Henderson explains, their presumption was that the best social purpose of managerial and technical expertise was to bolster the existing model of the family and woman’s role within it . . . The dream of a kitchen machine went well with many architects’ Functionalist ideas and their obsessions with mass production and industrialization. For women though, it meant the kitchen machine would bind them once again to the household and, for decades, spatially manifest the situation the Wages for Housework campaign sought to undo.16 Did the “modernization” of the kitchen in fact increase women’s labor, separate them even more from the commons of the house, and diminish the communal trans- and co-gender co-habitation of food production and sharing in households? Is there a connection between the architecture of the kitchen, mechanical agriculture, and the economy? Brazilian artists Jorgge Menna Barreto and Joélson Buggilla have also reclaimed the kitchen as a place of power, creativity, and political autonomy.

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Their installations of food on a table served up in gallery spaces, open fields, or public plazas take the harmony of the kitchen from a private space back to a public space. Barreto says that “the table becomes the earth, in this performance . . . I like to think of the table as a canvas, as a plane.” As in Rosler’s Semiotics of the Kitchen, the Barreto-Buggilla table is set with familiar kitchen objects: tall glasses, ceramic platters, cast-iron skillets, all filled with arranged raw vegetables that defy the categories we usually see in the supermarket. Here are exquisite examples of summer squash in unusual varieties and stripes, sliced into shapes that render them both average and ceremonial. The compositions created from cabbage heads and winnowed eggplant are reminiscent of Arcimboldo’s alchemical paintings exploded onto white tablecloths. The viewer is invited to touch and taste, setting our senses delightfully on fire. Food is not just a still life to admire, or a taste to enjoy, but a complete entity in and of itself. Barreto and Buggilla pronounce the plants autonomous, alive, and together with the viewer co-creators of the entire experience of the table. The foods have their own agency and autonomy and cease to be mere objects of human consumption. In a performative event, the artists serve the food at gallery openings and happenings, transforming the public from audience to participants to artist-engagers. The sharing of food returns the gathered group to a nonhierarchical sense with taste, not just of taste, and invites us once again into “spaces of communing” that are absent in privatized kitchens.

Figure 3.4 “Table Langue,” installation by Jorgge Menna Barreto and Joélson Buggilla, Utopiana, Genève, Switzerland, 2019. Photo courtesy of the artist.

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Monsanto and the Face of Modernism “It was the permanence, the durability of plastic that made the Monsanto house a marvel,” writes Bernard Cooper in his book Maps to Anywhere. “The wings, it was said, would never sag. The plastic f loor would never buckle, chip, or crack.”17 In the year the house was built, 1957, 30 percent of Monsanto’s business was in plastics, synthetic resins, and surface coatings. During its ten-year lifespan at the original Disneyland in Anaheim, California, over 20 million visitors saw the Monsanto House, the “house of the future.”18 For children who visited the installation, the monotonous song “There’s a Great Big, Beautiful Tomorrow” became a sort of brain-washing mantra that infiltrated future minds with the idea that the division of labor, chemically orchestrated seeds, and food control would create a happy, robot-operated future. It was both a sophisticated advertising campaign and an aesthetically orchestrated corporate propaganda machine, which was, prophetically, void of humans. The cooperation of arguably the largest producer of artists in the United States—Walt Disney, who fostered production teams and later helped found the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California—and one of the first agrochemical and biotechnology corporations in the world, Monsanto, made for ominous bedfellows. Monsanto’s 2018 sale to the German giant Bayer for $66 billion ended the name but not the production of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT), polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), dioxins, and the ubiquitous Roundup brand, all proven to be carcinogenic as well as the cause of miscarriages and birth defects. Populations around the world still suffer the consequences of Monsanto’s bioengineered seeds, which have destroyed ecosystems and farmers’ lives, threatened planetary biodiversity, and endangered species. Fake foods and food substitutes, including the artificial sweetener saccharin, which was invented by Monsanto in the early twentieth century, continue to contribute to our planet’s and our bodies’ poor health (see Chapter 11). The selling of Monsanto products via intentional design à la Disney was part of a corporate plan to equate a modernist lifestyle with “freedom” and “functionalism.” The invented “utopia” of plastic, like fake food and genetically modified plants, is part of our inherited consumer culture that we as citizens have been fed through the intravenous needle of media, which drip a slow concoction of desire and greed via our cultures of food. When Monsanto sold out to Bayer, billions of dollars in legal fees over cancer deaths and other human health concerns had begun affecting the company’s pocketbook. Bayer inherited the lawsuits and has recently begun, in a much-anticipated move, to defend itself against the claim that the chemical endosulfan, which is used in the popular weed-killer Roundup, contains carcinogens. The legal cases, which were quickly paid off during the pandemic, amounted to over $10 billion.19 The artist Neil Young was heavily surveilled by Monsanto after the release of his hit album The Monsanto Years

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in 2015. Members of Young’s backup band, Promise of the Real, talk about Young as an artist and his dedication to get out an environmental message about chemicals in our food. The reason I fell in love with rock and roll was because of that “thing” these artists like, you know, John Lennon, who put themselves out there to call bullshit on what no one else has the guts to call bullshit on. And Neil, he’s always been one of those guys. It’s pretty cool, especially coming from South America, when a lot of corporations and companies take over the country and the ocean, and everything and destroy it. For nothing . . . to go to the whole world, just to say: that is fucked up. “He’s not masking the message with poetic lyrics; he’s not hiding behind words . . . he doesn’t even care if the words rhyme.”20 It suffices to listen to the album: “it’s hard to know, if they know, what they feed their children.” For over 30 years, the American rock-and-roll legend has produced Farm Aid, a fundraising concert for small farmers, to which he invites other musicians to raise awareness about the financial crisis affecting small family farms across the United States. Executive director Carolyn Mugar describes Farm Aid as “the big tent” where people from all across the food chain come together to share, brainstorm and debate. This year’s [2021] event featured panels of farmers, activists, and thinkers brainstorming the latest issues impacting agriculture and communities—school lunch, safe water, farmers’ markets, alternate farm-raised fuels, chemical-free fields, sustainable local food systems that cut down dependence on fossil fuels and foreign oil, and a new farm bill that encourages small family-run farms and organic production.21 The first concert in 1985 in Champaign, Illinois, raised over $9 million for farmers fighting against corporate takeovers. Over 80,000 people attended to hear B.B. King, Bob Dylan, Billy Joel, Loretta Lynn, Roy Orbison, and Tom Petty as well as Young. Since then, the organization has set up a hotline through which small farmers can obtain financial resources, legal advice, and psychological help as well as, ironically, food. They have a year-round, full-f ledged nonprofit operation helping fund not only farmers, but policy change, education, and organic food concession.22 When Young and his fellow musician John Mellencamp brought farmer families and friends to testify before Congress, they helped ensure passage of the 1987 Agricultural Credit Act, which helps farmers avoid foreclosure of their operations because of unpaid bills. But the industrialization of the kitchen has left us approaching alarming statistics of health crisis, including billions of dollars in medical band-aids

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that cannot cure diabetes or obesity or cancer or even heal the growing number of children globally affected by starvation and food insecurity. While many artists are working on issues of industrialized agriculture and synthetic foods, there are those who choose to address the mass-produced food items that stock our supermarkets with fatty calories and low nutrition. The famous performances of Karen Finley in 2000 challenged the ubiquitous conf lation of addiction to chocolate, women’s bodies, and the male gaze. She also reclaimed her own body as she engagingly smeared her nakedness with chocolate in public. “I employ the symbolism of food as a device to evoke emotion, whether it is hunger for the body, or desire. Food is primal.”23 In her original 1990s work, she gluttonously, grossly consumed giant chocolate pieces in gallery settings to present the dysfunctional codependency of consumption and production and their historic connection to the consumption of the female body. The more we eat it, the more cocoa is needed to produce it. “Food provided a primitive, visceral, almost gruesome element. It helped to convey to the audience the ways in which the characters I portrayed were being violated.” Food acts in two ways for Finley: “it provides a visceral reaction in its presence as a real substance, but it also provides symbolic meaning in the way it is used.”24 By 1993, Finley’s performances were so abrasive to conservative white collectors and the public supporting American art that attempts were made to censor her. She fought back and her case went all the way to the Supreme Court. A lot of men tried to stop this artist from smearing chocolate on her body. Why? Is food so connected to intimate rituals of human-ship that they are only allowed in private? What nerve did Finley’s work hit in the male-dominated board rooms, where women were allowed to only serve coffee or otherwise stay at home in the kitchen? And yet were encouraged to exhibit their nude bodies in magazines for consumption? The never-ending treadmill of capitalist consumption was humorously portrayed in the famous scene in chocolate factory in the most-watched episode of American comedian Lucille Ball’s television show I Love Lucy in 1962. When she and her friend Ethel take factory jobs to make some extra money, they are placed on the assembly line and forced to stuff chocolates into boxes at the ever-increasing pace or “face the consequences.” The more they box, the faster the conveyor belt goes, forcing them to hysterically eat the chocolates they are unable to box to avoid a loss of productivity and hence their jobs. The black humor in the scene is not lost: the impossibility of ever fulfilling the production quota, the never-ending demand, and the male-dominated ideal of the “perfect” female body. As a brilliant female comedian ahead of her time, Lucille Ball, not unlike Karen Finley, used her performative skills to critique both capitalism and the production of food, especially candy, in a medium that was only beginning to accept women actors. Lucille Ball was a pioneer in both acting and a feminist social critique.

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Figure 3.5 USA postage stamp honoring comedian Lucille Ball from the popular TV show “I Love Lucy,” 1962.

The king of pop culture, Andy Warhol, once performed (again, in one cut) the act of eating a hamburger. In Jørgen Leth’s 66 Scenes from America (1981), Warhol monotonously sits, unwraps, and proceeds to eat a fast-food burger. Leth is later quoted as saying that the burger was so dry that Warhol could barely chew it and in fact does not quite finish it by the end of the scene. Warhol’s slow and somewhat boring enactment of eating “fast food” echoes his other critiques of American pop culture and canned culture. His aloneness on the screen is the antipathy of traditional meals at a table with a family. The solitary figure, struggling to chew the white-bun-encased, offers the viewer a mirror to our addictions and the inevitable loss they cause. The speed of delivery is belied by the disturbingly drawn-out solitude of the meal and begs the viewer to ask: what is food really? When tracing the lineage of social practice, relational art, and social sculpture, one inevitably encounters the artist-run restaurant FOOD, founded in New York’s Soho neighborhood in 1971. FOOD traced its ancestry to event scores, happenings, and chance operations of the preceding decade and, before that, the performative rebellion of the Dadaists, who protested the murderous absurdity of World War I with what FOOD’s co-founder Gordon

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Matta-Clark referred to, in Schumpeterian terms, as “a devotion to the imaginative disruption of convention.” Like many conceptual performances coming out in the 1960s and 1970s, there was a blurring of life and art in a practice of making and doing that denied the object its previous predominance in history. The subject was the audience as much as the artist or the idea. The meal could carry meaning, much as it had throughout history until industrialized agriculture and fast food took it away. Solitary consumption, as in Warhol’s deadpan performance, was a painful experience and a sad commentary on isolation in the contemporary world. Art places like FOOD or the Kitchen in New York City became sites of communal activity and exchange, much like traditional sharing places for eating and gathering. Leading a way to a new alternative of corporate food practices, artists in the past century have begun to open up discourse on the table as a place of creativity, nourishment, and shared experience and to understand that food is the common denominator for our own species, as well as for others. Gordon Matta-Clark was one of the early postwar artists who brought art out of the galleries and into the streets to question our conventions of form, social convention, and perception. Inf luenced by the Fluxus community, architecture, and performance art, Matta-Clark’s particular attraction to food was grounded in its universal connection to everyday activity. As for other

Figure 3.6 People and food in a market, South America. Gordon Matta-Clark, 1972. Collection Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal; Don de la succession Gordon Matta-Clark/Gift of Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark.

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Figure 3.7 “Matta Bones” dinner menu at FOOD Restaurant, New York City, New York, 1972. Photo: Cosmos Andrew Sarchiapone (printed in 2006). Collection Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal; Don de la succession Gordon Matta-Clark/Gift of Estate of Gordon Matta-Clark.

Fluxus artists, food for Matta-Clark became a medium, and the meal was the table and the context in which to serve it. His restaurant in SoHo became a hub for artistic happenings, eatings, and actions. He said in 2006 that “unlike other artists, I feel the need to become directly involved in a context that is physically, politically and socially structured, in short, to leave the studio and go out on the streets.”25 Like later works by Paul McCarthy, Corin Hewitt, and Rirkrit Tiravanija, Matta-Clark intended to transform our ideas about food: who grows it, how we eat it, and with whom. His pioneering work, inspired possibly from this 1972 visit to his father’s homeland in Chile, South America, give us connections to land and localities that were already disappearing in industrialized democracies in the Northern Hemisphere.26

Notes 1 Film Semiotics of the Kitchen, b&w, sound, 1975, 6’33. Semiotics of the Kitchen adopts the form of a parodic cooking demonstration in which, Rosler states, “An anti-Julia Child replaces the domesticated ‘meaning’ of tools with a lexicon of rage and frustration.” In this performance-based work, a static camera is focused on a woman in a kitchen. On a counter before her are a variety of utensils, each

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of which she picks up, names, and proceeds to demonstrate, but with gestures that depart from the normal uses of the tool. In an ironic grammatology of sound and gesture, the woman and her implements enter and transgress the familiar system of everyday kitchen meanings—the securely understood signs of domestic industry and food production erupt into anger and violence. In this alphabet of kitchen implements, states Rosler, “when the woman speaks, she names her own oppression.” 2 Electronic Arts Intermix, Martha Rosler: Kitchen Theatre, program notes for a screening and talk by Martha Rosler, January 19, 2011, https://www.eai.org/ user_files/supporting_documents/0111_rosler_pn.pdf. 3 “Event: Steina and Woody Vasulka,” The Kitchen (website), https://thekitchen. org/event/steina-and-woody-vasulka. 4 From “The Kitchen,” Vasulka Kitchen Brno, https://vasulkakitchen.org/en/ vasulkovi: Vaskulkas’ aimed to support experiments based on manipulation of electronic signals, devote themselves to the live demonstration of the video and at the same time to emphasize video as a spatial phenomenon, showing tapes on a series of monitors. The Kitchen program also focused on documentary videos, especially in conjunction with the radical marginal genres of popular culture from underground New York theaters and clubs, and featured documentaryactivist video production. All of these areas were largely out of focus on the established gallery scene. Performers in the early years of The Kitchen have discovered many pioneers in video editing as well as experimental theater, performance and music. There were also training programs, workshops and seminars focused on cybernetics, perception, or biological feedback. 5 Steina/Video Feedback, Automation House NYC, La Monte Young at the Kitchen/1997, videotaped interview, Steina and Woody Vasulka (website), http:// vasulkainterviews.org/video/41196448. 6 Woody Vasulka/Early Years in New York/1997, videotaped interview, Steina and Woody Vasulka, http://vasulkainterviews.org/video/41182897 7 Steina/Video Feedback. 8 Caroline A. Jones, “Helen Mayer Harrison (1927–2018),” ArtForum, April 7, 2018, https://www.artforum.com/passages/caroline-a-jones-on-helen-mayerharrison-1927-2018-74887. 9 See images on the website of the Stanford Library Archives, https://exhibits. stanford.edu/harrison/catalog/py529rk7944. 10 “C&H” stands for “California and Hawaii,” which is where the sugarcane was grown, processed, and distributed. The company that operated the Hawaiian crops, the Hawaiian Commercial and Sugar Company, harvested its last sugarcane in 2016 and closed its operations because of “diminished economic viability”. 11 Khalil Gibran Muhammad, “The Sugar that Saturates the American Diet Has a Barbaric History as the ‘White Gold’ that Fueled Slavery,” New York Times, August 14, 2019. An installment of the 1619 project. 12 Muhammad, “The Sugar that Saturates the American Diet.” 13 Clément Fournier, “10 of the Most Popular Foods are Also among the Worst for the Environment,” You Matter (website), August 25, 2017, https://youmatter. world/en/10-worst-popular-foods/. See also WWF, Sugar and the Environment, undated, http://d2ouvy59p0dg6k.cloudfront.net/downloads/sugarandtheenvironment_fidq.pdf, and Keri Hayes, “A Small Town’s Sweet Sorrow: The Tight Bond between Crockett and C&H Sugar Has Been Polluted along with Local Waterways,” East Bay Express, May 15, 2002, https://eastbayexpress. com/a-small-towns-sweet-sorrow-1/.

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14 Nicola Perullo, “Haptic Taste as a Task,” The Monist 101, no. 3 ( July 2018): 261–76. 15 Das Bauen ist ja nicht das Primäre . . . : Erinnerungen der Architektin Margarete SchütteLihotzky, directed by Bea Füsser-Novy, Gerd Haag, and Günther Uhlig (Cologne: Westdeutscher Rundfunk, 1980), as quoted in Julie Wiegner, “Kitchen Politics,” in Spaces of Commoning: Artistic Research and the Utopia of the Everyday, eds. Anette Baldauf, Stefan Gruber, Moira Hille, Annette Krauss, Vladimir Miller, Mara Verlič, Hong-Kai Wang, and Julia Wieger (Vienna: Sternberg Press, 2016). 16 Wiegner, “Kitchen Politics.” 17 “Living in the Monsanto House of the Future,” Disneyavenue (website), https:// disneyavenue.wordpress.com/2015/05/05/living-in-the-monsanto-house-ofthe-future/ Disney. 18 Monsanto’s Plastic “Home of the Future” at Disneyland (1957) is a fascinating film account of the all-plastic house funded by Monsanto for Disney. See https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=uUOTVPVQZNo. 19 Patricia Cohen, “Roundup Maker to Pay $10 Billion to Settle Cancer Suits,” New York Times, June 24, 2020. The chemical giant has also announced that it had set aside $400 million for claims on another Monsanto chemical, dicamba, as well as $820 million for future lawsuits concerning toxic chemicals in water supplies, known as PCBs. 20 In Neil Young + Promise of the Real—The Monsanto Years: The Message at https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=Al8msGCo0Wk. 21 “Farm Aid: Saving the Family Farm,” NPR, November 23, 2006, https://www. npr.org/2006/11/23/6526686/farm-aid-saving-the-family-farm. 22 “The Issues,” Farm Aid (website), https://www.farmaid.org/category/issues/. 23 Matthew Roudané, “An Interview with Karen Finley,” Five Points: A Journal of Literature and Art 11, no. 3 (2007): 20–37, https://go.gale.com/ ps/i.do?id=GA LE%7CA170 019796&sid=goog leSchola r& v=2.1& it=r& l in kaccess=abs&issn=1088850 0&p=LitRC&sw=w& user GroupNa me= mlin_oweb. 24 Quoted by Christine S. Bean, “Sticky Performances: Affective Circulation and Material Strategy in the (Chocolate) Smearing of Karen Finley,” Theatre Survey 57, no. 1 ( January 2016): 88–108, https://www.cambridge.org/core/ journals/theatre-survey/article/abs/sticky-performances-affective-circulationand-material-strategy-in-the-chocolate-smearing-of-karen-finley/0DFE34E16 0FAD1AE66B53ED8B9260FD3. 25 Gordon Matta-Clark, Works and Collected Writings, ed. Gloria Moure (Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 2006), 9. 26 Matta-Clark, Works and Collected Writings. This nexus of food, performance, and the participatory had a precedent in the Fluxus artists of the 1960s, who used food as a medium and the meal as context in what are historically labeled event scores: “simple actions, ideas, and objects from everyday life recontextualized as performance” (Allison Knowles, “Event Scores,” Alison Knowles (website), https://www.aknowles.com/eventscore.html).

Bibliography Bean, Christine S. “Sticky Performances: Affective Circulation and Material Strategy in the (Chocolate) Smearing of Karen Finley,” Theatre Survey 57, no. 1 ( January 2016): 88–108, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/ theatre-survey/article/abs/sticky-performances-affective-circulation-and-

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material-strategy-in-the- chocolate-smearing-of-karen-finley/0DFE34E160FA D1AE66B53ED8B9260FD3. Cohen, Patricia. “Roundup Maker to Pay $10 Billion to Settle Cancer Suits,” New York Times, June 24, 2020. Electronic Arts Intermix. Martha Rosler: Kitchen Theatre, program notes for a screening and talk by Martha Rosler, January 19, 2011, https://www.eai.org/user_files/ supporting_documents/0111_rosler_pn.pdf. “Event: Steina and Woody Vasulka,” The Kitchen (website), https://thekitchen.org/ event/steina-and-woody-vasulka. “Farm Aid: Saving the Family Farm,” NPR, November 23, 2006, https://www.npr. org/2006/11/23/6526686/farm-aid-saving-the-family-farm. Fournier, Clément. “10 of the Most Popular Foods Are Also among the Worst for the Environment,” You Matter (website), August 25, 2017, https://youmatter.world/ en/10-worst-popular-foods/. Füsser-Novy, Bea, Gerd Haag, and Günther Uhlig. Das Bauen ist ja nicht das Primäre . . . : Erinnerungen der Architektin Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky. Cologne: Westdeutscher Rundfunk, 1980. As quoted in Julie Wiegner, directed by, “Kitchen Politics,” in Spaces of Commoning: Artistic Research and the Utopia of the Everyday, eds. Anette Baldauf, Stefan Gruber, Moira; Hayes, Keri. “A Small Town’s Sweet Sorrow: The Tight Bond between Crockett and C&H Sugar Has Been Polluted along with Local Waterways,” East Bay Express, May 15, 2002, https://eastbayexpress. com/a-small-towns-sweet-sorrow-1/. Hille, Annette Krauss, Vladimir Miller, Mara Verlič, Hong-Kai Wang, and Julia Wieger. Spaces of Commoning, Artistic Research and the Utopia of the Everyday. Vienna: Sternberg Press, 2016. Jones, Caroline A. “Helen Mayer Harrison (1927–2018),” ArtForum, April 7, 2018, https://www.artforum.com/passages/caroline-a-jones-on-helen-mayer-harrison1927-2018-74887. “Living in the Monsanto House of the Future,” Disneyavenue (website), https:// disneyavenue.wordpress.com/2015/05/05/living-in-the-monsanto-house-ofthe-future/ Disney. Matta-Clark, Gordon. Works and Collected Writings, ed. Gloria Moure (Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 2006), 9. “Monsanto’s Plastic “Home of the Future” at Disneyland (1957),” https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=uUOTVPVQZNo. Muhammad, Khalil Gibran. “The Sugar That Saturates the American Diet Has a Barbaric History as the ‘White Gold’ That Fueled Slavery,” New York Times, August 14, 2019. “Neil Young + Promise of the Real—The Monsanto Years: The Message,” https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=Al8msGCo0Wk. Perullo, Nicola. “Haptic Taste as a Task,” The Monist 101, no. 3 ( July 2018): 261–76. Rosler, Martha. “Film Semiotics of the Kitchen, b&w, Sound, 1975, 6’33.” Roudané, Matthew. “An Interview with Karen Finley,” Five Points: A Journal of Literature and Art 11, no. 3 (2007): 20–37, https://go.gale.com/ ps/i.do? id=GA L E%7CA170 019796 &sid=g oog leSchol a r& v=2 .1& it=r& l i n k acce s s=ab s & i s sn=10 8 8 850 0& p=Lit RC &sw=w& u ser GroupNa me= mlin_oweb.

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“Steina/Video Feedback, Automation House NYC, La Monte Young at the Kitchen/1997,” videotaped interview, Steina and Woody Vasulka (website), http:// vasulkainterviews.org/video/41196448. “The Issues,” Farm Aid (website), https://www.farmaid.org/category/issues/. “The Kitchen,” Vasulka Kitchen Brno, https://vasulkakitchen.org/en/vasulkovi “Woody Vasulka/Early Years in New York/1997,” videotaped interview, Steina and Woody Vasulka, http://vasulkainterviews.org/video/41182897

4

Art and Research in Food-Based Situations

Exploring the problematic relations between art and food in a situation of planetary transformations means investigating the reasons for the ecological, social, economic and political crises that we are experiencing. The investigation must be creative, critical, and equipped with the tools of both science and art. Shouldn’t the long history of the relationship between science and art also be reviewed in the light of the Anthropocene, this era of catastrophic shocks? Saint John Perse testifies on this subject of this many times explored history of the links between science and art: When one watches the drama of modern science discovering its rational limits in pure mathematics; when one sees in physics two great doctrines posit, the one a general theory of relativity, the other a quantum theory of uncertainty and indeterminism that would limit forever the exactitude even of physical measurements; when one has heard the greatest scientific innovator of this century, the initiator of a modern cosmology that reduces the vastest intellectual synthesis to the terms of an equation, invoke intuition to come to the aid of reason and proclaim that “the imagination is the true seed bed of science,” going even so far as to claim for the scientist the benefit of a true artistic vision: is one not justified in considering the tool of poetry as legitimate as that of logic? In truth, every creation of the mind is first of all “poetic” in the proper sense of the word; and inasmuch as there exists an equivalence between the modes of sensibility and intellect, it is the same function that is exercised initially in the enterprises of the poet and the scientist. Discursive thought or poetic ellipsis— which of these travels to, and returns from, more remote regions?1 The Table and Territory program, which was such a research-creation project, allowed an experimentation between artists and scientists within the investigated territories. The links between scientific research and artistic poetry were intrinsic, if not necessarily theoretical. What kind of aesthetic intermediaries play a role in the exploration of the surrounding world? How is ecological sentiment gaining ground within contemporary societies confronted with environmental disaster? Ecological sentiment and environmental

DOI: 10.4324/9780367433710-5

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sensations, emotions, and other affects more generally are widely explored today in both fiction (from Jean Hegland’s Into the Forest to Barbara Kingsolver’s classic works and, more recently, Richard Powers’s bestseller The Overstory) and essays (for example, Glenn Albrecht’s Solastalgia). Aside from the inadequacies of scientific discourse in accounting for the complexity of reality, the cleverly maintained separation between rational knowledge and intuition, science and feeling, does not work. Consequently, approaches based on environmental forms, environmental aesthetic, and research-creation aim to underpin an exploration of sensitive environmental relations. Metaphors and imagery of everyday language and poetry tend to be removed from scientific discourse because they leave room for interpretation, projection, and imagination. However, we believe that explicitly maintaining this openness is a useful and necessary method for grappling with the complexity of reality and its dynamic, constantly reengineered character. We need to tackle forms of the environment in tandem with ecological sentiment to get back to territorial “livability.” Livability is a central theme of food production and quality of life insofar as it involves both the quality of land and ecosystems and the capabilities of citizens to learn to grow their own food. We wish therefore to redefine the links between approaches to research and approaches to creation. In the first part of this chapter, we will tackle environmental forms, the changes they are undergoing, and possibilities for assessing them. In the second part, we will discuss environmental aesthetic and the role of this field of investigation. Lastly, we will look at theoretical and empirical challenges bound up in the research-creation process.

Environmental Forms Our starting point is essentially a philosophical one: the contention that art resides not simply in museums but also in the different forms of everyday life. John Dewey, who developed this theme in his book Art as Experience, published in 1934, believed that aesthetic experience informs the events of everyday life. Hans Joas contended that Dewey argued, in a highly polemical manner, against the idea that an aesthetic theory must find its starting point in works of art in their final state, already hanging in museums . . . He wishes, in an even more radical way, to highlight the aesthetic dimension to all human experience.2 The inhabitants of a territory, regardless of its size, contribute to the aesthetic production of forms characterizing the natural and built environment in terms of both representations and practices (even though the forging and sharing of representations also amount to practices). We may consider these representations and practices as environmental cultures. The term “culture” as used here is based on the concept of lifestyle, which covers all aspects of human life and processes of the material and spiritual transformation of humanity, thus moving away from a narrower definition based on artistic activities.3

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Inhabitants’ representations and practices contribute directly to ways of being together in a territory and characterize environmental forms such as landscapes, narratives, ambiances, shared gardens, ice f loes, and forests, which act as aesthetic intermediaries with the environment. Fields, edible gardens, still lifes, porn food shows are mediations within the environment. By “environmental forms,” we mean the process of aggregation and modeling of environmental phenomena or environmental processes that organize the environment. The representations produced are either externalized (as landscape, nature writing, etc.) or internalized (as mental representations). Once they have been designed in this way, environmental forms refer to the sensitive aesthetic perception of environmental models. These environmental forms, which are fundamentally scalable and process based, lead to the idea of a morpho-dynamic environment. In fact, doubly so, considering the modeling activity specific to the entities that frequent it and the materiality at stake. The forms lend all of their meaning to ways of living in these territories and characterize their aesthetics as well as their degree of habitability. As such, environmental aesthetic applies to ordinary environments.4 Following on this first point—that is, the democratization of the aesthetic experience—aside from any related knowledge we may develop about environmental forms, they may be said to confer value on territory. Such value needs to be assessed collectively by means of structured debates and a conscientious examination of the different social, political, environmental, and economic issues governing the aforementioned places. What is value? Market value, intrinsic value, existence value, exchange value, eco-systemic or ecological value, etc. are bound up with collective definitions of criteria such as the desirable, the beautiful, the good, the fair, and so forth. All of these values describe value systems forming a certain worldview and guiding the actions of its members. What are the values that justify taking care of a given thing, part of living matter, or a person? Values may also emerge in the course of action or taking care of different parts of the environment. Values forming part of a given culture may refer to aesthetic aspects, environmental quality, a joint sense of belonging, survival, etc. There is also monetary value, which consists of putting a price on a person or a thing that ref lects the value assigned in a market based on supply and demand. In the framework of an experimental environmental aesthetic in the sense deployed here, values are said to be “relational”—in other words, they lead to an examination of the ways in which living beings become attached to their territories and develop in tandem with their environment.5 Obviously, the benchmark aesthetic is engagement with the environment, insofar as the forms of the environment help frame the elements of aesthetic appreciation.6 In this sense, environmental aesthetics, unlike early theories of an aesthetic of nature,7 tend to reinforce the ability of elements of the environment to make humans and nonhumans (re)act and to take on importance in existences situated through their agency.8 Finally, we are concerned with understanding and enriching this attachment to the local environment through food. We need to refer back to environmental forms and the processes involved in their co-construction to forge

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a research-creation process that incorporates ordinary routine ties as well as extraordinary ties (such as festive events) within territories. We refer to these processes as research-creation, which moves beyond research-action to a type of research that seeks to reestablish links between living beings and their environments and render both visible and public. The aim is to be able to discuss these links and promote new possibilities for collectively constructing forms of life in a process redolent of social emancipation. The relationships that we help forge with inhabitants of a territory go hand in hand with the idea of collective capabilities. They concern the awareness of a population and its ability to emancipate itself through new environmental narratives.9 Participative or co-contributive research (such as “Third Places”10) highlights culture as a basic step forward in the democratization of knowledge and the redeployment of learning and technical capabilities. Environmental aesthetic harnesses these tools and offer local experimental approaches. These experimentations highlight environmental forms that may be used to work on the collective dimension of the natural and built environment. These research-creation approaches hark back to experimental utopias, which Lefebvre believed were about the exploration of human possibility, helped by the imagination but firmly rooted in the real world. An experimental utopia differs from a prospective utopia, which extrapolates current trends without envisaging a changing society and fed into postwar urban planning. Lefebvre also distinguishes between an experimental utopia and an abstract utopia, which imagines a possible world in a fictional temporal space detached from present conditions.11 The experimental utopia is about exploring alternatives by creating life possibilities locally.

A Discipline for Evaluating Forms: Environmental Aesthetic The environmental forms that are of importance in public space—from shared gardens to clouds of pollution—fall within the domain of environmental aesthetic,12 which seeks to understand the relationship between aesthetic feeling and the natural and built environment—that is, the world around us, not merely whatever is deemed an environmental issue in public space (such as pollution or climate change). Environmental aesthetic as a discipline of thought concerns the emergence of a shared aesthetic, understood as a collective (and individual) way of experiencing and producing the environment, especially a way that helps forge close relationships at the juncture of meaning and the senses, theory and practice, and past, present, and future. Environmental forms are aesthetic intermediaries that ref lect natureculture entanglements and possible metamorphoses. As such, environmental aesthetics seek to produce new ways of formulating ecological issues by considering that the major challenge in terms of ecological transition, sustainable development, and characterization of the Anthropocene concerns not merely a scientific approach but cultural perceptions as well. Environmental aesthetic wishes to perpetuate the science of sensitive experience developed

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in the eighteenth century, notably by Alexander Baumgarten in Aesthetica (1750),13 Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757),14 and Immanuel Kant in The Critique of Judgement (1790). It focuses on the renewal of ties with the history of art and science as part of a new topic, often defined today as the Anthropocene, or the geological age of the human being. Environmental aesthetics combine with a post-humanist ref lection that, while highlighting the failure of humanism vis-à-vis colonialism, feminism, and environmentalism, is not content merely to analyze collections of human and nonhuman beings (as proposed by actor–network theory) but instead offers a fresh interpretation of the multiple ecologies associated with polycentric aesthetic subjectivities.15 At this point, we suggest two ways forward. A first research indicator tends to confer the human and social sciences with a new role—namely, that of mediating and translating the aesthetic subjectivities at work in territories. A second research indicator places environment-related aesthetic and artistic experimentation at the heart of an experimental environmental aesthetic that we term “research-creation.”16 The term refers to developing aesthetic and cultural research practices in situated contexts and introducing a new perspective on the relational nature of territorial attachments. Let us go back a bit. The aesthetic of nature perceived in Western philosophy emerged in the eighteenth century and then faded from view in the nineteenth century, when aesthetics was more interested in art. The European Romantic artists, poets, and writers did not really create a new philosophical current based on an appreciation of nature. At the same time, however, in the United States, a new way of describing nature was emerging that lent nature autonomy and paved the way for its face-to-face encounter with human beings. This new perspective was expressed by transcendentalist writers such as Emerson, whose Nature appeared in 1836, and Henry David Thoreau, who lived from 1845 to 1847 in a cabin on the shores of Walden Pond, as well as painters such as Thomas Cole. It was greatly inf luenced by the apparent degradation of nature by nineteenth-century industrial and urban development.17 William Henry Jackson’s landscape photographs and Thomas Moran’s engravings inspired the geologist Ferdinand Hayden’s 1872 campaign to ‘preserve’18 the Yellowstone region of the Rocky Mountains as a national park. With the exception of a few rare works, more in-depth ref lection on the relationship of aesthetics to nature and the environment did not take place until the second half of the twentieth century, when political environmentalism emerged. Ronald Hepburn’s article “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty,” published in 1966, is a seminal work.19 At the same time, Arnold Berleant called for active environmentalization 20 or environmental commitment based on the imagination and narratives, while Allan Carlson highlighted the value of sensitive approaches to the environment based on scientific knowledge.21 A steady renaissance of Indigenous thinking and environmental knowledge over the past two decades has also greatly inf luenced traditional western ideas about “environment”, aesthetics, and territory.

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As far as our own approach is concerned, suffice it to say that knowledge can enrich or renew perception. For example, understanding the role of invasive species in the landscape may prove contrary to savoring the landscape’s potential beauty. This contradiction enhances the beauty that is appreciated and the beauty that may be cared for. Yuriko Saito, who explored what she called “the aesthetics of the familiar,” highlights the role of knowledge in enriching experience and vice versa.22 Similar to Kant, the philosopher Emily Brady stresses the aesthetic experience of natural environments in the broad sense and with reference to aesthetics. However, until recently, research on environmental aesthetics has highlighted the preeminence of plants and animals as well as the landscape. Only rarely is weather or climate mentioned. This is especially the case if we look at the aesthetic dimensions of climate and the crucial issue of perceptions. We are often confronted with the question of what the weather or air quality is like. This representational defect has historical roots. Before the invention of modern meteorology in the eighteenth century, the sky was where celestial events unfolded, which made it possible to predict certain events on the earth below. However, the earliest ref lections on meteorology were already emerging in the seventeenth century. In “The Meteors,” a part of his Discourse on Method (1637), René Descartes meticulously explores meteorological phenomena, challenging scholastic treatises that mostly considered hail, thunder, and other phenomena as representations of magic. However, it was not until after the eighteenth century that the sky became a fully-f ledged meteorological space and an object of science. The Palatine Meteorological Society, created in Germany in 1780, classified clouds by their form (for example, thick, striated, or cumulative) and color,23 while Luke Howard, born in 1772, considered as the “father of clouds,” identified the three main categories of clouds as cumulus, stratus, and cirrus at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Howard was also a pioneer in urban climate studies. The role of the sky and meteorology also evolved from a cultural perspective. The English painter John Constable was fascinated by meteorology, and William Turner memorably depicted polluted skies at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution in Rain, Steam and Speed—The Great Western Railway (1844). However, Turner’s celestial representations also lent the sky an enchanting and colorful power. The Romantic painters had a different vision of the sky: Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (c. 1818) depicts a human high above the fray. In the twentieth century, the cloud even became the focus of aesthetic analysis. In A Theory Of/Cloud/: Toward a History of Painting (1972), art critic Hubert Damisch treats clouds as a hierophany or a manifestation of the sacred. In our contemporary era of globalized ecological crises, climate aesthetics are not just about the skies and meteorology or even the experience of climates. It is an aesthetic of climate change involving a world that is changing dramatically to the point that certain people believe that the very survival of humanity is at stake. R.M. Auer’s criticism of Emily Brady24 states that the aesthetic born of climate change means that we can no longer consider the environment in the disinterested manner advocated by heirs to the Kantian aesthetic. Henceforth,

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aesthetic judgments are morally contaminated by the feeling that humanity has failed to preserve the world in all its richness, beauty, and diversity. Ethics and aesthetics have together become stakeholders that help structure environmental affects. Philosophical heritage has played an important role, leading to the view that aesthetics is synonymous with a disinterested attitude toward the environment. However, recent trends actually argue in favor of proactive sensitive engagement. This is ordinary environmentalization, which seeks to give form to living environments. Environmental engagement is all about perceiving the values conferred on the environment, which are associated with sensoriality and sensitivity. The casual walker enjoys the fragrance of pine trees for its own sake. We need to factor in the sometimes unknown emotions triggered by an encounter in and with the environment.25 Ultimately, the imagination is essential: climate change is reconfiguring our entire perception and representations. What we are actually saying is that nothing that has formed the stable climatic framework of our environment for centuries makes sense anymore. Climate change means finding ways to tell stories that include the idea of permanent upheaval over which humans will have little control without radical changing their lifestyles. These narratives draw heavily on the imagination. According to Katryna Yusoff, culture, together with imagination, is now a stakeholder in climate change from a forward-looking perspective.26 This last point is especially important as imagination makes it possible to travel in space and time and helps confer an ability to act with animals and plants in the environment. The idea is not to limit ourselves to an anthropocentric perspective but to favor an “ecocentric” approach. In any case, this view of nature is based on a pluralistic, even opportunistic, aesthetic appreciation that is critical of science and elitist knowledge. Indeed, most environmental aesthetics specialists tend to forget the extent to which nature is subject to views that recall social classes and their distinctions. In France, the first research into environmental aesthetics took place in 200727 and highlighted not merely a largely neglected Anglo-American and American school of research but also the possibility of another aesthetic and ethical approach to sustainable development and the environment. This approach stressed the importance of aesthesis in representations and practices vis-à-vis animal and plant species and environmental forms more generally, especially landscapes. Regardless of whether we are talking about environmental aesthetics in the French- or English-speaking world, it is important to highlight the dynamic of ordinary environmentalization, which is partially driven by aesthetics. In the same vein, we need to appreciate the extent to which the imperatives of ordinary aesthetics are linked to those of ecology. Indeed, green lawns are of relatively little value from an ecological point of view but are highly prized from an aesthetic perspective. These ways of dealing with nature form a continuum with a nineteenth-century hygienism of the living environment. It therefore appears that aesthetics invites us to take a look at the cultures of nature and to revisit the challenges of representing ecological transformations. Aesthetic issues emerge not from subjectivities but from “collectives of taste” that allow space for history and geography.

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Beyond these observations, environmental aesthetics in its applied dimension is a discipline committed to action and the coproduction of local environments.28 It is no longer a question of keeping a respectful distance from the research object, but rather, of engaging with local stakeholders to deploy socio-ecological transformations and new possibilities in terms of narratives and collective action. By broadening a more general ref lection on research-creation, we wish to understand how it is possible to develop a maieutic approach to the local environment that involves teams composed of researchers in the social and human sciences, artists, and local inhabitants. The aim is to see how environmental aesthetics and a “sharing sensitive experience” can reconfigure the idea of global commons and environmental forms.29 The generalized “aestheticisation” of the experiences that characterize contemporary capitalist society30 does not sum up the political question formulated by Jacques Rancière: Politics is about what we see and what we can say about it, about who is qualified to see and to say, and about the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time. [Politics is also] the system of forms that in principle determines what is felt.31 It is on the basis of this first aesthetic that we may pose the “aesthetic practices” question as we understand it: the forms of visibility of art practices, the place they occupy, and the commonly held view of what they actually “do.” Artistic practices are “ways of doing” things that form part of the general distribution of ways of doing and their relationship to ways of being and forms of visibility.32 In this context, territory is seen as a resource, with its own specific characteristics, which makes aesthetic and artistic experience possible in relation to the environment. First off, we need to develop a theoretical foundation for research-creation that combines art and science. In addition to a relationship to sensitivity and sensibility, and therefore to aesthetics as a science of sensitive experience as well as an experimental science, research-creation is both an appreciative and a co-productive approach based on the need to revisit forms of the environment.33 It is also fed by research guided by a certain pragmatism—that is, assessments of what appears possible or not as action is taking place. In other words, it is a matter of assessing the possible conditions for socio-ecological transformations and evaluating their collective and individual learning value. Our approach is an extension of research that gives aesthetic feeling a role in the training and education of individuals and groups. This debate was especially prevalent in the nineteenth century and was supported by criticism of political institutions and economic and social structures. Writers such as Claude-Henri de Saint-Simon and Charles Fourier assigned a critical prophetic function to art in society, heralding a happy world free of constraints.34. In the twentieth century, a number of movements, such as feminist art, Fluxus, and Happenings, renewed the ties between art and society and turned the period into one of militant art. From the 1960s on,

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environmentally committed artists experimented with transforming reality by deploying locally situated ecological alternatives,35 and research-creation became an extension of those early ecological experiments. Why does it matter for our research-creation linking the art of the table and the diversity of our territories? Because transforming the ways in which we produce and eat food means being creative. Agricultural production and food itself are subject to an aesthetic that gives them a special place in the history of representations. It is a matter of sensitivity towards the components of our environments and even the political status of agricultural work. To stage research-creation for food production is to engage the latter in an aesthetic of our links to nature, which anchors it in processes and sustainability that respect ecosystemic limits. Research-creation can respond to both the production and consumption of food, as it is anchored in a documented reality and does not fear to leap into the unknown.

Research-Creation But what exactly is research-creation? In an article written jointly with Marine Legrand in 2019, one of the authors tackles this question.36 The term “research-creation” comes from Canadian art studies and describes programand process-based research, that is, protocols that combine artistic approaches with the usual methodological applications used in the social sciences.37 Canada’s two main sponsors of research-creation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and Fonds de Recherche du Québec–Société et Culture (FRQSC), each offer a different definition. The SSHRC believes that research-creation is a “creative process forming the essential component of a research activity and promoting the development or renewal of knowledge through innovative aesthetic, technical, instrumental or other practices.”38 For the FRQSC, on the other hand, research-creation “is any research activity or process that facilitates the creation or interpretation of literary or artistic works of any kind.”39 In France, the research and creation initiative deployed in 2014 by the Athena Alliance, an organization dedicated to prospective social and human sciences studies, and Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, a foundation for the humanities, focuses on boosting opportunities for encounters between the arts and the humanities through public exchanges, publications.40 The artistic creation process is therefore becoming more and more clearly integrated with a research process. The artist is not the sole custodian of creative practices, nor is the researcher sole custodian of scientific methods and conceptual applications. However, the status of creation needs to be clarified in academic artistic research41: an artist who acts as such at a university is not automatically a researchercreator. As researcher-creators, they qualify less simply because of their status of institutional belonging than through a research process that takes concrete form in two ways: production of a scientific nature and production of an artistic nature.42

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This approach stresses the relevance of hybridization in artistic or scientific research based on the idea of creation as research or research as creation. Ad hoc structures are also emerging, often bearing a name that confers a title such as “research lab.” The reappropriation of the term “laboratory” outside of strictly academic fields was apparent when the Sense Lab was founded in Montreal in 2004 by Erin Manning. Bringing together an international network of “artists and researchers, writers and practitioners, from many different backgrounds to work together at the juncture of philosophy, art and activism,”43 this essentially affinity-based structure is pioneering the development of the research-creation approach by incorporating artistic creativity into scientific approaches. Its stated aim is not only to reconsolidate the links between theory and practice but to redefine their respective contours.44 In France, Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers has stepped into the role of promoting artistic practices on the ground, which are designed not to produce works but as experience-sharing processes. For some, the stated aim of practices that blend art and science is to stimulate and showcase the production of technological innovations, to the extent that it is the target of many, frequently justified criticisms. Indeed, it is not uncommon for art to be used to embellish and increase the value—especially the monetary value—of scientific discoveries, as exemplified by photographic exhibitions on spectacular phenomena revealed by physical, biological, and astronomical sciences. Art can also serve as a master key for unlocking symbolic barriers and as a tool for securing social acceptability for controversial technologies. The pretext of art or the freedom to create can be used to give a free ride to the superseding of ethical precautions, especially the subjection of the living world still more intensely to purely instrumental imperatives. In such cases, one may speak of “art washing.” We neither subscribe to nor endorse these instrumental imperatives. In contrast, research in art as well as the humanities and social sciences harnesses artistic tools to configure new critical and educational devices. Therefore, we will focus on the insertion of bodies into the lived environment, thereby hoping to renew the transformative potential of research practices in art and the human and social sciences. At the same time, we will showcase research in art and its effect on art, particularly insofar as artistic practices challenge territorial renewal, while also formulating the contributions of the arts to the human and social sciences and the way in which the arts transform research practices. In brief, starting from a cross-epistemic perspective, our aim is to assess paradigm-based possibilities for renewing these two domains of activity, art and research, and their respective roles in society. Our ultimate objective is to contribute to an understanding of environmental relationships without separating cognition and sensitivity and thereby contribute to their transformation. Therefore, the research-creation process and an investigation into it play with the concretions emerging from these human and nonhuman collectives at the juncture of sense and meaning. Myriad of environmental forms— environment-based narratives, landscapes, atmospheres—are offered up for

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public appreciation as part of research-creation experiments in a territory. This position can indeed enrich research processes by involving inhabitants in planning and environmental management and deploying territorialized utopias. Discourse, knowledge, imagination, and ultimately bodies fully deserve to be taken into account in their multiple, constantly evolving material and sensorial dimensions. We need to embrace the diversity of perspectives, listening to them in concert, and taking them on board. The aesthetic perspective is objectified in public debate. The quest for an inquiry into research-creation implies a highly experimental position. In its scientific meaning, experimentation is a process by which different dimensions are rationally circumscribed, leaving nothing to chance, and which can be reproduced indefinitely in an identical manner or based on carefully controlled variations. Conversely, if we consider our own daily routine as a spatiotemporal experiment, time becomes a play on the ways in which experience unfolds, extended to the realm of the sensitive. Experiments, which are by definition spatiotemporally situated, help transform space and time by offering up new possibilities.45 Experimentation’s critical perspective arises from its distancing of everyday experience through an interplay of space and time with new protocols. We may cite as an example the thought experiments underpinning the literary production of science fiction or the creation of utopian graphic art installations. Moreover, participating in research-creation processes is an attempt to re-separate art and science in terms of their common potential for social transformation. According to the pragmatic American philosopher John Dewey, art is the “culmination of nature,” while “science is properly a handmaiden that conducts natural events to this happy issue.”46 More recently, the French philosopher Jacques Rancière saw artistic practices as “the transformation of thought into the sensory experience of the community.”47 He suggests abolishing art as a separate activity and reincorporating it into work, that is, as part of life working out its own meaning, while questioning the ordinary character of work and the extraordinary character of art. Art can show signs of being an exclusive activity insofar as it is work. The cult of art presupposes a revalorization of the abilities attached to the very idea of work. However, this idea is less a discovery of the essence of human activity than a re-composition of the landscape of the visible, a re-composition of the relationship between doing, making, being, seeing, and saying.48 We will look at these ways of “being-ness” and making vis-à-vis posthumanist and more-than-human ontologies as also posing a critical analysis and reinterpretation of colonial capitalism and its extractive history. Indigenous scholar Daryle Rigney, writing with Simone Bignall, established the importance of acknowledging a “‘post-humanist’ commitment to a processoriented ontology of constructivist naturalism. Instead of defining humanity in modern terms, as definitely separated from object matter and animality,

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posthumanism connects human beings creatively with the natural world.”49 These are ways to politically and intellectually respond to “Eurocentric modernism” and establish new-old paths of connectivity and community with the other-than-human worlds. Our focus on recomposition requires a customized approach. Researchcreation implies using fieldwork as experience in order to materialize it through both artistic and scientific practices. Artistic practices then consist in actually giving form to reality and not just representing it. In this framework, artists and researchers harness open-ended approaches to investigating reality based on surveys and a wide range of media for (re)presentational purposes. The research-creation project in which they participate, the techniques that they use, along with their invitation in principle to use the findings in an indeterminate manner, make the initiative a more customized local project in the sense of specific, concrete, local production.

Notes 1 Saint-John Perse, “Speech at the Nobel Banquet on December 10, 1960,” in Œuvres Completes de Saint-John Perse (Paris: Bibliotheque de la Pléiade, 2013), 443–47 (authors’ translation). 2 Hans Joas, The Creativity of Action (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 149. 3 Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985). 4 Yuriko Saito, Everyday Aesthetics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 5 M.A. Chan, et al., “Opinion: Why Protect Nature? Rethinking Values and the Environment,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 113, no. 6, (February 9, 2016): 1463. 6 Arnold Berleant, Art and Engagement (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1991). 7 Ronald Hepburn, “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty,” in British Analytical Philosophy, eds. Bernard Williams and Alan Montefiore (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), 285–310. 8 Such a position consists in revisiting the question of intentionality. See Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998) and Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 9 Nathalie Blanc and Lydie Laigle, Narratives, Capabilities and Climate Change: Towards a Sustainable Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 2018). 10 Movilab defines “third places” as intended to be physical or virtual meeting spaces for people and various skills that would not necessarily meet otherwise. It was originally intended as a catch-all term to describe coworking spaces, FabLabs, HackerSpaces, Café meet-up places, shared gardens and other shared habitats or open-plan businesses. “Third Places” (if capitalized) has come to be used as a collective term for thinking about these necessary singularities provided they are conceived and organized within a global ecosystem with its own language, so that the focus is no longer on places or infrastructure services, but on the emergence of collective projects that facilitate co-creation and the preservation of value in the territories. (Movilab, https://movilab.org/ (authors’ translation)).

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11 Claire Revol, La rythmanalyse chez Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991): Contribution to poétique urbaine (PhD diss., Université Jean Moulin Lyon, 2015), 3. 12 Nathalie Blanc, Les formes de l’environnement. Manifeste pour une esthétique politique (Lausanne: MétisPresses, 2016). 13 Alexander G. Baumgarten, Aesthetica, trans. and ed. J.-Y. Pranchère (Paris: L’Herne, 1988). 14 Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2015). 15 Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013). 16 Nathalie Blanc and Marine Legrand, “Vers une recherche-création: explorer la portée transformatrice des récits dans les relations au milieu de vie,” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 18, no. 1 (2019), 49–76. 17 See, for example, George Perkins Marsh, Man and Nature, 1864 (London: Dover Publications, 2021) and John Muir, The Mountains (New York: Binker North, 1882). 18 The authors would like to acknowledge that the national parks established during this period of American history were of course part of the colonial expansion of white, immigrant Europeans on the unceded territories of Native Americans. 19 Ronald Hepburn, “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty,” in The Aesthetics of Natural Environments, eds. A. Carlson and A. Berleant (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2004), 44–62. 20 See Arnold Berleant, The Aesthetic Field: A Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience (Springfield, IL: C.C. Thomas, 1970) and Arnold Berleant, Art and Engagement. 21 See Allen Carlson, “Appreciation and the Natural Environment,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 37 (1979), 267–76 and Allen Carlson, Aesthetics and the Environment: The Appreciation of Nature, Art and Architecture (London: Routledge, 1979). 22 See Yuriko Saito, Aesthetics of the Familiar: Everyday Life and World-Making (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 23 Edith Liegey, Écomorphisme(s), vers une culture du vivant. Formes et évolution d’une symbolique de l’écologie dans l’art contemporain (Paris: Thèse du Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle, 2018). 24 R. M. Auer, “Environmental Aesthetics in the Age of Climate Change,” Sustainability 11, no. 18 (September 2019): 5001; Emily Brady, “Climate Change and Future Aesthetics,” in Climate Change and the Humanities, eds. Alexander Elliott, James Storrs, and Vinita Damodaran (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 25 Noël Carroll, “On Being Moved by Nature: Between Religion and Natural History,” in Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts, eds. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 244–66. 26 Hepburn, “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty,” 285–310. 27 We are thinking of the international Environnement, Esthétique et Espaces Publics conference in Paris, May 9–11, 2007. See also Nathalie Blanc and Jacques Lolive, eds., “Esthétique et espace public,” Cosmopolitiques 15 (2007), and Nathalie Blanc, Vers une esthétique environnementale (Paris: Quae, 2008). 28 Yrjö Sepänmaa, “Applied Aesthetics,” in Art and Beyond: Finnish Approaches to Aesthetics, eds. Ossi Naukkarinen and Olli Immonen ( Jyväskylä: Finnish Society of Aesthetics, 1995), 230. 29 Jacques Rancière, Le partage du sensible. Esthétique et politique (Paris: Fabrique, 2000). 30 Gilles Lipovetski and Jacques Serroy, Lʼesthétisation du monde: Vivre à lʼâge du capitalisme artiste (Paris: Gallimard, 2013). 31 Rancière, Le partage du sensible, 13–14 (authors’ translation).

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32 Manola Antonioli, “Qualité urbaine et ‘partage du sensible’” in Penser la qualité: la ville résiliente et sensible, eds. Emeline Bailly and Dorothée Marchand (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2019), 43–56. 33 Elsa Vivant, “Experiencing Research-Creation in Urban Studies: Lessons from an Inquiry on the Making of Public Space,” Cities 77 ( July 2018): 60–66. 34 Neil McWilliam, et al., eds., “L’Art social de la révolution à la grande guerre: Anthologie de textes sources (Paris: Publications de l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art, 2014), https://books.openedition.org/inha/4825?lang=en. 35 Nathalie Blanc and Barbara Benish, Form, Art and Environment: Engaging in Sustainability (London and New York: Routledge, 2016). 36 Blanc and Legrand, “Vers une recherche-création.” 37 Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt, eds., Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry (London: I.B. Tauris, 2010), and Owen Chapman and Kim Sawchuk, “Research-Creation: Intervention, Analysis and ‘Family Resemblances,’” Canadian Journal of Communication 37 (2012): 5–26. 38 See “research-creation” under “Definition of Terms,” Government of Canada, Social Sciences and Humanitites Research Council, https://www.sshrc-crsh. gc.ca/funding-financement/programs-programmes/definitions-eng.aspx#a22. 39 https://frq.gouv.qc.ca/en/program/research-creation-support-for-newacademics-ccz-2022-2023/. 40 “À propose Alliance Athena,” Alliance Athena (website), http://www. recherche-et-creation.fr/a-propos/. 41 See Corina Caduff, Fiona Siegenthaler, and Tan Wälchli, eds., Art and Artistic Research (Zurich: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2010). 42 Sophie Stévance, “À la recherche de la recherche-création: la création d’une interdiscipline universitaires,” Intersections: Canadian Journal of Music/Intersections: revue canadienne de musique 33, no. 1 (2012): 3–9. 43 “About SenseLab–3e,” SenseLab–3e, http://senselab.ca/wp2/about/. 44 Erin Manning and Brian Massumi, Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014). 45 Nigel Thrift, Spatial Formations (London: Sage, 1996) and Nigel Thrift, NonRepresentational Theory Space, Politics, Affect (London and New York: Routledge, 2008). 46 John Dewey, Experience and Nature (New York: Dover Publications, 1958), 358. 47 Rancière, Le partage du sensible, 70. 48 Rancière, Le partage du sensible, 72. 49 Simone Bignall and Daryle Rigney, “Indigeneity, Posthumanism and Nomad Thought,” in Posthuman Glossary, eds. Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 166.

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Berleant, Arnold. The Aesthetic Field: A Phenomenology of Aesthetic Experience. Springfield, IL: C.C. Thomas, 1970. Berleant, Arnold. Art and Engagement. Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 1991. Bignall, Simone, and Daryle Rigney. “Indigeneity, Posthumanism and Nomad Thought,” in Posthuman Glossary, eds. Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova. London: Bloomsbury, 2018, 166. Blanc, Nathalie. Vers une esthétique environnementale. Paris: Quae, 2008. Blanc, Nathalie. Les formes de l’environnement. Manifeste pour une esthétique politique. Lausanne: MétisPresses, 2016. Blanc, Nathalie, and Barbara Benish. Form, Art and Environment: Engaging in Sustainability. London and New York: Routledge, 2016. Blanc, Nathalie, and Jacques Lolive, eds. “Esthétique et espace public,” Cosmopolitiques 15, (2007). Blanc, Nathalie, and Lydie Laigle. Narratives, Capabilities and Climate Change: Towards a Sustainable Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 2018. Blanc, Nathalie, and Marine Legrand, “Vers une recherche-création: explorer la portée transformatrice des récits dans les relations au milieu de vie,” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 18, no. 1 (2019), 49–76. Brady, Emily. “Climate Change and Future Aesthetics,” in Climate Change and the Humanities, eds. Alexander Elliott, James Storrs, and Vinita Damodaran. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Braidotti, Rosi. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2015. Caduff, Corina, Fiona Siegenthaler, and Tan Wälchli, eds. Art and Artistic Research. Zurich: Scheidegger & Spiess, 2010. Carlson, Allen. Aesthetics and the Environment: The Appreciation of Nature, Art and Architecture. London: Routledge, 1979. Carlson, Allen. “Appreciation and the Natural Environment,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 37 (1979), 267–76. Carroll, Noël. “On Being Moved by Nature: Between Religion and Natural History,” in Landscape, Natural Beauty and the Arts, eds. Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, 244–66. Chan, M.A. et al., “Opinion: Why Protect Nature? Rethinking Values and the Environment,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 113, no. 6, February 9, 2016: 1463. Chapman, Owen, and Kim Sawchuk. “Research-Creation: Intervention, Analysis and ‘Family Resemblances,’” Canadian Journal of Communication 37 (2012): 5–26. Dewey, John. Experience and Nature. New York: Dover Publications, 1958. Gell, Alfred. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Hepburn, Ronald. “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty,” in British Analytical Philosophy, eds. Bernard Williams and Alan Montefiore. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966. Hepburn, Ronald. “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty,” in The Aesthetics of Natural Environments, eds. A. Carlson and A. Berleant. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2004, 44–62. Joas, Hans. The Creativity of Action. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1997.

82 Art and Research in Food-Based Situations Liegey, Edith. Écomorphisme(s), vers une culture du vivant. Formes et évolution d’une symbolique de l’écologie dans l’art contemporain. Paris: Thèse du Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle, 2018. Lipovetski, Gilles, and Jacques Serroy. Lʼesthétisation du monde: Vivre à lʼâge du capitalisme artiste. Paris: Gallimard, 2013. Manning, Erin, and Brian Massumi. Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014. Marsh, George Perkins. Man and Nature. London: Dover Publications, (1864) 2021. McWilliam, Neil, et al., eds., “L’Art social de la révolution à la grande guerre: Anthologie de textes sources. Paris: Publications de l’Institut national d’histoire de l’art, 2014, https://books.openedition.org/inha/4825?lang=en. Muir, John. The Mountains. New York: Binker North, 1882. Rancière, Jacques. Le partage du sensible. Esthétique et politique. Paris: Fabrique, 2000. Revol, Claire. La rythmanalyse chez Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991): Contribution to poétique urbaine. PhD diss., Université Jean Moulin Lyon, 2015. Saint-John Perse, “Speech at the Nobel Banquet on December 10, 1960,” in Œuvres Completes de Saint-John Perse. Paris: Bibliotheque de la Pléiade, 2013. Saito, Yuriko. Everyday Aesthetics. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Saito, Yuriko. Aesthetics of the Familiar: Everyday Life and World-Making. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Sepänmaa, Yrjö. “Applied Aesthetics,” in Art and Beyond: Finnish Approaches to Aesthetics, eds. Ossi Naukkarinen and Olli Immonen. Jyväskylä: Finnish Society of Aesthetics, 1995, 230. Stévance, Sophie. “À la recherche de la recherche-création: la création d’une interdiscipline universitaires,” Intersections: Canadian Journal of Music/Intersections: revue canadienne de musique 33, no. 1 (2012): 3–9. Thrift, Nigel. Spatial Formations. London: Sage, 1996. Thrift, Nigel. Non-Representational Theory Space, Politics, Affect. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. Vivant, Elsa. “Experiencing Research-Creation in Urban Studies: Lessons from an Inquiry on the Making of Public Space,” Cities 77 ( July 2018): 60–66. Williams, Raymond. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.

5

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Each of the various research-creation approaches involved in art and food production has a singular, experimental character. But they all have a common foundation, which can be described as follows. First, these transformative experiences often have both a cognitive and an aesthetic aspect. Indeed, they participate in the transformation of local ecological knowledge. They also help characterize discourse on the living environment and express not only a single situated source of knowledge but also the sensitivities of the territorial stakeholders with a view to restoring the territorial experience. They blend collective imaginary and representations of the body, health, and food as well as what surrounds and affects these things. Bodies are micro-environments. All persons, things, and components experience, at the level of their own bodies, the changes and adaptation processes underway outside of themselves and the things that nurture them: pollution, climate change, stress, etc. Discovering what comprises these scientific investigation processes while putting them on display forces us to invest this experience with a resonance that showcases it in an original manner. Whether they comprise text, images, or visual or sound performances, the fabricated representations interplay with these territories and bodies and ultimately render them capable of initiatives. Second, each of the research-creation approaches blends knowledge, words, and images. Regardless of whether these expressions are scholarly, ordinary, or political, they maintain relationships in the context of the hybridization and democratization of knowledge. Instead of just building a consensus, we actually see the anti-consensus at work. Research-creation processes propose to reinvent places that human and social sciences need to turn into a process of critical ref lection. Contrasting such knowledge, words, and images with multiple references—in other words, bringing them head-to-head—is also a way to lay bare the conf licts between the rationales underpinning differentiated legitimacies. Finding ways to express a new world—that is, to combine representations and ways of characterizing the scientific world with representations born out of other cultural contexts— helps forge a culture that incorporates the conditions for reproducing a quality environment.

DOI: 10.4324/9780367433710-6

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Third, research-creation factors in themes that have sometimes been neglected and give substance to the environmental relationship. Aside from questions about individuals’ intimate emotional and aesthetic relationships with their environments, they highlight invisible swathes of reality using new media. Indeed, their concern is to explore how the environment—understood as a milieu that goes beyond the collection of problems highlighted in the public space (such as climate change or the erosion of biodiversity)—underpins the construction of individual and collective knowledge to generate ties to the history of places. In this chapter, we will describe research-creations conducted in the framework of The Table and the Territory program and, for some, in liaison with the Saint-Denis Urban Farm. We will also look at research-creation at the Mhotte Farm initiated by the pirate ecology lab in the rural Allier department—an “eco-space” that is seeking to establish an alternative model compatible with the idea of ecological breakdown.

Recipe-Narratives The experiment is located not too far from the University Paris 8 in the northern suburbs. The sky is gray, and the surroundings ref lect a rapidly developing city. When visiting the last five hectares of market gardens on the edge of Paris, in Saint-Denis, a visitor needs to overcome her initial amazement at finding urban agriculture. A nineteenth-century vegetable farm was acquired in 2017 by the Poetic Party, a group of artists and beekeepers, and the Gally Farm, a farmers’ group initiated in 1746 near Versailles. The Poetic Party planned to farm a hectare of land that had retained its productive farmland status but had also been thrown open to other uses involving the public, artists, experts, and even researchers in urban agriculture. The Saint-Denis Urban Farm combines permaculture market gardening, cultural and educational programs, civic participation (residents, younger people, visitors to Paris, cultural tourism), and the integration of marginalized people. The project seeks to deploy innovative and interdependent approaches to promote healthy eating and living, healthy local and responsible agriculture, urban biodiversity, and the territory’s cultural diversity, all based on cooking. Also linked to this project and others elsewhere of a similar type is the Sustainable Culture Lab, which sees itself as an innovative program combining scientific practices, especially in the human and social sciences, with artistic practices and practices of the communities concerned. This collaboration between art, science, and society is helping drive the transition of the Urban Farm by contributing to the emergence of a terroir or culinary identity in Saint-Denis, which is home to 135 nationalities. The farm explores the aesthetic, gustatory, and nutritional qualities of local culinary knowledge in order to jointly imagine what sustainable food in Seine-Saint-Denis might look like in the future.

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At the Urban Farm, the idea is to collect recipes, or rather recipe-narratives that the inhabitants recount to the researcher, who is also an investigator. These recipes are recalled from countries or territories of origin and are also present and every day, made with available local ingredients or recipes dreamed up between cultures—both the culture of origin and the present culture. Aside from actual recipes, the specific nature of the work undertaken as part of the Sustainable Culture Lab lies as much in the attention paid to the way in which recipes are recounted, the stories and spaces they evoke, as to the ingredients that the recipes showcase. These “recipe-narratives” comprise genuine personal culinary landscapes that form part of traditions and environments.1 Between forgetting and memory, storytelling remains one of the most effective ways to reestablish relationships between different countries and territories. In addition to putting together a recipe book and highlighting the great diversity of individual tales and places to which they refer, the aim is to study the narrators’ rapport with food in a territory with working-class and immigrant populations that are the custodians of plural histories, with all of the related economic problems. The Saint-Denis Urban Farm intends to use an analysis of this shared food narrative to come up with experiments in reoccupying urban space. The ingredients in the recipes may then be grown on the farm and cooked by the inhabitants. Around 30 similarly organized interviews were conducted.2 The first set of interviews focused on memories of cooking, the second on everyday cooking practices, and the third on future perspectives and possible changes in cooking. This last set is the most original, depending on individuals, who may focus on preserving traditional, inherited tastes and values or on culinary innovation, inventiveness, and the personality of cooking in harmony with the environment. For example, K., a Guinean woman, who was interviewed by Lou Gauthier as part of his research for a master’s degree, highlights quick, improvised recipes that blend “typical” foods from different cuisines. For example, K. describes the inclusion of milk in rice as a Fulani inf luence, chili in pasta as a Guinean inf luence, and replacing Maggi stock cubes with soy sauce as a Japanese inf luence. This interview highlights inventive relationships with territories traversed in the course of migrations and reveal a whole blend of cultural inf luences. The many culinary shifts demonstrate the absurdity of pigeonholing someone in a specific culinary culture based on their origin or nationality. K. developed her own family cooking style when she was still very young. She remembers learning to make tomato sauce and how this became “her” dish. She made it for her family every time she cooked. This person’s recipesouvenir is tomato sauce: I can clearly remember the first meal I prepared. I remember that one day my mother couldn’t do the cooking because she was going to a weekly market. My sisters had gone to wash clothes in the river because our

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family went to the river to do the washing. You see, that’s a really African thing! Brothers do not do the cooking. So I was the only one at home and my mother said, “I don’t have time today, so you’ll have to cook.” I was 14 years old, and everyone went off and left me to my own devices. I remember it was Sunday, so I didn’t have school. My mother did the shopping and then she came back. She left everything and went off again. And it is this exact recipe that I’m going to give you because this is the first recipe I ever cooked in my life: tomato sauce . . . It’s a happy memory. I have a special relationship with this recipe. It left a deep impression on me because everyone in the family loved the meal that day. They told me, “that’s wonderful K. You cooked really well. We really enjoyed that.” Others made fun of me a little. My big brother said, “but it really needs more salt . . . it needs a bit more pepper . . .” And everyone was laughing but I was really happy because my father said “upon my word! My daughter works well at school, and she cooks well, too. I have a perfect daughter!” And it’s funny because I remember this really well. So this is the recipe I’m going to give.3 K. then left Guinea for Japan, where she did not expect to find any familiar cooking ingredients. But she found rice, fish, and okra. In France, rice and baguettes were familiar items. She incorporated pasta into her everyday recipes, but the recipe she still prepares most often is tomato sauce. When she makes it in France, she considers it to taste almost the same as in Guinea, except that the tomatoes are not fresh and the fish is not smoked. “In Guinea, you eat fresh tomatoes like fruit. They’re absolutely delicious!” Another recipe she often makes is tiep, a well-known Guinean dish. She learned to cook tiep quite late, after she entered university. I invited friends from the university around to my place and I cooked tiep for them. That was 20 years ago, but I remember the day as if it were yesterday. In Guinea you can’t get either grapes or olives. Here, when I cook this Senegalese recipe tiep, I use olives and grapes. Guinean friends who come to the house told me “you’ve found a recipe.” I added my own special touch. The improvised recipe for tiep shows how recipes no longer belong to a single culture. K. transformed the dish by adding grapes and olives. When she cooks for other people, it’s often for friends who wish to “discover African cooking.” Whenever I invite my French girlfriends, they want to eat Guinean food . . . I’d like to cook something different, but they don’t want me to. They

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say, “K., if we come over, will you make us mafé or tiep?” Always a Guinean dish . . . I’ve always just gone along with this . . . People ask me for something that comes from Africa . . . It’s unconscious racism. People don’t realize that I want to cook something else. I’d love to make gratin dauphinois, for example! This latter recipe, which K. is especially fond of, illustrates the nonsegmentation of tastes by culture. In Guinea you can’t get cheese. In France, I discovered it in Marseille, and I remember I liked it at once. The people around me found that surprising . . . We do have food in Guinea called sumbara, which stinks like cheese and I love it! It’s made from locust beans, a plant that grows in the Sahel region. We dry the locust beans, cook them in the oven, and grind them into powder. The smell is really strong and reminds me of cheese. You prepare rice with okra, oil, and African eggplant and you sprinkle sumbara on it like salt when you’re eating it. It’s really delicious. The aesthetics of these recipes draw on the territories that have been traversed. The pattern of the survey highlights the need to empathize with life forms. In a territory in which we meet up with inhabitants and farmers, what we eat, how we eat it, and even how we cook it form part of research work. The research process, which provides common ground for shared experiences, now gives ample room to individual and collective sensibilities. According to forms of horizontality, the personality of the collective changes and develops its own narrative, as highlighted by the strong variations in the survey. Hence the difficulty of developing a single coherent approach from start to finish. Whether we are talking about forms or manifestations of experience or collective discussions about them, developments factor in the narrative of the approach itself and that of the people involved, according to their professional or disciplinary backgrounds. The forms of the survey therefore become joint enquiries that incorporate geographies and histories as well as the “naturalness” of space. The absence of a food commonly consumed in a region and synonymous with a type of food can be experienced as an emotional lack, as N. from Algeria recalls: It’s fresh milk, unpasteurized, that we let ferment at room temperature so it will curdle. You can drink it; you can eat it with a spoon . . . but people usually eat it in couscous. Since there is no sauce in couscous in Ramadan, because it is too heavy, people put in curdled milk instead.4

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But you cannot find the same curdled milk in France as in Algeria, N. adds, highlighting the strong links between food and personal experience as she relates the history of places with the experience of colonization. Everything I prepare at home, I do it in relation to my culture and my traditions. Absolutely everything. The bread for example . . . But in terms of taste, it’s not the same thing. Meat has less taste here. Let’s not talk about the bread, it’s really French. We didn’t make baguettes, we learned that with colonization. But as far as taste is concerned, the products from there are organic, they are fresh. So it changes! We notice the taste, we see the difference, because there are no chemicals. The land is fertile, it has sunshine. It is a great country: the granary of the Mediterranean. The rejection of certain recipes can be attributed to a renewed link to one’s origins: I will tell you something. When I arrived here in France, I was preparing a couscous, and my husband went to buy merguez [a sausage from Maghreb]. I said to him, “What are you doing? We don’t mix merguez in the couscous. We don’t put chops in the couscous either.” He said: “Yes, but the French eat it like that.” I replied: “We are an Algerian household, we stick to the traditional, to our customs.” To tell you the truth, I now put merguez sausages in my couscous, because my children ask me to. In addition, culinary repertoires and recipes tend to shift in line with localized innovations. Obviously, the environmental forms constituted by these recipes—between individual trajectories, inherited traditions, and territories crossed—allow us to ref lect on the relationship between recipes made with local foods and a healthy and sustainable diet. What role should be set aside for environmental aesthetics on the basis of these experiments? It is indeed a question of understanding and analyzing the links between the preparation of recipes, the aesthetic relationship with each of these, and the relationships of these recipes to memories of places, personal trajectories, and everyday life in a territory. In this sense, environmental aesthetics are all about everyday life and ways of experiencing it aesthetically. One of the authors has also been organizing writing workshops on foodrelated topics. Each participant was invited to poetically modify, in their own words, a series of scientific texts about food and agricultural production. We contend that writing is a means of experiencing food-related issues in a meaningful way and possibly of looking differently at standard representations of food. The written texts are read out loud to the other participants and will subsequently be published as a collection.

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Figure 5.1 Zone Sensible, with Maria Varela. France. Recittes project, 2021. Photograph by Andrea Mantovani. Courtesy of Zone Sensible.

Research-Creation Around the Table and the Territory Recipe-narratives have been developed as part of a research-creation program titled The Table and the Territory, which sought to tackle the question of food in several territories and a host of communities. The Table and the Territory aimed to bring together inhabitants, local authority stakeholders, associations, and private actors to exchange, debate, and forge a culture and a food mindset that can become not only a material key to their impact on the territory but a symbolic and powerful way of acting that ref lects ways of being together. In the case of the Saint-Denis Urban Farm, the issue probably concerned the taste of the food grown there. Social and environmental justice lie at the heart of the Sugar Killer project, that brought together researchers and artists to challenge what is on our plates from a sensitive perspective. The Table and the Territory moved away from standardized research and adopted a more decentralized approach, both from a disciplinary perspective and in terms of artistic and research practices, in favor of sensitive awakening and critical sensitivity. The project examined (and questioned) the ways in which teenagers in Vaulx-en-Velin, a suburb of Lyon, represent agriculture

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and the nature of their food practices. A working assumption was that introducing information about agriculture into courses on food would transform their food practices and how they actually viewed food. At the origin of this research-creation lied a research-action initiative known as Marguerite and the Marguerite Network association run by researchers. For the artist Thierry Boutonnier, who wished to pay tribute to the power of plants and worked in an urban nursery and a participative orchard followed by a rose garden in Lyon, there was a certain obviousness in the choice of the geographical territory of Vaulx-en-Velin. Getting involved with the Henri Barbusse Secondary School was a concrete opportunity to see how research and creation practices could be combined in the field and how high school students could develop representations of their personal food landscapes and food portraits and of their environment in general. The initial action-research produced research material in the form of a visual database of images called Selfood that represent a series of food portraits. For seven days, the students photographed their meals along with everything they ate at breakfast, midday, or in the evening. The number of forks represented the number of people seated at the table. Thanks to Boutonnier’s presence, the research-creation team that was set up subsequently discovered that the Selfoods were also portraits and even self-portraits. The images generated a great deal of excitement: the food self-portraits revealed much more than the contents of the plates and what the teenagers actually ate. Research-creation starts with a meeting and a common object. The teenagers invited us to sit with them at the table after they analyzed their own day-to-day food practices. This research approach proved successful thanks to the support of teachers who paid careful attention to the children’s visual culture. They were key to the success of the work performed with the high school students. This was art-science-school research and not just art-science research. Selfood itself traveled to other countries such as Argentina, Mexico, and Canada and was used by adults as well as teenagers. In France, sugar quickly became an issue, given the ubiquitous presence of soda at the meal table. Other people became involved in the project: students as well as researchers in neuroscience and politicians working on sugar consumption in France. Research that had become art-science research turned into art-science-school research and then into art- scienceschool-territory research. The teenagers developed their own means of questioning and even their own investigative techniques, such as calling toll-free numbers to understand the labels that appear on what they eat, bottles of soda, etc. They called different companies to find out where their sugar came from, how it was produced, and the ingredients and different components of highly processed foods. This research generated telephone and sound recordings and highlighted the opacity masquerading as transparency typical of the whole field of food quality. The high school students themselves questioned their diets. They understood that addictive behavior

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may exist. The sugar addiction in adolescents and subsequent adult addiction to other products, such as alcohol or drugs, is a very important issue, at an international scale. These three years of research-creation fieldwork conducted with teachers and researchers set in motion non-results-based investigative processes that neither seek nor demand any formal qualities. Generating questioning and doubt about our food was the result of coconstruction work carried out with the high school students. Between self-portraiture and a mental representation of the bundle of relationships that link us to the environment, the project reveals the physical continuity that links our bodies and our environments via food f lows, thus rewriting a certain history of portraiture and landscape art. For the French artist Anthony Duchêne, research-creation work and the Paysage à boire (Landscape to Drink) publishing project more are bound up with language and ways of doing things. Humor and wordplay are central to his work. As he says himself, he draws on science and elements of scientific knowledge, but the ultimate purpose of his work is humor. He got together with winegrowers who had decided to take organic and biodynamic methods a little further and whose work focuses on the balance of nature in terms of mineral, plant, and animal. These farmers attach great importance to soil, and they replant trees, incorporate stones, and attract birds and insects so as to avoid using sprays and other plant protection products. Duchêne represents these processes in the form of sculpture, drawings, and text. His first play, Les Dessous de la terre (The Underbelly of the Earth), depicts this blending of humor and ecology especially well. The artist buries a pair of pure cotton underpants, knowing that fauna in the soil—springtails, mites, earthworms, ants, and fungi—devour plant-based material. An identical pair of underwear is buried in land belonging to the neighboring farmer, who uses conventional methods of farming that involve chemicals. After three months, the underwear in the organic field was entirely devoured while the pair in the other field was still intact. The contrast highlights the impact of human activity. One of the first farms to try this experiment, the Déplaude de Tartaras, is located in the Giers Valley of France. The use of these experiments as well as a research-creation network that brings together different stakeholders involves promoting forms of research and creation that blend the renewal of collective and public action and the coproduction of living spaces and environments with the communities concerned. A new conception of art is needed. A craft-based approach to both material and symbolic territory and community, but also of science, is an inclusive methodology. Scientific investigations have all too often been harnessed to industry and public policy and insufficiently in tune with the critical and investigative mindset of the inhabitants of a territory. Our conception of the renewal of art and science is based on participatory experiments, which allow the communities concerned to play the role of enlightened public and co-producer of the action being staged.

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Pirate Ecology Labs In an extension of these research-creation experiments, four researchers initiated research and ref lections that departed from an academic social sciences and humanities perspective as well as current research critical of liberalism.5 They wished to be more in tune with proactive civil society stakeholders with renewed interest in preserving the environment and a concern for the future. New forms of research can only be created on the margins of institutions. For sure, there is much borrowing from the social and human sciences but based on adapted processes and aims. The goal then becomes one of reinventing the means of research, which are now focused on political ecology—in other words, on civil disobedience of research institutions or financial backers of green capitalistic-type studies. The term “pirate ecology laboratory” signifies a hybridization of political ecology that denounces the unequal exploitation of the planet’s resources and the generalized degradation in lifestyles and hacking, i.e., a way of pirating institutionalized initiatives invested with importance. This narrative invites us to identify destructive processes and the collectives that cause them as well as generalized predation arrangements with a view to presenting research processes that could provide an antidote. The key issue in the research quickly appeared as a way to grapple with the challenges posed by the reproduction of socio-ecosystems. At the Mhotte Farm in the Allier department, at the invitation of the artist-members of the Bureau d’Études collective who were responsible for publishing the Atlas of Agendas,6 a group of researchers and artists concluded that only direct confrontation with an action-based situation would make it possible to listen to the territory in a collective manner. However, their overall aim was to take other paths of action, research, and creation and testing untried solutions in response to questions raised by territorial stakeholders. These researchers and artists, eventually joined by farmers, were also motivated by the need to remain relevant in the face of the pending ecological and political disaster—in other words, to trace existential trajectories allowing them face up to the predicted catastrophe. A second, clearly stated intention was their collective desire to analyze research challenges in greater depth than permitted by the agenda of project prescriptive demands or project-funded research. In brief, they wanted to take the time to experiment with new ways of performing research in a territory that would meet the needs or address the problems of local stakeholders. In the absence of specific public or private research funding, the researchers had to self-finance their participation in the collective process and demonstrate a moral and political commitment that went beyond statements of intent. This commitment to others, to the territory where the research was being conducted, and to the people who live there, made it necessary to get beyond the idea of straightforward passive research objects that could be bent in line with personal or epistemic interests.

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The approach then crystallized around a series of surveys conducted in parallel in the same territory, the Mhotte eco-space. The Mhotte Farm is not a place that is based on ownership, where a group of people organize their time together to create a social project at the juncture of cultural, agricultural, and educational spheres. In this sense, it is part of the inclusive economy sector. What does research-creation add to the mix—that is, research involving a community of humans and nonhumans and the analysis of their practices, along with a sensitive approach involving artists—compared to “participative research” aiming at innovation and socio-ecological transformation? Socio-ecological transformation strategies exhort an inflection of possibilities by calling for artist-scientistpopulation collaboration. They showcase the reflexivity of communities. The art of inquiry at the heart of the process led to a series of experiments and collective reflections. For example, it concerns writing about animals present, observed, or gathered together on farms. Farmers spoke lovingly of their geese; some observed cows, while others described insects. During a writing workshop, participants attempted to observe, describe, and then adopt the point of view of an animal. The aim was to compose a text that would recount an experience with the animal or reconstruct this animal’s relationship with the world.

Box 5.1 Alexandre’s Writing about the Geese on His Farm Starting Point. Migratory Spirit. Proud bearing, with a rich wandering spirit. You shout and call me. And then, in two strokes, the idea f lies away. Already gone. The feather f lies away, while mine goes crazy. In my mind, nothing shines any more. I am bound, bound to them, bound to you, and you have seduced me. Without waiting for anything, I leave. I cannot follow you on this journey you are taking me on. So my imagination takes over. Here or there, weary of this time, where I wait for you. And then you smile at me. Or I think you do. Because that’s all I remember about you. And then suddenly, nothing more. She’s gone. Will she come back tomorrow? Already life is reborn, and you’re smiling at me once again. This bond slips in between us, the one that unites us. Eternal and perpetual, I emphasize how beautiful you are. And already, nothing makes sense anymore. Starting point. You shout and call me.

Research was also conducted with biodynamic farmers or field actors to understand the challenges facing the place with a view to constituting global commons, a term usually used to describe supranational global common-pool resources such as the oceans, the atmosphere, the outer space. Tackling global commons in this territory also means appreciating knowledge in a specific perspective. The actors of the territory retrieved the experience on their bodies

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and in their language. For example, one farmer developed knowledge about herd immunity and joined the collective, where he was able to discuss his positions. An art schoolteacher put together a recording based on the work of Murray Schaeffer, the pioneering composer of The Tuning of the World and The Soundscape. A member of the pirate ecologies team adapted the idea of visual landscape descriptions, essentially to apply it to sound. He therefore chose an isolated sound event and a background landscape to describe a general ambiance. He highlighted the concepts of ecotone or fringe. Faced with a perforated, torn landscape, he wanted to make the effects of disruptions heard. According to the acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton, there are only around 50 regions on the planet where man’s activity cannot be heard. By listening to the world, little by little, it becomes possible to access other dimensions of the territory or even other levels of a reality that can only be seen superficially. For example, if one stands on the ground long enough to adapt one’s perception, a completely different rich and multilayered landscape appears. In the main room of the lodge, where all the ecology pirates are gathered, if it is quiet and you listen carefully, you can clearly hear the continuous nibbling of termites in the wooden beams.

Box 5.2 Léonora’s Writing about the Cows That She Herds An astonishing square-like structure, placed there, and then there, concentrated on methodically tearing out these rows of earthly substances, gathering the material necessary for their task. A landscape animated by a slow variation, like mechanical breathing, organized by some necessity, variable and yet shared. Punctuating space with nonchalant oscillations, with these arses adorned with a broom, a powerful f ly swat, backed up by the wiggling of ears. These days, their skin appears f lattened as if bruised by the sun, reinforcing the prominence of their bone structure, especially in the mothers. The cattle still bear the trace of their early months, even though they have left their baby-like appearance behind. I arrive just as they are beginning their afternoon nap. The Highland cows are gathered in the shade of three oak trees. One in full gestation stands at the foot of the oldest tree, framed by the trunk and fallen dead branches. There she stands, motionless, only her long bushy tail swishing and swaying to ward off the irritating insects. Even the ears are at rest now, only the jaw moves from right to left chomping over its lunch, eyes veiled by thick fringes, lightly highlighted by the magnificent slender horns. These majestic horns, redolent of those small rustic long-haired cows, form a cup on top whose curves appear to ref lect the outline of the receptacle. A still hairy heifer makes her way toward me, resuming her eating. Here and there, a few members who have noticed my presence lean forward on their knees to get up and resume collecting grass, gradually scattering the group engaged in active repose.

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Creative Force of Knowledge Through these different experiences, research-creation work consists of staging the effects of actual research into the relationship with the environment.7 These conclusions borrow from the article Nathalie Blanc co-authored with Marine Legrand in 2019,8 as well as the various works developed by the pirate ecology labs.9 Research here is primarily an experiment that turns the field into a laboratory of real situated experiences not reserved exclusively for the researcher. The researcher therefore invites all residents, artists, designers, and planners to work together while seeking to limit the effects of power, in line with collaborative research principles. This reveals a creative force of knowledge underpinned by the overlapping activities associated with the environment as a primary engagement in space and the media, resulting in literary, graphic, or sound output. The situationist project therefore values localized associative shifts.10 The approaches proposed in the various experiments can partly be described as nonrepresentational. Based on common sense, the texts, film interviews, websites, and other graphic art, sound, visual, and film output produced during the experiments open up a diverse range of interpretations, insofar as these productions challenge any idea of the unifying power of representations by comparing and contrasting them with critical writing exercises. The latter, which are intended to be open to the public through workshops or discussion groups, make it possible to publicly question the variety of translations.11 In doing so, this research tends to blend the documentation of cognitive, aesthetic, and sensitive dimensions out in the field, a complexity that academic research generally tends to partially hide. This is what gives such research its critical and political scope, which is why we have chosen to group these examples together under the term “research-creation.” In the series of experiments described above, research-creation is presented as a practice that showcases field research and documentations of reality. The initial hypothesis is that a research-creation approach is not intended merely to describe, analyze, understand, or deconstruct. It helps the event emerge and makes something possible that was not there before, testing the bounds of reality by distorting the lines of force present. It is about enriching the probabilities and possibilities of existence, extending relational universes, and developing an off beat form of prospective research. Abduction, this third basis of reasoning that nestles between induction and deduction—linked to what may be plausible as opposed to what is possible— may provide the most accurate depiction of such an approach. Indeed, abduction as defined by Charles Sanders Pierce ref lects an imaginative reasoning that appeals to our knowledge in an aesthetic manner, insofar as the beauty of the reasoning matters when its validity is experienced.12 Amazement occupies a central place. Born of the disparity between a horizon of expectations and the emergence of a surprising event, based on an attempt to normalize the surprising event, a change in perspective comes into play to generate a new horizon.13

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Testing the limits of reality also aims to develop emancipatory possibilities. The social sciences have long been moving closer to art in their desire to help drive societal shifts. They have regularly embraced this transformative approach in their alliance with actors on the ground, whether they subscribe to Marxist theories or have a more pragmatic perspective. In this respect, the social sciences have repeatedly developed anticipatory capacities from a political perspective. These alliances, aimed explicitly at political intervention, have provided a platform for research-action, defined as a social science research process with a significant focus on actor experience in the analysis of concrete practices (praxeology), the involvement of actors in the process of objectification and formalization (participative action research) and the production of useful knowledge through action (applied research).14 The meetings between different actors are also of epistemological value. Cooperation between what we may term “local researchers”—inhabitants, city dwellers, members of collectives, women, farmers, therapists, pedagogues, etc.—as well as other researchers and artists leads to the emergence of a common research space. The effects of the encounter are asymmetrical: from a local perspective, the simple written or filmed transcription by a researcher or an artist of a statement or practice allows the announcer or practitioner to perceive her practice or herself, to become aware of what she is doing or saying, how she is doing things, and what she is trying to do. Invisible knowledge of the nonhuman world acquires legitimacy, and knowledge is no longer the tacit monopoly of places of knowledge. All of the actors in a territory need to get out on their own and harness the potential of micro-political issues in the territory. These still need to be recognized, brought to collective attention, and transformed into political challenges. The local environment must become public in the sense of serving as a debating forum and a real space that is of interest to the set of inhabitants that comprise the public. The research-creation approach is an invitation to extend actionresearch into new ways of generating situations involving matrix-based environmental experiences. The encounter is not just between researchers. It takes place in the density of a world and the plurality of entities that populate it, highlighting cosmopolitan forms of existence. So how do we implement a multispecies micro-policy? The field of exploration involves bringing emotion and sensitivity into play through practice and meetings with other beings. Aside from a documentary relationship with reality or a “utensil”-type function, such a research-creation involves an attempt to shape the social fabric: a way of shaping reality. Here, the critical dimension of scientific and artistic work underpins a contingent reality, an ever-changing situation, a

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succession of specific deployments. It is independent of any wish to achieve a comprehensive understanding insofar as it reifies its object (i.e., devitalizes or renders it heteronomous). Political ecology is less a message or a watchword than a practice and a social project that needs to be constructed. The project is to investigate new ways of producing research in the field. Affirming the possibility of a research-creation approach highlights the deliberate choice to focus on form and to consider the scientific process from an aesthetic perspective. Knowledge cannot be reduced to just the message, and we opt to go beyond the opposition of content and form, the rational and the sensitive, objective and subjective, insofar as form connects with the senses and sensitivity (or is of the same symbolic order), whereas content connects with the receiver’s rational faculty. This idea, which is the culmination of experimental research, differs from a closed philosophical system and a positivist understanding of knowledge that seeks to fit asymptotically with its object. Therefore, all knowledge may be conceived as a fragment of light in a fabric full of holes of uncertainty, incorporating an incompressible portion of strangeness. In this sense, the research field is essential to this epistemological orientation, insofar as research is situated temporally and spatially and constrained within the limits of all physical existence. Fieldwork takes place in a series of present moments. Aside from this well-shared observation, the specific aim of researchcreation work is to intensify and complexify the performative notion of reality as expressed by research. This research does not develop a method to discover preexisting reality but instead seeks to highlight a co-reality that develops as an event in the eyes of the participants. It is no longer a matter of relying on a preexisting world whose features possess values in principle that can be easily recorded and interpreted or selected. As Karen Barad argues extremely convincingly in Meeting the Universe Halfway,15 questions, choices, gestures, and scientific equipment co-produce this reality. Beyond the so-called nature/culture, substance/ form divide, the idea is spreading that culture shapes nature through its observations, through its surveys or notations, and through its drawings and paintings. In conclusion, for pragmatists like Pierce, Wilfrid Sellars, and Robert Brandon, reasoning is not merely the discursive activity of a subject concerning the world but also a transformative engagement of this subject with the world. We are currently witnessing the convergence of work emerging from the social sciences and contemporary art in many different ways of telling stories and using language, which is giving rise to new forms.16 This understanding of research-creation develops a critical production of the dominant forms of knowledge and art, far removed from the normative standards of writing and representation that play out in the power relationships that underpin forms of knowledge. It occurs, for example, in the adoption of a way of writing recipes that retains their relational dimension or in the assertion that the poetic translation of scientific texts produces not merely a new form but a specific form of knowledge.

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Notes 1 Michel de Certeau, L’Invention du quotidien, vol. 1, Arts de faire (Paris: Gallimard, 1990); Michel de Certeau, Luce Giard, and Pierre Mayol, L’invention du quotidien, vol. 2, Habiter et cuisiner (Paris: Gallimard, 1990). 2 This research was conducted by Nathalie Blanc in collaboration with geographer Pauline Guinard, professor at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Lou Gauthier helped compile some of the recipes. 3 These and other remarks by K. were made in discussion with Lou Gauthier, September 9, 2018. 4 These and other remarks by N. were made in discussion with Lou Gauthier, September 9, 2018. 5 The researchers were geographers and philosophers Nathalie Blanc, Denis Chartier, Cyria Emelianoff, and Patrick Degeorges all engaged in political ecology approaches especially in urban areas. 6 Bureau d’Études, An Atlas of Agendas: Mapping The Power Mapping the Commons (New York: Onomatopée, 2019) is a political, social, and economic atlas that informs the public about socio-political power structures and activates opportunities for both the individual reader and the global commons. The French research and design office Bureau d’Études has produced maps of contemporary political, social, and economic systems that enable people to learn, reposition, and empower themselves. Revealing what usually remains invisible—often in the form of large banners—and recontextualizing apparently distinct elements within new frameworks, these depictions of interests and relationships rearrange the dominant symbolic order and update existing structures that would otherwise remain hidden and unknown. 7 Returning to John Dewey, we consider research–creation a practice that aims to transform an indeterminate situation into a problematic one, leading to the formulation and testing of hypotheses, with a view to mitigating the problem in question and restoring a balance between humans and the environment. Usage takes precedence over meaning and thought remains a practice rather than an actual representation of reality. 8 Nathalie Blanc and Marine Legrand, “Vers une recherche-création: explorer la portée transformatrice des récits dans les relations au milieu de vie,” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 18, no. 1 (2019): 49–76. 9 “Laboratoire d’écologie pirate, prémices,” Laboratoire d’ecologie pirate (website), https://ecologiepirate.org/le-collectif/. This research–creation started in 2016 and ongoing until 2019. 10 David Pinder, “Situationism/Situationist Geography,” in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, vol. 10, eds. Rob Kitchin and Nigel Thrift (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2009): 144–50. 11 Sarah Mekdjian, “Translation: Ref lective and Disruptive Practice for Critical Geography,” Ecritures 9 (2017): 203–19. 12 Critics point to inconsistencies in Pierce’s definitions of the term and the philosopher’s conceptions versus those developed more recently. See Igor Douven, “Pierce on Abduction,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Stanford, CA: Metaphysics Research Lab, Philosophy Dept., Stanford University, 2021), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/peirce.html. 13 Sylvie Catellin, “L’Abduction, une pratique de la découverte scientifique et littéraire,” Hermès 39 (2004): 179–85. 14 Alain Penven, Ingéniérie sociale, expertise collective et transformation sociale (Paris: Éditions Eres, 2014), 15. 15 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Presse, 2007).

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16 Sandra Delacourt, Katia Schneller, and Vanessa Theodoropoulou, eds., Le chercheur et ses doubles (Paris: Éditions B42, 2016).

Bibliography Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Blanc, Nathalie, and Marine Legrand. “Vers une recherche-création: explorer la portée transformatrice des récits dans les relations au milieu de vie,” ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies 18, no. 1 (2019): 49–76. Bureau d’Études. An Atlas of Agendas: Mapping the Power Mapping the Commons. New York: Onomatopée, 2019. Catellin, Sylvie. “L’Abduction, une pratique de la découverte scientifique et littéraire,” Hermès 39 (2004): 179–85. Certeau, Michel de. L’Invention du quotidien, vol. 1, Arts de faire. Paris: Gallimard, 1990 Certeau, Michel de, Giard, Luce, and Pierre Mayol. L’invention du quotidien, vol. 2, Habiter et cuisiner. Paris: Gallimard, 1990. Delacourt, Sandra, Katia Schneller, and Vanessa Theodoropoulou, eds. Le chercheur et ses doubles. Paris: Éditions B42, 2016. Douven, Igor. “Pierce on Abduction,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta. Stanford, CA: Metaphysics Research Lab, Philosophy Dept., Stanford University, 2021, https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/peirce.html. Mekdjian, Sarah. “Translation: Ref lective and Disruptive Practice for Critical Geography,” Ecritures 9 (2017): 203–19. Penven, Alain. Ingéniérie sociale, expertise collective et transformation sociale. Paris: Éditions Eres, 2014. Pinder, David. “Situationism/Situationist Geography,” in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, vol. 10, eds. Rob Kitchin and Nigel Thrift. Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2009: 144–50.

6

ArtMill, Rural Residencies, and Environmental Education

The ArtMill Center for Sustainable Creativity was founded by American-Czech artist (and this book’s co-author) Barbara Benish in rural Bohemia, in the Czech Republic, in 2004. Originally a f lour mill, the abandoned building and assorted outbuildings situated on the beautiful site next to a lake were slowly renovated by the family as children were raised and gardens were revived. The site had probably been inhabited by Celtic peoples who settled the region for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. The eco-art center grew organically over the years from a children’s summer camp into a facility offering artist-in-residence programs into the gallery and international exhibition platform that it is today. Since the mill is located in a farming region in southwestern Central Europe, the emphasis on sustainability and regenerative land-use practices is a natural part of ArtMill’s mission. “Making something from nothing” is a theme that encourages students and artists to create works that are nontraditional, process oriented, and responsive to the surrounding landscape and environment. As is stated on the organization’s website, “ArtMill fosters creativity in the individual and, to that end, sustainability of the planet. We don’t just make art, we make change.” Stemming from ArtMill’s roots in the social and political changes in Central Europe in 1989, the center is committed to building civil society through the arts and culture, including practices and cultures around organic food production. The umbrella nongovernmental organization (NGO) that supports the ArtMill space, ArtDialog, takes its name from the first exchange exhibition between Czechoslovak and American artists since before World War II, which Benish co-organized in 1989 before the Berlin Wall came down.1 Rural eco-art centers, such as INLAND in Spain and ArtMill in the Czech Republic, offer site-specific places for research, tranquil creative exploration, and access to farms and gardens. The region surrounding ArtMill, known as Pošumava, lies at the edge of the immense Šumava forest. Because of its topography, the region has historically been somewhat isolated (or protected) from neighboring Germany to the west and Austria to the south. The Czech Republic is unique in that nearly 15% of the land, twice the European Union (EU) average, is organically farmed.2 The Slavic tradition of dachas, or rural weekend houses, where families grow food in small gardens, is perhaps a contributing factor to this astounding statistic.

DOI: 10.4324/9780367433710-7

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Figure 6.1a ArtMill, summer, 2020. Photograph by Natália Kalná.

Although Central Europe, particularly Prague, lies at the crossroads of east and west, thanks in part to the mighty Vltava River, the western region is bordered by mountains and forests. The winters are extreme and in former times closed off the mountain passes for months at a time. Farming the land, which is full of rocks, was and remains a backbreaking job. Life was a constant struggle for survival. Yet the hills were rich with silver and the rivers sparkled with gold and pearls, which were eventually mined and collected to support the king and decorate his crown. This monarchy became part of the Hapsburg Empire, which ruled Bohemia from the early 1500s until World War I. Thanks to the area’s rich natural resources, the nearest town of Horažd’ovice (11 kilometers from ArtMill) was once a wealthy fiefdom and supplied most of the jewels and riches to the king in Prague, even before Austro-Hungarian rule. However, after the brief f lowering of the First Republic (1918–38), the area’s fortunes changed when the Nazis took control of Czechoslovakia and turned it into a protectorate in Hitler’s push east. After Germany’s defeat, Czechoslovakia had another brief democratic period before falling to communism under Soviet inf luence. The borders were closed for 50 years during the Cold War, and civil society activists were forced to go underground or face imprisonment. Although opened again during the Velvet Revolution in 1989 (and redivided into the Czech and Slovak Republics in 1993), the country’s borders still remain present in some people’s minds.

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It is this particular history that informs the efforts of rural NGOs working to strengthen civil society via food system justice. During the dark years of state control, Czechoslovakia’s rural regions were able to maintain a small amount of autonomy as meat and food items were raised on farms outside of the urban seats of power. But industrialized agriculture was enforced by the communist regime during the Stalinist period in the 1950s, when the central government sent agents to villages to shoot the horses that pulled plows on family farms. This brutal action forced many farmers to acquiesce to buying tractors as the only alternative for plowing their fields. Many family farms were given up at this time to the centralized state bureau, the United Agricultural Cooperative, a conglomerate that was quickly privatized after 1989 but still operates with an elite management. Not coincidentally, the former prime minister of the Czech Republic, Andrej Babiš, is one of the largest landholders in the country and apparently continued to run his big agro-business while in office. (He is currently under investigation by the EU on charges of conf lict of interest, among other things.) And yet the Czech Republic maintains its strong tradition of preserving local farm foods such as sauerkraut, jams, honey, cheeses, and beets, which adds to the potential for food justice nationally. PhD candidate Zdenka Smutná researched the specific qualities of post-socialist societies’ construction of food platforms in rural spaces and found that an intrinsic element of the success of local organic food production is “social capital.”3 The term refers not only to the coordination of farmers but also of SOCIAL CAPITAL AS NECESSARY PREREQUISITE SOCIAL CAPITAL Horizontal coordination Coordination FARMERS

PROCESSORS

GOVERNMENT

RETAILERS

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• Generation of social innovation • Reinforcement of community

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Figure 6.1b “Food, Partnership, and Value Added: Introduction of Key Concepts to Construct Local Food Platforms in Post-Socialist Rural Space,” presentation at the How to Make a Just Food Future: Alternative Foodways for a Changing World Conference, Sheffield, UK, July 8–10, 2019. Source: Smutná, Zdenka.

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other stakeholders, such as local retailers, NGOs, citizens, and local governments. Smutná’s research showed that building community is as important as growing food. This is exactly what places like ArtMill are doing.

Material Culture, Aquaculture, and Industrialization Mills have a certain magic and mystery in European history. Rembrandt etched them into our artistic heritage, their slowly turning wind sleeves grinding f lour across the continent and time. Mill technology emerged in both China and Europe in the second century BC, but it was slower to develop in Europe, where peoples continued to rely on slave and donkey power before switching entirely to hydropower.4 The first recorded documentation of a water wheel came from the engineer Vitruvius, who wrote during the Augustan age (c. 43 BC–AD 18). In China, in the first century AD, the engineer Du Shi wrote of a sophisticated water wheel used to power a casting factory making iron agricultural instruments. There are still extant examples from Roman times of multiple-wheeled mills, including one in Tunisia and another in present-day Israel. Documentation still exists of water wheels near Arles in southern France in the fourth century AD. Harnessing water for energy is thus a basic milestone of human development, and at the Red Mill (Červený Mlyn), the site of ArtMill Center, the turbine still runs to generate energy. The turbine has become an important part of ArtMill’s educational curriculum on science, agriculture, and sustainability. The Red Mill was first sold to a private owner in 1758. The sales contract states that the new owner had to adhere to special instructions for milling the f lour as well as 1) remain a faithful Catholic, 2) buy beer only from the lorded lands of Nalžovský Brewery, and 3) keep the water level high enough in the adjoining lake, the large Red Pond [Červenák, from červený, red], so as not to harm the carp. ArtMill’s archives confirm that the mill was already in existence during the reign of Charles IV (1346–78), who was Holy Roman Emperor as well as King of Bohemia. At the time, Bohemia was a rich, f lourishing cultural and economic center, with an aquaculture dating back to the eleventh century, when ponds were created next to the monasteries dotting the countryside. The benevolent Charles IV, a progressive thinker and ruler, ordered the creation of more artificial ponds to connect the existing series of lakes across the region. This intricate system of waterways, connected by small streams and rivers, stretched across Bohemia and Moravia and still exists today. It sustained the easily accessible protein source of farmed carp, which could have been a catalyst in helping the populace rise out of feudalism. By the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, fishermen’s guilds established under Charles

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IV were creating the fish markets that gave rise to bucolic scenes in a new genre in painting, culminating in Jan Breughel the Elder’s Great Fish Market (1603). The lake where the mill sits still hosts carp and is now part of a larger regional fish farm enterprise. Carp is nearly a sacred food for the Czechs, probably because of its beneficial dietary qualities as well as its contribution to ending feudalism. It is a traditional holiday food, which accounts for its year-round production culminating in the annual fall fish harvest, when live fish are delivered to cities during the Christmas season. The plazas are filled with food and craft stalls as well as huge barrels full of live fish, which are purchased for the traditional feast. Rich in omega 3s, B vitamins, vitamin E, and fatty acids, carp accounts for nearly one quarter of global aquacultural production. It has a relatively low intake of mercury compared to other fish. In 2005, the Czech Republic was the largest importer of carp to the European market (with 40–50 percent going to Germany and the other half consumed at home).5 In 2019, the Czech Republic was the second only to China as the largest exporter of carp in the world.6 But images of fish have appeared in art for over 14,000 years, attesting to its importance as a food source. From cave paintings in France to ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs and tomb paintings, the fish has been a powerful symbol in religious and cultural communications throughout human history.7 Did this iconography store knowledge, have religious significance, contribute to ritual practices, transfer communication visually to other members of the tribe and beyond? We can only conjecture. But the material culture of produced objects including visual documentation of fish indicates the importance of fish to human life, a symbiotic relationship that has existed for eons. As Moyle and Moyle write: The figure [of the fish] fascinates me more than its meaning, the figure being an “echo” of the sound it represents. The Western mind does not easily relate to this concept but to me it is beautiful, like a fish.8 Each fall, ponds across the country are drained as local fish guildsmen arrive in the misty morning hours before dawn, with their boats and rubber boots, to cast their nets much as in Brueghel’s time. Students and visiting artists participate in this tradition at ArtMill, which thus connects them to the ancient ritual of fish harvesting. During the rest of the year, the management of the mill battle the fishermen on issues of pollution, chemical runoff, and accountability, thereby helping to maintain a watchful eye on the local environment. Over the years, ArtDialog has vocally protested local nonsustainable activities, such as the spraying of pesticides on crops, duck-hunting sport businesses, and manure dumping in the lake to feed the carp. As a small, rural NGO focused on the environment, ArtMill does this work unseen in the community, but it is an integral part of Smutná’s concept of social capital that builds community and food security.

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Environmental Learning via Experiential Art ArtMill brings together people from various fields of art and science by providing a platform for collaborations and cross-fertilization that is often spontaneous or unplanned. With its rambling outbuildings and expansive grounds, the site allows for fertile encounters with creative makers, who can then produce new works and foster ideas for the future. For example, Michael Stanley-Jones, Programme Management Officer with UNEP, for the Basel, Stockholm, and Rotterdam conventions on the environment in Geneva, delivered a talk on plastic pollution to a group of international Erasmus students from Norway, Turkey, Switzerland, Spain, the Czech and Slovak Republics, and the United States then studying at ArtMill. Stanley-Jones described the science of persistent organic pollutants, or POPs, and their bioaccumulation up the food chain, particularly in the fatty tissues of fish. These polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and other harmful chemicals in plastics are migrating into our food systems, and as of 2021, micro-plastics are even found in babies’ stool. Complementing this lecture was visiting Czech artist Martin Zet, who brought students to an ArtMill workshop in the framework of the EU’s Erasmus program in 2011. Zet escorted the students to the side of the lake and asked them to fill up blue plastic bags with water. The participants obliged by rolling up their pants and wading into the lake, which was slowly shrinking in anticipation of the carp harvest the following weekend. Zet then asked each student to punch a little hole in the bag and walk slowly around the lake’s shores to aerate the water and “warn the fish of their impending death.” It was a somber request. With no other humans in sight, and only the forested shores 1,000 meters away as witness, the silence of the space, disturbed only the sound of trickling water from two dozen temporary water fountains, created a sense of calm and sacrifice. It was a contemporary ritual, a moment in which each person connected to the beasts beneath them swimming in the dark, cold water, and at the same time a moment that confronted each one with the strong visual of one-use plastic. The swimming life forms would be food for 1,000 people next week. As the Japanese artist Shiro Ikegawa said, the figure of the fish is an echo of the sound it represents. Need, want, desire, and taste conf lated in what was at once a mourning ritual and an act of gratitude for the sacrifice about to be made. Zet created a contemporary food ritual that humbled the participants, created a sense of community, and echoed a tribal action harking back thousands of years, one that perhaps even occurred on the shores of that same lake. Each young artist created an “echo” of the fishes movements in the lake with sound, an offering of fumbling human inefficiencies, walking on two unstable and awkward legs in the mud, saying a primeval goodbye to the elegant swiftness of hundreds of carp about to be sacrificed for the feast of Christmas. The Red Mill was modernized in the 1920s, just as Czechoslovakia proclaimed itself an independent nation after 400 years of Hapsburg rule. The mill was renamed Valcový Mlýn (Cylinder Mill), indicating that the miller had

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exchanged the old-fashioned millstones and water wheel for a modern new turbine, a major technological achievement of the time. Electricity installed throughout the mill and adjoining houses was completely powered by hydroenergy from the turbine generator as well as a steam engine used during the months that the lake was too low (these laws from the Kingdom of Bohemia are still in effect today regarding water levels and private usage of water from Czech lakes). Cylinder Mill was the second modernized mill in the country at a time that the newly democratized state of Czechoslovakia was on its way to becoming the third strongest industrial power in Europe, though one of its smallest countries. But the name Cylinder Mill never stuck for whatever reason. Perhaps it is not at romantic as Red Mill, “moulin rouge,” but the turbine still exists. The Navrátil family lived at the Red Mill through the two world wars, keeping the mill running even during the Nazi occupation in the 1940s. The Red Mill, like many other mills in Czechoslovakia, contributed to the Czech resistance by secretly milling at night despite the Nazi curfew and law providing that only Germans could have bread. (Because of this activity, the miller, Pan Navrátil, was eventually caught and interred in a concentration camp. He survived only to be imprisoned a second time after the war, this time for fighting against his country’s new communist regime.) The mill was kept running during these hard times by his wife, the stoic Marie Navrátilová, a beautiful woman whom local farmers still speak of with respect. She was the inspiration for Benish’s series The Miller’s Wife (2004–07), which is now installed in the mill gallery. For public and students visitors touring the mill, the artwork is a way of talking about the history of the place, the memory of this woman, the rich material culture of the First Republic of Czechoslovakia and Europe between the wars, and the mill’s importance as a food hub. The repurposing of industrialized buildings into educational and cultural centers has blossomed around the world during the last decades. Witness the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island, where a former textile mill built in the early twentieth century was converted into an art school that today is one of the top in the United States. Or a derelict CocaCola factory in Belgium, which now houses public services and a cultural center for the urban hub of Oostkamp. Former breweries have been transformed into artists’ spaces from Los Angeles to Prague. In Portugal, a former textile factory is now the bookstore and art gallery Ler Devagar, which hosts poetry readings and other events. Ler Devagar showcases one of many avantgarde design ideas that are bringing these older building to life. The interesting thing is that the product that they are creating is now “culture.” They are often converted into green buildings or embrace eco-friendly ideas, which hold that instead of polluting the surrounding environment, buildings should create a system to help heal it, or at least keep their footprint to a minimum. As our society shifts from an economy based on industry to an economy based on information, many structures in the urban environment have become abandoned relics of a bygone era. The current practice of linear production,

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in which something is produced, used, and discarded, is no longer viable. Reducing consumption, recycling, reusing what has been produced, and being more responsive to the environment form the basis of a new way of thinking. Through adaptive reuse, many buildings of the industrial era can contribute to a more sustainable development pattern . . . through the juxtaposition in the built form of the past idea of industrial progress and the current idea of progress through the concept of sustainable design . . . .9 ArtMill is another example of the worldwide trend of bringing life and culture back to places that once made things, whether f lour for bread, fabric for textiles, or beer for drinking. The trend of making culture palpable and vital for a local audience extends to the growing international public (growing, at least, before the pandemic). This is another form of the social capital that Smutná describes. ArtMill’s mission also fits into the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in that not only culture, but also commerce, is brought to the region through its audiences and visiting artists.

Educational Systems and Structures: Grassroots to Policy Visiting artist Jill Giegerich came to ArtMill in 2010 on her way to a workshop on permaculture techniques in France. A successful visual artist with major gallery representation in the United States as well as a professor of art at the University of California, Riverside, Giegerich was searching for an alternative to the capitalist market system, to which she had become increasingly antagonistic, both morally and politically, to express her creativity. In an interview with her years later, she talked about how her time at ArtMill helped her to find a new path to a more holistic, life-enhancing practice. Permaculture is the art of seeing the subtle connections and patterns of the natural world and then designing systems accordingly. It’s just like art-making in that way. Permaculture principles and ethics lead naturally to a consideration of vast interconnectedness, and that can lead to seeing how racism, food deserts, food security and climate justice are interlocked.10 Moving away from an extractive culture is like getting off heroin. In the industrialized West, we are addicted to our fast foods, supermarket imports, television sitcoms, Amazon’s quick delivery of goods, and cars that have nothing to do with natural systems. And we are dependent on ecosystems as fuel for the growth of said systems. As Giegerich says, artists are systems thinkers. They have a set of tools, an array of problems, sometimes a deadline for solving them, and the result is something creative, possibly even a solution. Artists, when confronted with social and environmental challenges, can show the way to solutions scaled up to global proportions, leading not only to survival but also to a quality of life that is just and equal for all.

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Various intergovernmental and international organizations, such as the UN and the UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), have attempted to bring about such change globally. Although initially established as a peace-keeping force after World War I, the UN has gone on to become the world’s largest international governing body. It is a formidable organization, with representatives from nearly every country,11 voting on laws and enforcing regulations to try to balance out many imbalances created over time. The UN Environmental Program (UNEP) was established in 1972 to control emissions from ozone-depleting chemicals. The problem with these large organizations, despite their obviously unwieldy size and bureaucracy, is, as with many governments, corruption. Well-paid lobbyists from petrochemical corporations to pharmaceuticals have managed to pay off and spy their way into these once respected bodies. The SDGs, which have become the poster child for the UN’s global planning and outreach since a conference on the topic in Rio de Janeiro in 2012, are embraced by governmental bodies as a chance to stem climate change and attain equitable societies. But even since the word “sustainability” was coined in the early 1980s by Gro Harlem Brundtland, the former prime minister of Norway, the situation has changed, as has the planet. Climate change has turned quickly into a climate crisis, and the word “development,” nuanced according to Western ideas of growth, extraction, and the accumulation of wealth, has become outdated in many activist and artist communities around the world.12 When UNESCO urged countries to sign the Hangzhou Declaration (2013), which called for governmental and nongovernmental bodies worldwide to adopt art as an integral force for social change and thus policy changes,13 it recognized the work of artists and culture-makers as integral to the planet’s health and well-being. Environmental law has a long way to becoming a completely effective means of battling climate change, as is well documented on the media. And yet one can hope that the youth movements gaining momentum globally will push governments further away from fossil fuels and imminent eco-disaster. Thanks to the work of people like Swedish environmentalist Helena Norberg-Hodge, who lived and worked in a remote village in Tibet in the 1980s, indicators of sustainability have been questioned and redefined. Her work as founder of the NGO Local Futures promotes a shift toward decentralized government, the preservation of local seeds, permaculture farming practices, and a circular economy. She equates this sustainable lifestyle with not only good health but happiness. This intangible aspect of society, which includes living in nature without negatively impacting the environment, education, and service to others, has given credibility to social pillars that are not necessarily economically based. In Bhutan, the gross national product has been replaced by the gross national happiness index. The diverse powers in the UN and many critiques of the organization’s effectiveness from both the left and the right. NGOs like Local Futures reoffer a bottom-up strategy for change as compared to the hierarchal top-down systems. Norberg-Hodge,

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for example, is currently organizing an alternative to the UN Food Systems Summit, which the organization claims has been usurped by the agrochemical and genetically modified organism (GMO) industry, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, and other corporate-controlled biotechnology groups. The Global People’s Summit on Food Systems brings together a south-led group of landless farmers, Indigenous peoples, youth, rural women, fisherfolk, and other marginalized rural peoples who want to “envision and achieve just, equitable, healthy, and sustainable food systems.”14 Since the word “sustainable” came in vogue, the climate crisis has intensified to the point that in fact there is not much left to sustain. We are in extinction mode for most living species, including, possibly, humans. The language about climate included for a brief moment the word “resilient,” which has now been replaced with “regenerative.” We have acknowledged our mistakes and seem to be, at least in some circles, no longer trying to sustain a failed paradigm. And the very word “development” is tied to colonial notions of empire and expansion that require ever-increasing extractive positions. Resilience implies that a wall can be built around continents to battle rises in sea level, when in fact cities like Venezia or Miami are already f looding despite massive inf luxes of money and engineering. The term “regenerative” finally acknowledges, as Indigenous cultures always have, respect and care for and investment in preserving and increasing the earth’s resources not only for the next generation but also for the next seven generations.

Systems of Making/Gardens of Delight Permaculture gardens, locally based and regenerative, are commonplace in Indigenous communities but became a hybrid practice in the Western countries only in the twentieth century, led by Australian farmers and researchers Bill Mollison and David Holmgren. They incorporated symbiotic plantings of foods that, in their combined biodiversity, enhance pest resistance, water retention, soil mulch, and shade while increasing animal habitats. Mound-building is the basis of permaculture gardening techniques, and they in turn are based on Indigenous traditions. Plants are planted in families, or “guilds,” of symbiotic species that help one another fend off pests and weeds while creating shade and nourishing growth, as in any family. “The three sisters” of corn, beans, and squash are staples of Native American diets: The genius of the Three Sisters lies not only in the process by which they grow, but also in the complementarity of the three species on the kitchen table. They taste good together, and the Three Sisters also form a nutritional triad that can sustain a people. Corn, in all its guises, is a superb form of starch. All summer, the corn turns sunshine into carbohydrate, so that all winter, people can have food energy. But a human cannot

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subsist on corn alone; it is not nutritionally complete. Just as the bean compliments the corn in the garden, it collaborates in the diet as well. By virtue of their nitrogen-fixing capacity, beans are high in protein and fill in the nutritional gaps left by the corn. The squash provides the vitamins that neither corn nor beans have alone.15 In her twenty-first-century version of this acknowledgment of elemental inf luences on art, Giegerich found a balance in permaculture that was similar to art and reliant upon it: I practice pattern recognition. In many ways, this is no different than my practice had been as a studio artist. Artists have the ability to see connections that are often missed by most people and to draw those connections together in a way that allows for a new and completely surprising synthesis to manifest. In the studio, I did this with the materials of sculpture and painting. As a permaculture practitioner, I do this by close observation of the patterns of air, water, soil, wind, sun, heat, cold, micro-climates, history, weather patterns, and the f lora and fauna on any given site. The goal is ever transforming as the design evolves towards creating a resilient and regenerative ecosystem. In Joshua Tree, I did this on the five acres that I owned. It took three years and included a host of earthworks for catching and sinking storm water runoff into the land and the planting of nitrogen fixing native trees. Time could be considered a material in permaculture design. Permaculture people tend to think in large time frames. My land design was based on a 100-year plan. The systems were designed to jump start the ecology over time and be self-sustaining beyond my lifetime.16 Besides offering untraditional art courses, ArtMill focuses on food and gardens to bring art and education to the same table. Under the communist regime prior to 1989, the villagers were “invited” to go to the fields and harvest together, a tradition still enjoyed by a few of the families in the nearby village of Miřenice (albeit now by choice rather than state referendum). Long rows of potatoes, sowed and plowed by giant tractors across hectares of land, are a common scene in the rural region. And each year, more and more fertilizer is needed to grow the food. Mounds were never used in Europe after potatoes were introduced by Columbus, but research shows that the traditional Andean system of planting in mounds has ensured that over 5,000 varieties of potato survive in Peru through many generations. As Shakespeare wrote in Othello: Our bodies are gardens; to the which, our wills are gardeners: so that if we will plant nettles, or sow lettuce; set hyssop and weed up thyme; supply it with one gender of herbs or distract it with many; either to have it sterile with idleness, or manured with industry; why, the power and corrigible authority of this lies in our wills.17

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Part of the explanation for this fact is the avoidance of monoculture and the maintenance of crop diversity. Students are invited to learn about potatoes at ArtMill, dig them up, plant them, or help with the harvest. During the summer months, everyone helps pick food for lunch. It is a respite from other studies or classes and brings everyone together in a communal activity. They learn about growing food and local recipes, healing herbs and natural pest control. This is a tradition in many such eco-art centers established over the last 100 years where communities are being built. Czech artist Eva Kot’átková created a performance work at ArtMill in 2011 using visiting students as well as potatoes as her media. Encircling the potato patch with a white ribbon on sticks, she created a sort of enclosure that was both a marker and a metaphorical fence. Inviting the students to dig up the potatoes in this small enclosure created an immediate sense of forced community. Bumping into one another, bending over, becoming entangled and intertwined, the 20 or so people with shovels were immersed in dirt and laughter as they dug for the tubers in the autumn chill. In this work, Kot’átková created an immediate sense of physicality on the little plot of land, which was now overpopulated with human bodies in strong movement looking for food. All humor aside, it brought the ancient act of harvesting to an absurdly fast frenzy of contemporary contrasts, turning the humans into machines as they were unwittingly caged in the landscape. The performance was an unwitting critique of humans’ relationship to the earth and food: our greed and corrupt practices of mass production overruling the slow steadiness of natural cycles. ArtMill’s curriculum is inspired by other experiments, such as the Goetheanum at Dornbach, Germany, and the Black Mountain College in the United States, as well as the director’s own experience at art school in California. Benish studied at the Claremont Graduate School program, where, under the tutelage of Roland Reiss, she was inf luenced by Reiss’s experience at the Black Mountain College in North Carolina in the 1940s. Black Mountain was established in 1933 and existed only until 1956. Those 23 years were pivotal for experimentation in the arts, cross-fertilizations between Europe, the United States, and Central and South America, and educational reform as artists f led an increasingly fascist Europe. Josef Albers, a professor at the Bauhaus in Berlin, and, perhaps more significantly, his wife Annie Albers were invited to teach at the f ledgling school. Hitler had become increasing hostile to the mission of the Bauhaus, which in 1919 was founded by Walter Gropius, who was no friend of the traditional European academy system, believing that it “had created a false division between craft and art, and fostered a false sense of superiority in the latter.”18 The Bauhaus combined high and low arts interchangeably and had a strong social agenda. Although only 1,200 students crossed the fields of Black Mountain during its lifetime, like the Bauhaus, it planted seeds that f lourished and had a phenomenal inf luence on twentieth-century Western art and art education. ArtMill fosters both craft and art on equal terms and views the two terms as interchangeable. Echoing

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the philosophy of Fernando García-Dory at INLAND, this melding of craft and high art is also an integral mission of the rural movement in many other countries, which recognizes the interdependency of habit and craft as well as action, art, and social practice. Mentorship (a Renaissance guild tradition) and tutelage are other traditions that ArtMill carries on to this day. Weaving and wrapping, labor-intensive hand movements, knitting, sewing, and wrapping are among activities that students and artists engage in while at ArtMill. The slow pace of the place encourages this. After a lecture on plastic pollution, one student gathered all the recycled plastic on site and began to knit a cape of sheet plastic. Another student, on learning of a blight caused by climate change affecting chestnut trees throughout the country, spent her week in a workshop winding brown thread on found chestnuts. She created dozens of finely wrapped nuts and then hung them from a dying chestnut tree. They blew in the breeze like totems or dangling offerings, emphasizing the artificial, human-induced end of the life cycle of these majestic trees. Native American artist Denise Davis (Mountain Maidu) has participated in basket-weaving circles at ArtMill, helping us plant willows, teaching us to trim them, and preparing the branches for weaving. Students have gathered herbs, learned their medicinal properties, and made champagne from elderberries; they have hunted for mushrooms and photographed their grandeur; and they have learned to make cheese, separating the cream from the whey and creating labels for their products using In-Design. As a female-led organization (Benish is a mother who works with her two adult daughters), ArtMill focuses on what historically has been relegated to the “domestic” sphere of craft and hands-on art. Like Annie Albers at the Bauhaus and then later at Black Mountain College, where she fought for weaving to be on par with traditional high arts such as architecture and painting, ArtMill’s curriculum and workshops are grounded in making. Offered minimal art materials, such as paint, paper, or canvas, artists and students are encouraged instead to conceptualize and interact with the surrounding environment. This is a rural space, full of nonhuman life that requires an opening of the heart to experience in ways that are subtle, slow, and interactive. Less populated nonurban places present an opportunity for a deeper connection to nature and can offer visitors and temporary inhabitants a space to create that is more about co-creation than solitary production. The simplicity and ruggedness of the site brings humans back to a very basic experience of existence. Where is the water f lowing from? How can one care for the food garden? What is the individual and communal responsibility to regenerate the land and steward the nearby forests? Natural life cycles are up close and real at the mill, and each visitor cannot avoid the daily chores of subsistence. Chickens feed off the compost pile and wander in the courtyard. Their eggs are welcome for breakfast. The gloriously colored feathers of the red hens blend in perfect harmony with the fallen leaves in fall. There is a visual and aesthetic connection to food sources that over half of the world’s population no longer experiences. The daily activities of a small farm—harvesting,

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Figure 6.2 A pitchfork ready for use by the ArtFarm Research Collective at ArtMill. Photograph by Gabriela BK.

weeding, watering, cleaning, herding, digging—surround the studios of ArtMill and bring a sense of both urgency and ritual to all activities. In this way, each visitor is embraced in the cyclical routines of food production. And, as Donna Haraway says, “to be one is always to become with many.”19 During the pandemic year of 2020, the traditional row gardens on the property were torn up and replaced with several permaculture gardens. Twelve young people, mainly art students living at ArtMill under quarantine, represented a cross-cultural mix from six countries (Costa Rica, Czech Republic, Germany, Iran, Ukraine, and the United States), and they each brought their own cultural knowledge to the table. Thus, one garden is named “Norush” after the Persian holiday marking the new year; another is a spiral garden featuring the “three sisters” of beans, corn, and squash,

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ref lecting the Indigenous heritage of some of the gardeners; and another area became a food forest where biodiversity was integrated. These activities became the ArtMill Farm Research Collective, in the framework of The Table and the Territory project described earlier. The gardens are open for visiting during public hours at ArtMill and have created havoc with some local farmers, who use mechanized agriculture systems that deplete the soil of all nutrients with overplowing. The gardens are completely organic, and a seed bank of heirloom seeds has been established, which was used for exchange during the Seeds to the 7th Power Festival at ArtMill in summer 2021. These and other public interactions are an important element of the mission of ArtMill and its umbrella organization, ArtDialog. As each visiting foreigner interacts with the small rural town, an increased understanding of otherness results. This exposure can mitigate, if not erase, racism and xenophobia while bringing pride back to the local communities. A sense of difference, in fact, is one of the key elements of fostering creativity in the individual and thus society. Cross-cultural exchanges, borders open to new immigrants, even outreach out to a new friend who is outside one’s social group expand our consciousness as humans. The physicist David Bohm sees this dynamic in the creative mind, in the sense that what is different challenges us to relinquish all preconditioned notions and experiences that have gone before. No really creative transformation can possibly be affected by human beings, either in nature or in society, unless they are in the creative state of mind that is generally sensitive to the differences that always exist between the observed fact and any preconceived ideas, however noble, beautiful, and magnificent they may seem to be.20 This is also a core principle at work at ArtMill, where youth and artists come together as strangers in a controlled situation for a limited time, working, eating, and living together: they experience others in a new way and discover pathways to creativity under the inf luence of trees, the lake, the fungi, and the f lora f lourishing on the mill grounds. Many old industrial and mining areas have lost their industrial function and are now turning to tourism as a regional reconversion tool. The process of transforming an industrial (and abandoned) landscape into an interesting space for tourists is a major challenge for both developers and tourism sellers. From a social and political point of view, the rebirth of a cultural identity is at stake in these regions. In the period following the closure of the mines, the first reaction is to shave the traces of the past, eliminate the landmarks and scars of the landscape and return, if possible, to the natural landscape of the pre-industrial era. Having gone through a traumatic process of declining employment and degradation of the quality of environment, the search for new activities that can be part

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of sustainable development in the region is a high political priority. The question of which forms of tourism and which model of development are appropriate and feasible in the context of a post-industrial community and environment implies a realistic assessment of the tourism potential of industrial heritage sites and objects and an integrated regional development plan.21 ArtMill’s architect from 1996 to 2016, Petr Kalný, is an avid follower of Joseph Beuys. He drew and planned the slow but thoughtful restoration of the mill one building at a time. While it would have been more cost-effective to tear down the ruins and build something new from the ground up, Benish and Kalný wanted to preserve the inherent spirit of the rural architecture that made the mill a landmark of history and local lives. The walls inside the main mill are still divided with room-sized patterns that mark former rooms for housing decades ago. One 10-meter wall in what is now the kavarna (café) is covered with painted and printed (cylinder-rolled) relief patterns, which decorated the former rooms in a colored frenzy. It is a Gordon Matte-Clarketype installation, which has been left as is. One of the unique designs is of hemp leaves, with which, of course, all the visiting students can identify, and which ref lects the local production of hemp in the early twentieth century for textile and light manufacturing purposes. The vitality of farm life has been romanticized since modern man began to leave the countryside for an urban existence. As the world grew more industrialized in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, artists began painting bucolic scenes of pastures and haystacks, majestic mountains, and winding rivers in the Great Outdoors. Our interconnected, symbiotic relationship with the nonhuman world is well known but only recently explored scientifically. Harriet Ritvo writes: “The question of the limits of the human, or the degree to which it overlaps with or interpenetrates other animal categories, has inspired centuries of philosophical debate.”22 Science is catching up to the artistic vision of nature as healer in providing not only food and medicinal herbs, calming psychological and even spiritual balms, but also unseen bacterial life, which could be the genesis of our immune systems and a stimulant to the brain in ways we had never imagined. As art exhibitions moved out of the white cube into mainstream social experiments in the last century, the lines have blurred between audience participation, process, intention, and performance. Works of art turn into acts of art, and rural art centers like ArtMill are able to intentionally confuse and inspire makers as new arenas for creativity and healing. Often for young students, ArtMill elicits an “aha” moment that can transform their vision of what art-making is about. One such moment recently involved a work by a student from the University of Liberec in the Czech Republic, which became a walking ref lection on the history of art. She spent her workshop hours at ArtMill building a very clever white cube, approximately 1.5 meters, square, which was lightweight enough to carry. As the

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student projects were presented on the final day, she and other students were tasked with carrying their rather burdensome white cube around the grounds of ArtMill during each presentation. Their route eventually included a long walk along the lake shore to view other artworks. The absurdity of the oversized object moving along the landscape was both humorous (in an understated Czech way) and compelling. The stark whiteness of the sculpture against the cold autumn earth colors of the environment offered beautiful contrasts. After the artist set her work down at the shore, she ceremoniously sent it f loating out on the lake. Unceremoniously, the cube began to sink in the mud. The group chuckled, and yet, in its failure to f loat, the cube made a perfectly fine comment on the history of art. Modernism’s geometric abstraction has served its purpose, and we are now confronted only with the environment. More studies have proven a link between our overly sanitized society and an increase in immune-related disorders and diseases in children. Soil-based organisms (SBOs) are the good bacteria that keep the gut strong enough to prevent infection. The discovery of the beneficial effects of a bacterium in humans that now has rock-star status, Mycobacterium vaccae, points fairly solidly to the benefit of gut bacteria not only in building our immune system but also significantly boosting our brains, possibly with the same effects as antidepressants. Dr. Lowry and his team found that Mycobacterium vaccae, when tested on mice, lit up the same neurons in the brain that produce serotonin. We are still learning about the connections between healthy SBOs in our intestines, the immune system, and mood, but there are exciting discoveries in both psychology and science that make a strong case that the rich common soil of the countryside has more beneficial ingredients for human health that we ever imagined. We know that children raised in rural environments tend to have, in general, more robust immune systems and apparently suffer less depression than children raised in sealed-off rooms and classrooms in the city. The Covid-19 pandemic has and will continue to give us more data on urban population density and the dangerous transmission of contagions in urban settings, which could change our relationships to each other and to cities forever. Furthermore, household chemicals (most prevalent in developed countries, particularly the United States) have contributed to over-sanitized domestic conditions of modern life that are in fact killing off the beneficial bacteria that our bodies need. This double burden of an over-sanitized and chemicalladen living environment suggests enormous unknown risks to human health (see Chapter 10). The Montreal Protocol’s Multilateral Fund, which promotes cleaner and more sustainable products, as well as providing information to consumers and households, has successfully disbursed billions of US dollars for industrial conversion to switch to sustainable production technologies and practices and other activities to protect the ozone layer.23

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In 1989, the Basel, Stockholm and Rotterdam conventions were established under the auspices of UNEP to establish a global watchdog for monitoring hazardous chemicals in our environment, our homes, and, ultimately, our bodies and create international laws to protect both the earth and her inhabitants from poisonous toxins. There has always had an abundance of animals at ArtMill, freely roaming or suitably housed. At one point, they totaled 32. Dr. Aubrey H. Fine in Pomona, California, has published some of the most recent effects of the results of animal contact with hyperactive children, finding “that they could be more easily taught how to behave calmly if allowed to handle his pet gerbil.” “I realized this approach can have a tremendous impact in teaching because it helps to change how we relate to other beings,” he has written.24 The site of the mill is large enough that students are always able to be near animals and interact with them. Dogs, cats, rabbits (raised for organic meat), a goat, and horses were brought in from the pastures and allowed to roam around the grounds. Their presence nearby added a feeling of well-being and connection. Philosopher-feminist Donna Haraway calls this “encounter value” with our nonhuman farm animals. The beasts are not paid, nor sold, nor used for financial gain in the capitalist tradition. They are loved. “This category is necessary once we accept the notion that ‘to be one is always to become with many’” and that the many are mostly not human. Haraway finds Marx crucial for conceptualizing the process of “becoming with,” in part because labor is a more helpful category for thinking about nonhuman animals than the Enlightenment emphasis on rights. Thinking about Marx also leads her to note that while human relationships with nonhuman significant others are complex, valuable, and defining, they are not (usually) between equals. “Because human relations to nonhuman animals are so often asymmetrical, with most of the power on the human side, they lead necessarily to consideration of ethical issues such as suffering, wickedness, and responsibility.”25 As a rural art center, ArtMill takes complete responsibility for the animals, caring for them daily as members of the family. Almost any farmer will echo this relationship to their animals, the proof in that farm routines inevitably start at dawn by feeding them first and humans second. The practices of small farmers contrast deeply with the large-scale agro-farming that has insidiously infiltrated and turned over our relationship to the land and our nonhuman compatriots who share it. The horrendous mass production of meat and egg in factories in the United States, China, EU, and Brazil, to name the biggest producers, was expected to include 86.6 million tons of broiler meat in 2014.26 This is expected to reach over 1.1 million tons by 2021. But there are alternatives forming, and animal activists are partnering with local organic farmers. Groups such as the Rare Breeds Survival Trust (RBST) and its sibling organizations around the world are incubating what socialists, communists, Zionists, Asian industrial tigers, nationalists in the Caucasus, transnational poultry

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scientists, and Iowa Democrats failed to imagine: ongoing chicken–human lives that are attentive to complex histories of animal-human entanglements, fully contemporary and committed to a future of multi-species natural cultural f lourishing in both wild and domestic domains. 23 RBST works against the premises and practices of factory farming on many levels, none of them reducible to keeping animals as museum specimens of a lost past or as wards in a permanent guardianship, in which utilitarian relations between animals and people, including eating meat, are always defined as abuse. RBST maintains a database of breeds of poultry threatened with disappearance through industrial standardization; plans in advance how to protect rare-breed f locks from extermination by culling in bird f lu and other epidemic disasters; supports husbandry conducive to wholeorganism well-being of both animals and people; analyzes breeds for their most economical and productive uses, including new ones; and demands effective action for animal well-being in transport, slaughter, and marketing . . . That is what “becoming with” as a worldly practice means.27 Small farmers practicing local consumption are trying to live Haraway’s “becoming with” day to day.

“Pro-Agro”: You Are What You Eat After the changes in 1989, foreign supermarket corporations began moving into the Czech Republic. At first, they were only in Prague, then spread to other cities: Brno, Plzeň, and Český Krumlov. It was an anomaly and interesting for a populace that had been shut off from the consumer world since 1949. The extra cost seemed well worth the price of semi-luxury goods such as imported avocados and oranges from Spain, pineapples from South America, and an exotic papaya from the Canary Islands. People were making salaries unknown before and spending them just as quickly. Banks started loaning, a system nonexistent under socialism. The supermarket, like the fast-food chains (McDonald’s, KFC, Burger King) that moved in immediately after the borders were opened to the West, became a place of prestige. Those foreign luxury foods were a sign of entering the globalized, mercantile capitalism that had been denied to the Czechs for so long. Soon, the supermarkets moved out to the countryside, so the even small towns like Sušice, 15 kilometers from ArtMill, with a population of about 11,000, had one. Then two. Then a Tesco was built. Then a Lidl. So that now there are no less than five major supermarkets in town, with talk of another being built. Needless to say, the little green grocers and mom-and-pop stores folded. They could not keep up with cheap imports from abroad. The corporatization of the global food economy, starting with the use of and subsequent dependence on chemicals in the United States, is unfortunately now the norm.

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A project in 2020 at ArtMill by artist Tomaš Hrůza and his social scientist wife Andrea Průchová-Hrůza, which was part of the Table and Territory Festival, attempted to address the commodification of food. Collecting a simple village recipe book, they went door to door to the 32 houses in their village and asked each household to donate a favorite recipe. They then compiled a little booklet, printed it, and delivered a copy to each family. It was a simple act to build community (they are a young family, newly moved from the city), introduce themselves, and engage in a dialogue about food. Many of the recipes were seasonal (for example, 35 percent involved zucchinis, which are always overabundant by the end of summer), and most included foods from the kitchen gardens. As an informal research project, it showed that local folks are still cooking from home gardens and pride in cooking still exists. As contemporary life in industrialized countries decreases the amount of shared, homecooked meals at a drastic rate, this was an encouraging project to witness. The popular 2009 breakthrough book on corporate food production, Food, Inc.: A Participant Guide: How Industrial Food Is Making Us Sicker, Fatter and Poorer, edited by Karl Weber, exposed how damaging the global food economy has become. Weber quotes Gary Hirshberg, who founded the organic food company Stonyfield Farm in 1983 and managed to keep his business sustainable to become the largest producer of yogurt in the world. An important speaker and thinker in the green business world, Hirshberg offers the larger picture of global food manufacturing: All of humanity ate organic food until the early part of the twentieth century yet we’ve been on a chemical binge diet for about eighty years— an eye-blink in planetary history—and what do we have to show for it? We’ve lost one-third of America’s original topsoil; buried toxic waste everywhere, and polluted and depleted water systems, worsened global warming, and exacerbated ailments ranging from cancer to diabetes to obesity.28 The short-term price benefit often wins out over long-term health considerations. Time, money, and convenience form a triad causing social amnesia that hides epidemic obesity, increased carbon release inf luencing climate disaster, chemical poisoning, and increasing death rates, especially in the United States. The American way is now heading to Africa and ports beyond, led by Monsanto, Dow, and a handful of powerful lobbyists and corporations now controlling our food. Thankfully, the EU and other nations are trying to keep controls on genetic engineering and pesticides. The UNEP’s Basel, Stockholm, and Rotterdam conventions have introduced a system that seeks to create international laws to regulate hazardous chemicals and wastes that would otherwise f low into our systems. But governmental and corporate lobbies are strong and rich. Our defense is information, people power, and living by example.

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At one point, ArtMill started raising rabbits, adding to the menagerie at the mill. Visiting vegetarian students humorously posted signs around the mill saying “SAVE THE RABBITS” with cute cartoons of bunnies. Rabbit meat has been stigmatized in some industrialized countries as “poor people food.” Boning them is more work than a chicken, which is perhaps why they have not been a popular meat until recently. Around ten years ago, rabbits were rediscovered by the foodies and got headlines from New York to London and Quebec as “the new gourmet white meat.” Shawna Wagman writes: Rabbits’ reproductive habits are legendary but their reputation as a lean and low-calorie meat that’s high in protein, iron and minerals puts other animals to shame. In addition to being one of the most sustainable and healthiest meats on the market, rabbits can exist on a grain-free diet in a time of raising grain prices. She quotes Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and in Defense of Food, who points out that it is “sentiment” that prevents people from embracing the backyard bunny as a meat choice. “Rabbit is a comparatively sustainable source of animal protein, as well as a tasty one,” he [Pollan] says. “They grow fast, eat any produce you want to discard and are quiet.”29 Besides the delicious, economic, and healthful benefits of eating rabbit, there is another interesting theory that one may ponder on the life-and-death rituals of farm life in general. Living close to the land, where life can be snuffed out in one swoop of the falcon’s claws over the hen run, and mice are regularly hunted by the feline population, there is a near daily connection to death. Also birth, depending on how large the farm is and its population. But the act of butchering, purposefully, is something one must dig really deep into the genetic body memory to enact. All morality and ethics and religion aside for a moment, we as humans developed over the course of millennia due to increased protein in our diets with the advent of hunting. Whether one decides it to be right or wrong in today’s modern era, there is apparently still the ability in us to kill, on some deep level. It is a dilemma that is a constant interior ethical dialogue and the choice to eat meat or not is specifically tied to manufactured, climate-inf luencing practices or those that are small, locally produced, and sustainable. If we think that raising and killing animals for food is in itself morally wrong, then we can become vegetarians. If, on the other hand, we believe that breeding and raising animals that would otherwise not even come into existence, then slaughtering them just as they reach adulthood so that we can cook and eat them is on balance an acceptable way to

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increase the leisure of human lives, then we have another moral duty. This is, to be aware of just how fragile the claim to exercise this “right” really is . . . .30 The justice issue seems to be about a global climate challenge, with mass production and fair distribution contributing to the debate. When the Amazon forests, the lungs of our planet, are decimated thanks to our addiction to Big Macs, something is extremely wrong. It gets back to issues of local and fair consumption practices. Each small farmer owning one or two cows does not contribute to the destructive CO2 emissions firing up the planet. But if McDonald’s is selling 75 hamburgers a second (as it is), then we can do the math and figure out how quickly the Amazon ecosystem is being clear-cut to make more grazing land for cattle. And those cows are farting intestinal gas into our oxygen supply. As Vandana Shiva says, cows in India do not fart—they have clean stomachs because they are not industrialized beasts.

Fermenting The process of making sauerkraut, a staple of Slavic diets, is, like most canning jobs, extremely labor intensive for a short number of days. But then the food is available for the next season or years, and one reaps the bounty 100fold. Like most cultured foods, sauerkraut holds a magical probiotic elixir that creates and fosters good enzymes in the gut. Czech artists Petr Vrba and Radim Labuda created Project Fermentation Revisited, an interdisciplinary performance that emphasized the symbiotic relationship between humans and our microscopic companions, the enzymes that enable the fermentation process. They capture the sound atmospheres of the processes, what they call “miniature music,” or sound recordings of the inside of fermentation vessels, to create musical compositions. Imitating the anthropological history of field recordings in jungles, deserts, and industrial environments, the artists created works from this other landscape, often ignored, but of primal importance to our digestive systems. In this way, they celebrate the interspecies coexistence of living things, each dependent upon the other. ArtMill produced an “exchange” intervention/collaboration with 12 international artists and 10 local women entitled Civic Women (2018–19). Co-curated by Lydia Matthews and Barbara Benish, the idea was to celebrate the diverse talents of the rural-based women of the Pošumava region around the mill by teaming them up with artists. One of the local women chosen was Pani Vlčová, a farmer and housewife. Her knowledge of all things agricultural and domestic was celebrated in a festival of tea and roses by artist Bahar Behbahani (Iran/US) and in a tree planting by Susan Cockrell with Elaine Buckholtz (US). Behbahani’s piece, which included inviting a Syrian refugee woman to the Czech Republic to describe her own experience in the diaspora and the culture of rose petal tea she carried with her, took place around

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ArtMill’s barn in the summer of 2019. Invited guests and participating artists in the project shared homemade sweet breads baked from traditional recipes shared by local women, while the encounter was documented by Indian artist Meeta Mastani.

Figure 6.3 Bahar Bahemani’s “Damascus Rose” installation with traditional Bohemian koláče at ArtMill. Traditional Indian textile block prints inspired by koláče patterns made by Meeta Nastani and Sarah K. Khan. Photo courtesy of the artists.

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Mastani brought her culture’s tradition of batik and hand-stamped patterns to the table, literally, in her project with Sarah K. Khan (US/Pakistan) for the Civic Women installation. They created hand-carved wood blocks that replicated the patterns of the kolače (sweet breads) brought from the various regions around the country.31 Printing the beautiful designs onto recycled natural cotton fabrics using plant-sourced natural inks, the two women then held workshops at ArtMill to share their techniques with villagers and visitors during the opening. Pani Vlčková’s experience was a valuable asset to students and teachers alike, who have all indirectly benefited from her agrarian skills. This invisible gift of intangible knowledge from an elder neighbor of the mill, such as which leaves to hang in the rabbit coops to prevent disease, or the way to dry onions properly in the fall, or the best timing for trimming fruit trees (during mid-winter snows), was acknowledged in a ritual performance of dance, food, and drink. Each of the civic women chosen for the project represented an important thread in the social fabric of the rural region in which they lived: often underestimated and overlooked, these women were recognized for their contributions to this particular agrarian culture and civic society over long years. One artist, American poet G.E. Patterson, created a simple poem to celebrate the profound nature present at ArtMill and its sounds of nonhuman activity. The transfer of knowledge from generation to generation is integral to our survival as a species. Each farmer knows his land intimately, having settled on it often for generations. This type of information, even with climate change disturbing weather and ecosystems, is vital for adapting to changing conditions for growing food. People who live this close to the land for a lifetime are integrated with its seasons and temperatures, wind currents, and animal life. All the ingredients of the ecosystem are enculturated in each farmer, like the recipes for zucchini in the village cookbook. They vary slightly with each plot of land and farm, but the region holds knowledge particular to its geography. ArtMill is a hub for the exchange and gathering of people, ideas, and food. It is firmly rooted in the local, with a view to global communication and interaction. Its mission is not just to bring artists to a lovely country spot to make art but also to present the regional history and culture to foreigners and artists as an alternative tradition. The seven cellars at ArtMill still hold the harvests of each year, as they did in times before refrigeration. Each space has its own micro-climate and maintains certain food and drinks better than others. There is a cellar that is best for storing apples (on the stone f loors in a wooden box), one for hiding the sauerkraut in darkness while her lactic-acid bacteria proliferate, one for the chilled Moravian wines, and one for root vegetables. The onions, which were pulled from the ground in early fall and left lying in the beds for a several days before being strewn under the barn eaves, where they mature and gather in their f lavors while developing a harder skin, are now drying into softer tones of creamy whites and golds. They have been woven into

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the traditional braids of five or ten onions in a line and hung in the old mill, where it is chilly but the air circulates. Putting up the harvest for another year is more than just storing food. Each glass jar holds a memory. Entwined and embalmed in all those liquids and colors is a moment shared, a gift of love, a summer’s night captured in sweet syrup or sour contrasts. There are friends, students, lovers, family, all mingled up in those neatly lined up containers, opened up when the times are slower and one can savor, again, that time. Making hay in the early harvest season is a ritual in rural places that goes back to some ancient memory in our bodies. It is hot in June, and there is a nervousness before cutting hay, when everyone looks to the sky to guess the summer rains. It is a time of intense communication as well as sharing among the farmers. Tractors and combines are lent and borrowed. Pitchforks and rakes are in motion. Hands are put to work for neighbors. Bodies are needed to do the incredibly physical work that is needed in a very small amount of time. Once the call is made by some instinctual clock in the farmer’s body, a connection to the earth that borders on the mystical, the team goes into silent action. One can feel the sleeplessness across the hills, praying that no rain drops before the next day’s harvest. Dawn comes early that time of year, and the night is short. The long hot days are utilized to bring in the hay, either baling it and leaving it in the fields, or scooping it up fresh into the oversized hay trucks to store in the high-ceilinged barns. How does this practice— small-scale agriculture—relate to the process of art-making? According to Jill Giegerich, It’s a practice of connectiveness. It’s relational. It involves the willingness and ability to reconnect with the forces of nature that restore health and well-being. The most elemental of this force is the transformation of energy through the digestion of food, air, and water. If we grow the food that we eat, we become that vital energy. Dead food, dead energy . . . I think that often artists who take a different road feel that they have to define that new road in the language of art—which is a very rarefied and awkward language in my opinion. I don’t feel that necessity anymore. The two roles (artist and farmer) can be worlds apart or they can be inseparable. It depends on the person.32 In contrast to the connectiveness that Giegerich articulates, or perhaps as a conceptual extension of it, is the work of the collective Futurefarmers, who do not grow their own food. Founded by Amy Franceschini in San Francisco nearly two decades ago, the group cultivates ideas such as partisan interventions and relational activities around food in various international situations.33 Using the slogan “Futurefarmers—Cultivating your Consciousness,” they seek to question what food is and how it is made, with whom it is grown and cooked and shared, so as to “amplify the consciousness of the imagination.” In an emphasis on community, they rely on other institutions and actors in local spaces to intervene in a particular project and

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then move on to let the seeds planted in various countries thrive or lie fallow. Much like farming, then, Futurefarmers are incubators of ideas and actions, framing dialogues on larger issues of food production and community.

Educational Systems and Structures: Grassroots to Policy ArtMill is rooted firmly in an historical progression of learning experiences that is both contemporary and traditional. Educational theory has named three distinct but related structures of higher education in Euro-American systems: formal, informal, and nonformal. This analysis came out of a joint concern in the 1960s of UNESCO and, ironically (or not), the World Bank, that jobs were not being filled and people fulfilled by educational systems in the West. UNESCO was looking toward a lifelong learning society, ref lecting much of the philosophy expounded by psychologist, educational theorist, and visionary John Dewey in books such as Art as Experience and Democracy and Education.34 The conf luence of the world’s most powerful cultural organization and the money machine behind it is both problematic and enlightening.35 As developed world economies boomed, the concern of World Bank economists was that the educational system was not creating the jobs needed to keep the envisioned machine moving. That is one side of the story. The other, seen through UNESCO’s more humanitarian lens, was that people were not rising above poverty levels imposed by feudal structures to truly educate themselves in a way that would create richer, more fulfilling lives. A general concern with society’s failure to educate our youth holistically is at the core of ArtMill’s mission. Formal education—understood as a system of grading, structured classes in an indoor room, the graduation of students to the next level of technical and professional training—is a highly hierarchal system in which a few thrive and the majority succumb, pushed out of universities into a world in which they must continue to compete, excel, and tread the developmental path. Among the reforms that Marie Theresa, the only female ruler in the Hapsburg line, introduced across her empire in 1775 was the requirement that all children of both sexes between the ages of 6 and 12 attend school. The rule was not met with great enthusiasm, and half of the Austrian population was still illiterate well into the nineteenth century. But Maria Theresa’s reforms remain, for better or worse, the foundation for school structures in the West today. Prior to Maria Theresa’s strict codification of teaching, the Moravian pedagogue, philosopher, and reformer Jan Amos Comenius advocated for integrated learning. His great work, written first in Czech and later in Latin, was Didactica Magna (loosely, The Whole Art of Learning) (1649). Radical for its time, the work critiqued the educational system based on rote learning (still unfortunately present in Czech and Moravian pedagogy) and celebrated the innate curiosity and joy that humans should feel when learning. Today, we might call this “experiential learning,” which is key to environmental education.

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Informal education was defined as the organic process of learning through one’s native environment, community, and family in an unstructured system. This is the truly lifelong process whereby every individual acquires attitudes, values, skills and knowledge from daily experience and the educative inf luences and resources in his or her environment—from family and neighbours, from work and play, from the marketplace, the library and the mass media.36 Informal education is generally conversationally driven, compared to the curriculum-driven approach of formal education. It relies on the shared experience of elders and teachers imparted in a nurturing, noncompetitive environment, such as in homeschooling or farming apprenticeships. This is what Dewey called educating “so that people may share in a common life.”37 The term “non-formal education” is used to designate alternative structures of learning that are not hierarchal and do not necessarily take place in a classroom. It can be tied (or not) to formal (school) systems or informal education. The three structures are tied together and overlap. But generally, nonformal designates a type of learning that does not occur in a traditional classroom. The EU recognizes all three categories of education and supports each with funding for over 30 years. Nonformal education can be part of a larger approach or program, and it has specific learning goals and outcomes. As Eduard Lindeman famously declared: Education conceived as a process coterminous with life revolves about non-vocational ideals. In this world of specialists everyone will of necessity learn to do his work, and if education of any variety can assist in this and in the further end of helping the worker to see the meaning of his labor, it will be education of a high order. But adult education more accurately defined begins where vocational education leaves off. Its purpose is to put meaning into the whole of life.38 It is in this nonvocational, non-hierarchal open-endedness that democratic processes are learned. The discussions, the debates, and the unknowns are all part of the sloppiness of freedom of expression, the founding stone of civil society. Informal and nonformal educators working in communities, with youth groups, inner city clubs, and rural summer camps, know the value to spontaneous learning of bilateral exchanges in these settings. They are the foundation of ArtMill’s teaching strategy both with younger preschool through secondary schoolchildren and older university students. Echoing the fifteenth-century philosopher Marsilio Ficino, psychologist James Hillman agrees that we need an educational system that opposes our inclinations toward naturalism and literalism, as evidenced in current specialized programs of study. “Therefore, Hillman holds to his counter education . . . with

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doggedness and fire, transforming medical-minded manipulations of the psyche into psychology as he defines it; archetypal, imagistic, aesthetic, and poetic.”39 These informal and nonformal learning experiences also confirm theories about the brain, which postulate that tactile processes of repetition and hands-on practice embed memory in the brain in a way that simply reading about the activity cannot. With the rise of climate change and increasing global awareness of the need for a united effort to maintain our planet’s ecological balance, a concerted effort is taking place to educate the public and students about pressures on our environment. Starting in 1987, when the UN Brundtland Commission defined the concept of sustainability, institutions of higher learning as well as local community groups began to rely more on process-oriented learning to encourage awareness and understanding about the planet we live on and help the next generation recognize their responsibility for and stewardship of related biological and ecological systems. Environmental education, sometimes paired with or contrasted to education for sustainable development, has grown along with increasing public concern about climate change and is supported by the UN and most countries around the world. It “utilizes processes that involve students in observing, measuring, classifying, experimenting, and other data gathering techniques. These processes assist students in discussing, inferring, predicting, and interpreting data about environmental issues.”40

ArtDialog According to the EU’s older guidelines for environmental education, “culture is a relatively new sphere of action” for the body, at least from a legal standpoint: the legal basis for EU action in this field was only introduced in 1992 with the Maastricht Treaty. This action is aimed at encouraging and supporting cooperation within Europe in order to bring the European common cultural heritage to the fore.41 But beginning in 2021, the EU has prioritized the importance of environmental sustainability education for all age groups, with a Communication on the European Education Area stressing climate and biodiversity educations. In 2013, ArtDialog was one of many international NGO representatives to sign the Hangzhou Declaration in China, UNESCO’s multilateral effort to bring culture, and art in particular, to the international dialogue on economic and social welfare. ArtDialog has participated in numerous UN conferences on environmental issues and collaborated with other global entities under the auspices of the Basel, Stockholm, and Rotterdam conventions. Opportunities to help form and create policy, based on actual local experience, such as at ArtMill, are an obligation—and desire—of civil society organizations globally. The research performed at centers like

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ArtMill is vital to the creation of progressive policies that need data to fuel political changes. They provide a bottom-up f low of information and experience that brings the reality on the ground to often lofty top-down legal propositions (and can also help protect against corporate lobbying to some extent). ArtDialog has contributed to policy proposals on plastic pollution, ocean sustainability, and environmental education for youth in various UN fora and outreach programs since 2010. These multilateral, global efforts are vital for the health and accountability of governance at organizations such as UN. The input and knowledge base of NGOs, tribal councils, and arts organizations worldwide can help contribute regenerative, creative solutions to our earth’s challenges in the twenty-first century. Recent studies on the “iGeneration” born after 1995 show that they are experiencing increasing depression and anxiety in their young lives.42 Humans are living longer and are healthier but are experiencing more addictions, phobias, and anxieties than ever before. Our disconnection from nature only decreases our interaction with it even as the news reminds us of rising sea levels, hurricanes, and other erratic human-caused climate change disasters. How can we live in this time bomb? When Henry David Thoreau went to Walden Pond 150 years ago, he left us with words that still soothe contemporary eco-traumas: I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.43 Rural artist residency programs and environmental education for youth offer opportunities to become involved in the earth’s systems on a more particulate level, thus re-creating the holistic experience that nature offers the human species. The “soft structure” of shared lectures on their work, interactions with students, visiting scholars, and local artists and the preparation of public exhibitions gives artists a timeline and a little self-imposed pressure to produce in a smaller, less formal situation. Residencies and cultural centers in rural regions such as Pošumava not only nurture artists and students but also inf luence surrounding communities by changing and mixing things up. In fact, by creating culture. Understanding the other builds tolerance and compassion while fostering creativity to encourage social change. After nearly

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20 years of operation, ArtMill has hundreds of alumni across the globe (by last count, in over 25 countries), and a collective audience in the thousands. Students from the early years of summer camps are now adults: teachers, dancers, graphic artists, activists, writers, theater directors, even parents. Some of ArtMill’s visiting artists are now emeritus professors, recipients of prestigious awards, wandering musicians, and organic farmers. Most importantly, they have created communities wherever they went after their visits to the Bohemian countryside. And they took with them a little part of the rolling hills and forests. Recipes have been shared, romances have blossomed and died, seeds exchanged. Art and food were the medium, but the exchange of experience with each other and with the land is the core.

Notes 1 Barbara Benish and Zdenka Gabalova, Dialog Praha Los Angeles, Dialogue Prague/ Los Angeles (Prague: no publisher listed, 1989). 2 EU Agricultural Markets Briefs, Organic farming in the EU A fast growing sector, No 13 | March 2019, https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/default/files/ food-farming-f isheries/farming/documents/market-brief-organic-farmingin-the-eu_mar2019_en.pdf 3 Zdenka Smutná, “Food, Partnership, and Value Added: Introduction of Key Concepts to Construct Local Food Platforms in Post-Socialist Rural Space,” presentation at the How to Make a Just Food Future: Alternative Foodways for a Changing World Conference, Sheffield, UK, July 8–10, 2019. 4 WaterHistory.Org, www.waterhistory.org. See also : John H. Munro, “Industrial Energy from Water-Mills in the European Economy, 5th to 18th Centuries: The Limitations of Power,” 2002. https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/ 11027/ 5 Food and Agriculture Organization, “The Czech Republic,” http://www.fao. org/fi/oldsite/FCP/en/cze/profile.htm. 6 World Integrated Trade Solution, “Fish, Live, Carp Exports by Country in 2019,” https://wits.worldbank.org/trade/comtrade/en/country/ALL/year/2019/ tradef low/Exports/partner/WLD/product/030193. 7 Peter B. Moyle and Marilyn A. Moyle, “Introduction to Fish Imagery in Art,” Environmental Biology of Fishes 31, no 1 (May 1991): 5–23. 8 Moyle and Moyle, “Introduction to Fish Imagery in Art,” 22. 9 Gregory Howard Snyder, abstract (master’s thesis, University of Cincinnati, 2005), 1. 10 Jill Giegerich, email to Barbara Benish, May 14, 2019. 11 As of 2021, only the Holy See and the State of Palestine are unrepresented at the UN. 12 Nathalie Blanc and Barbara Benish, Form, Art and the Environment: Engaging in Sustainability (New York: Routledge, 2017). 13 See “The Hangzhou Declaration: Placing Culture at the Heart of Sustainable Development Policies (2013),” Zhejiang Gongshang University (website), June 12, 2017, http://orcp.hustoj.com/hangzhou-declaration-2013/. 14 “Opening Program of the Global People’s Summit on Food Systems,” Hungry4Change, September 23, 2021, https://peoplessummit.foodsov.org/ watch-opening-program-of-the-global-peoples-summit-on-food-systems/ 15 Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass, Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2013), 137–8.

130 ArtMill and Rural Residencies 16 Giegerich email. 17 Shakespeare, Othello. “The Moor of Venice.” I. 3. 18 Vincent Katz, ed., Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 36. See also Vincent Katz, ed., Black Mountain College: Una Aventura Americana (Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2002). 19 Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 4. 20 David Bohm, On Creativity (New York: Routledge, 1998), 19. 21 Myriam Jonsen-Verbeke, “Industrial Heritage: A Nexus for Sustainable Tourism Development,” Tourism Geographies 1, no 1 (1999): 70–85, http://www. tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/14616689908721295?src=recsys. 22 Harriet Ritvo, “Making Animals Real: Review of Donna Haraway, When Species Meet, and Sarah Franklin, Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy,” Books Forum, December 1, 2008, 445–448, http://web.mit.edu/hnritvo/ Documents/Articles/Reviews%20copy/harawayfranklinrev.proofs.pdf 23 Jorge E. Vinuales, ed., The Rio Declaration on Environment and Development: A Commentary (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015). 24 Jane E. Brody, “Easing the Way in Therapy with the Aid of an Animal,” New York Times, March 14, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/health/ 15brody-animals.html. 25 Anna Peterson, “Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 21 (2008): 610, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/ s10806-008-9108-7. 26 Meat Atlas 2014: Facts and Figures about the Animals We Eat, cited in “Broiler,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broiler. 27 Haraway, When Species Meet, 273. 28 Karl Weber, ed., Food, Inc.: How Industrial Food Is Making Us Sicker, Fatter and Poorer (New York: Public Affairs, 2009), 48. 29 Shawna Wagman, “Meet (and Eat) the New Gourmet Meat: Rabbit,” The Globe and Mail, March 12, 2013, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/ food-and-wine/meet-and-eat-the-new-gourmet-meat-rabbit/article9682680/. 30 Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, The River Cottage Cookbook (London: Harper Collins, 2001), 137. 31 This project was inspired by a long-term photo documentation research of kolače patterns by Barbara Benish. For more information, see Barbara Benish (website), barbarabenish.org. 32 Giegerich email. 33 https://www.futurefarmers.com. 34 For more information on UNESCO’s educational philosophy, see its annual Faure Report, which began in 1972 as a monitoring and pedagogical look at global education structure. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000001801 35 The International Monetary Fund was cofounded by Czech economist Jan Victor Mládek, who with his wife Meda Mládková emigrated to Washington, DC, after World War II. His role as governor of IMF enabled the couple to buy an extensive art collection, Meda’s passion, which is housed today in Museum Kampa in Prague. 36 M.K. Smith, “Informal, Non-Formal and Formal Education: a Brief Overview of Different Approaches,” Encyclopedia of Pedagogy and Informal Education (2002), http://infed.org/mobi/informal-non-formal-and-formal-education-a-briefoverview-of-some-different-approaches/. 37 Smith, “Informal, Non-Formal and Formal Education.” 38 Smith, “Informal, Non-Formal and Formal Education.” 39 James Hillman, “The Poetic Basis of Mind,” in A Blue Fire, ed. Thomas Moore (New York: Harper Perennial, 1997), 17.

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40 “About EE and Why It Matters,” North American Society for Environmental Education, https://naaee.org/about-us/about-ee-and-why-it-matters. 41 See the EU Guidelines for Environmental Education at https://ec.europa.eu/ info/law/better-regulation/have-your-say/initiatives/12985-Environmentalsustainability-education-and-training_en. 42 Julian Menasce Horowitz and Nikki Graf, “Most U.S. Teens See Anxiety and Depression as a Major Problem Among Their Peers,” Pew Research Center, February 20, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/02/20/ most-u-s-teens-see-anxiety-and-depression-as-a-major-problem-among-theirpeers/. 43 Henry David Thoreau, Walden; or Life in the Woods (Boston, MA: Ticknor and Fields, 1854), Wikisource, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Walden_(1854)_ Thoreau.

Bibliography “About EE and Why It Matters,” North American Society for Environmental Education, https://naaee.org/about-us/about-ee-and-why-it-matters. Benish, Barbara, and Zdenka Gabalova. Dialog Praha Los Angeles, Dialogue Prague/Los Angeles. Prague: MX Art, 1989. Blanc, Nathalie, and Barbara Benish. Form, Art and the Environment: Engaging in Sustainability. New York: Routledge, 2017. Bohm, David. On Creativity. New York: Routledge, 1998. Brody, Jane E. “Easing the Way in Therapy with the Aid of an Animal,” New York Times, March 14, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/15/health/ 15brody-animals.html. EU Agricultural Markets Briefs, “Organic Farming in the EU A Fast Growing Sector,” No 13 | March 2019, https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/default/files/ food-farming-f isheries/farming/documents/market-brief-organic-farmingin-the-eu_mar2019_en.pdf Fearnley-Whittingstall, Hugh. The River Cottage Cookbook. London: HarperCollins, 2001. Food and Agriculture Organization. “The Czech Republic,” http://www.fao.org/ fi/oldsite/FCP/en/cze/profile.htm. Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Hillman, James. “The Poetic Basis of Mind,” in A Blue Fire, ed. Thomas Moore. New York: Harper Perennial, 1997, 17. Horowitz, Julian Menasce, and Nikki Graf, “Most U.S. Teens See Anxiety and Depression as a Major Problem Among Their Peers,” Pew Research Center, February 20, 2019, https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/02/20/most-u-steens-see-anxiety-and-depression-as-a-major-problem-among-their-peers/. Jonsen-Verbeke, Myriam. “Industrial Heritage: A Nexus for Sustainable Tourism Development,” Tourism Geographies 1, no 1 (1999): 70–85. Katz, Vincent, ed. Black Mountain College: Una Aventura Americana. Madrid: Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, 2002. Katz, Vincent, ed. Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass, Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions, 2013.

132 ArtMill and Rural Residencies Moyle, Peter B., and Marilyn A. Moyle, “Introduction to Fish Imagery in Art,” Environmental Biology of Fishes 31, no 1 (May 1991): 5–23. Munro, John H. “Industrial Energy from Water-Mills in the European Economy, 5th to 18th Centuries: The Limitations of Power,” 2002, https://mpra.ub.unimuenchen.de/11027/ “Opening Program of the Global People’s Summit on Food Systems,” Hungry4Change, September 23, 2021, https://peoplessummit.foodsov.org/watchopening-program-of-the-global-peoples-summit-on-food-systems/ Peterson, Anna. “Donna J. Haraway, When Species Meet,” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 21 (2008): 610. Ritvo, Harriet. “Making Animals Real: Review of Donna Haraway, When Species Meet, and Sarah Franklin, Dolly Mixtures: The Remaking of Genealogy,” Books Forum, December 1, 2008, 445–448. Shakespeare, Othello. “The Moor of Venice.” I. 3. Smith, M.K. “Informal, Non-Formal and Formal Education: A Brief Overview of Different Approaches,” Encyclopedia of Pedagogy and Informal Education, 2002, http://infed.org/mobi/informal-non-formal-and-formal-education-a-briefoverview-of-some-different-approaches. Smutná, Zdenka. “Food, Partnership, and Value Added: Introduction of Key Concepts to Construct Local Food Platforms in Post-Socialist Rural Space,” presentation at the How to Make a Just Food Future: Alternative Foodways for a Changing World Conference, Sheffield, UK, July 8–10, 2019. Snyder, Gregory Howard. “Abstract,” Master’s thesis, University of Cincinnati, 2005. “The Hangzhou Declaration: Placing Culture at the Heart of Sustainable Development Policies (2013),” Zhejiang Gongshang University (website), June 12, 2017, http://orcp.hustoj.com/hangzhou-declaration-2013/. Vinuales, Jorge E, ed. The Rio Declaration on Environment and Development: A Commentary. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2015. Wagman, Shawna. “Meet (and Eat) the New Gourmet Meat: Rabbit,” The Globe and Mail, March 12, 2013, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/food-and-wine/ meet-and-eat-the-new-gourmet-meat-rabbit/article9682680/World Integrated Trade Solution, “Fish, Live, Carp Exports by Country in 2019,” https://wits. worldbank.org/trade/comtrade/en/country/ALL/year/2019/tradef low/Exports/ partner/WLD/product/030193. Weber, Karl, ed. Food, Inc.: How Industrial Food Is Making Us Sicker, Fatter and Poorer. New York: Public Affairs, 2009, 48.

7

Bread, Grains, and Ancient Cosmologies

There is an ancient story in the Jewish tradition about the golem, a figure made from clay and earth that comes to life in order to—in one version— save the Jews of the Prague ghetto. Forming figures of clay, which were then baked and turned into ceramic vessels, statues, and eventually what we might call art, possibly originated in early practices of baking food and making magic. The connection of making, baking, and community still persists in the symbolism of artworks that incorporate grains. The domestication of wild grains is tied to the history of cultivation, agriculture, settlements, and civilization. Growing crops of grain requires non-nomadic, sedentary cultures. Grains can be turned into f lour that turns into bread, taking many forms in the world’s diverse culinary traditions: tortillas, paella tam, and so forth. In this chapter, we look at artists in various cultures who create artworks from bread, or the cultural equivalents of grain-based staples, and the ideas that bread-making fosters. Bread is not always these artists’ sole medium and is often used only as part of a particular installation or performance in a wider artistic oeuvre. But our examples will illustrate the universality of bread—that is, baked or cooked grains—and confirm its popularity as a symbol for many artists today. Bread ornamented with clay stamps has been found in excavations around the Mediterranean, from Macedonia to northeastern Europe. They date back to the Neolithic era.1 The stamped designs, which can be abstract or language-based insignias, were meant to identify, protect, and in other ways ritualistically imbue the bread with meaning and power. The reverse swastika, for instance, was associated with the vulva in ancient Mediterranean religions and therefore probably represented the deities Artemis and Astarte, both of whom were associated with fertility, reproduction, and abundance in food and hunting. Ornamentation on bread was also used to mark specific events, such as births and marriages. Embracing the ancient tradition of bread decoration but updating it to contemporary times, Greek artist Maria Varela works with digital technologies to transform people’s wishes into decorations on bread, using symbols that represent such things as health, purity, and fertility. The artist compiled a list of the wishes of the inhabitants of Tavros, a suburb of Athens, during a recent pandemic lockdown and transformed them

DOI: 10.4324/9780367433710-8

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Figure 7.1 Maria Varela, Decorated Bread, 2021. Tavros/Locus Athens, Greece.

into decorations for bread using an algorithm that combined figures and symbols to represent specific themes, such as love or travel. Thus, the tradition of ornamenting bread is renewed and reassimilated with digital technology to produce new bread decorations for the people of Tavros.

Kneading as Creating In Europe, throughout the Slavic, Germanic, Mediterranean, and Scandinavian lands, bread is one of the main starch staples. With this in mind, an artist-run space in Tavros was founded in 2019. As she created the new project space, which she called “Tavros,” under the umbrella of the formerly nomadic Locus Athens arts organization established in 2004, founder Maria-Thalia Carras, along with founding co-partner Olga Hatzidaki, began “thinking of the ‘public’ less as architectural space but more as content and communities.”2 Their entire programming is based on bread, which works as a “springboard for our need to respond to the social and political circumstances around us, by exploring notions of democracy, equality and ecology whilst looking to address these issues head on through dialogue, listening and learning.”3 Situated in a multi-ethnic community on the outskirts of the city, the town is named after the nearby Toros Dağları or Taurus Mountains of Turkey, where many of the town’s current habitants come from. The working-class neighborhood inspired the curators’ vision for an open, diverse, alternative space for artists, makers, and thinkers. Marie and Olga were specifically looking to base themselves in a tight community like this one, which is made up of Turkish, Syrian, Punjabi, Russian, Albanian, Armenian, Arab, and French immigrants. Tavros Art Space is

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both an artists’ space and a bakery. They recently invited various artists to create works tied to our longer-term project Table and Territory, funded by the EU Creative Europe program, in which five cultural organizations in different countries created events and projects based on the idea of food, table, and territory. The artists at Tavros speak of the “diasporic qualities” of bread, which conveys so much in the breaking of the crust, the sharing from hand to hand, and the sustenance provided to people in migration. Greece is one of the most rural countries in the EU. Predominantly rural territories provide more than 40 percent of the jobs in Greece and about one-third of the country’s economic output. Clearly, the countries of the Mediterranean Basin are among the most vulnerable to climate change, and new species of crop plants have been and will be introduced over the coming years with this in mind. Organic farming is capable not only of adapting to the effects of climate change in agriculture-based ecosystems. It also has the potential to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from farming. Among new modes of agriculture, urban agriculture did not really exist in Greece until very recently, and its rapid growth coincides with a sharp deterioration in the country’s living standards because of chronic recession. The roots of Greek urban agriculture go back to the early years of the twenty-first century, when small libertarian, alternative, and ecological circles were experimenting with a new way of life. Their projects initially attracted attention in the wake of the fires of 2007, when “guerilla gardeners” became active and the first more permanent manifestations of urban agriculture (such as a botanical garden in Petroupoli, west of Athens) emerged. The best-known examples of urban farming by civil society appeared in 2011 with the founding of a self-managed farm at Ellinikon Airport in southern Athens and of PER.KA (short for periastikoi kalliergites or “suburban famers”), located in old military camps in Thessaloniki. Both projects were part of a movement to reappropriate open and public spaces, and since 2012 urban agriculture has been spread by civil society, with the help of local municipalities. Against the backdrop of social, ecological, and economic crisis, initiatives such as Locus collective look back at ancient traditions involving bread, cereals, and agriculture, including from a mythological perspective. The Locus collective is developing artistic projects that incorporate traditions and local modes of production in the territory. Locus Athens is an independent contemporary art center interested in ecological and other public issues.4 Its program includes exhibitions, conferences, screenings, workshops, publications, children’s books, residencies, and community-based projects. In 2021, the center hosted the Geometries exhibition, a three-month multidisciplinary project organized by the Agricultural University of Athens that brought together more than 40 artists, activists, farmers, academics, cooks, and filmmakers to work on humanity’s relationship to its environment. A key aspect of the

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project was food and its production and distribution. Meals were cooked and eaten together. An investigation into bread, its symbolism, rituals, and political, ecological, and cultural roles paves the way for ref lection on its role in the Mediterranean while seated at tables and food collectives. Paky Vlassopoulou works with the theme of bread in her Bread project, which examines the biological process involved in sourdough bread as a metaphor for political change and information-sharing, which in turn is synonymous with community. She focuses on gatherings and shared moments in which bread and newspapers play a role in community formation. Vlassopoulou was invited by Tavros to create a special project on the table-and-territory theme and envisioned a newspaper to represent the diverse neighborhood where the gallery space is located. Her artistic work was carried out on the territory of Tavros, which has been a migrant neighborhood since 1922, when the first migrants settled in a recently burnt-down slaughterhouse. The first stage of the Bread project comprises a ceramics and sourdough bread production workshop helped by a baker, Elissavet Koulouri. The second stage involves the creation of a newspaper in which bread is discussed. The texts are translated into languages of Tavros’s migrant communities—Punjabi, Albanian, Russian, Armenian, Arabic, and French. The community of Tavros therefore constitutes and represents the territory, and the artist attempts to use the newspaper to bring people together. The newspaper’s political tone is bound up with the idea of sitting around a table with a piece of bread in the middle, and it is available in all of the bakeries of Tavros.

Figure 7.2 Paky Vlassopoulou, Bread, 2020. Tavros/Locus Athens, Greece.

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“Paky Vlassopoulou is interested in our need for exchange, our want to be in touch and share, she cares about knowledge mediated through experience and how it leads to empowerment and collective action,” the Locus Athens website states.5 Community is vital to the artist, and she talks about form being “collective,” or molded. It was imperative to her that her collaborators on the newspaper, baker Elissavet Koulouri and architect Iris Lykourioti, be included as authors of the project. Created during the pandemic, when communication and interpersonal exchange were challenged if not completely shut down, the Bread project hit an immediate chord as it responded to a cry for communication from a community that wanted to continue to touch and be in touch. Vlassopoulou declares that haptic responses are vital to our existence as humans: “mouths, tongues, words, language,” she says, are connected.6 The artist goes on to equate ideas of knowledge to bread and its making. Her immediate response to the pandemic shut down by the Greek government was to imagine what information immigrant communities were and were not receiving. What was being communicated and to whom? Like most of the world, she was frustrated and worried at the lack of coherent medical and scientific explanations and clear procedures. Her newspaper was a sort of anti-depressant for the neighborhood, conveying information in an appealing visual format connected to food and local bakeries. Vlassopoulou connects knowledge with bread-making in a way not unsimilar to the work of Richard Sennet, for whom manual labor is a simile for knowledge. “Then there is all this knowledge that comes through the centuries of growing yeast,” she says. “From my perspective, the tactility and sensibility that bread making needs is a way to train ourselves to the most important aspect of knowledge that is related to caring and sharing.” 7 The Hypercomf collective focuses on the territory of the island of Tinos, Greece, where its Biosentinel project conducts research into the bacteria and microorganisms common to people, bread, wine, and honey, as well as the process of fermentation. Their objective is to provide honey and other agricultural products to inhabitants of the territories. At the end of the fermentation process, guests join in a party to drink the wine and beers they have produced through fermentation. The Hypercomf farm is featured in a film about different groups around the world that rely on resources such as the sun to bake bread in do-it-yourself solar ovens.8 Another Mediterranean artist sharing similar values is Italian Maria Lai. In her seminal work of 2008, Bread Encyclopedia—Letter A; Letter E; Letter F; Letter G; Letter H; Letter I; Letter L; Letter M; Letter N; Letter P; Letter Q; Letter R; Letter S; Letter V; Letter U; Letter Z, books are bound in covers of bread, which again relate bread to knowledge, kitchen to studio, and craft to art. Lai said that in Ullasai, Sardinia, “creativity in daily life reveals its female qualities: the loom or bread which for the feast days takes on the shape of birds, f lowers and jewels.”9 The handcrafts of her native land imbue meaning and extend knowledge.

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Figure 7.3 The Biosentinel solar oven being used to cook food. Hyperkomf, Greece, 2019.

Following a ten-year depression, in which she was unable to work, Lai focused solely on watercolor drawings of local Sardinian women at work, often kneading and baking bread, as in. Women Making Bread (1961). In her installation Pane Quotidiano (2008), a clothed table is laden with loaves of bread on roughly hewn wooden cutting boards of assorted sizes, laid out like so many seats at a table, with varying forms, shapes, and colors. Stylized sheep, a Sardinian staple, are woven into the border of the tablecloth along with the words “Quando un libro è cosa viva bisogna mangiarlo” (“When a book is a living thing, it must be eaten”).10 One cannot help but think of a Biblical text written 2,000 years earlier on another Mediterranean island, Patmos. John’s book of Revelations has a similar text: “1:1 in the beginning was the word” and “when you read these words, eat them/throw them away.”11 Lai’s connection of bread to knowledge is similar to many artistic interventions in the medium of art. Her reality grounded in a local culture, and a life lived, authenticates her experience in cultural production and knowledge creation. The artist understands the connection of hand to mouth to land, the sustenance of life arising both from bread and the stories that humans tell. More than decoration or craft, Lai points us to the integral life force that creates what we call culture, weaving words and yeast into intricate patterns of new understanding.

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Guns ‘n’ Bread In the summer of 1989 American artist Karl Matson went to Prague for the exhibition Dialogue: Prague/Los Angeles, just before the Berlin wall came down. The exhibition was a meeting of two extreme cultures as the Cold War wound down and the Velvet Revolution was about to open the borders of Central Europe to the West after nearly 50 years. The privation and struggles of citizens behind the Iron Curtain were in stark contrast to the wealth and luxury imagined to exist in the West, especially in California, where Matson was living. His installation in a small gallery with Gothic arched ceilings consisted of a construction with fallen airplane debris (echoing Beuys’ as well as Matson’s own experience in the Vietnam War), cast iron bullets, guns, knives, and red stars. Between beautifully crafted wooden structures, he scattered loaves of bread, freshly baked, as they are still available in the country today—the same rounded shape, without packaging or preservatives. The bread grew hard within two days, and the loaves turned wooden, like the sculptures in the installation, darkening and shrinking but remaining solid. In its review of this extraordinary exhibition, Rude Pravda, the state-run communist newspaper, singled out Matson’s work as a “capitalist” artist who had defiled the nation by “throwing our hard-earned bread” on the f loor in a gesture of disrespect. The artist had touched a nerve in the small Central European country that had survived two world wars, both of which forced people to go without bread for long periods of time. The reviewer of the propagandistic article had no idea that the artist was then living in Watts, Los Angeles, a predominantly Black community. Food scarcity in many AfricanAmerican urban neighborhoods in the United States was higher at that time and still is today, than in many post-Soviet countries of Central Europe. Matson’s reference to war and survival, prisoners of war, and privations of the battlefield were not unlike the early works of Josef Beuys, who used fat in his installations to symbolize survival. The famous story of Beuys’s plane crash over the Crimea and subsequent survival in freezing temperatures by being wrapped in fat by wandering Tartars, entered the canon of food art after 1972. Beuys used fat in various forms throughout his long career, in reference to the natural ingredient of both cooking and preservation in the cultures of the frozen tundra on the steppes. Both artists used the basic food staples of bread and fat to represent an organic, visceral analogue for the body in ways that bronze or marble never could. In 1963, Joseph Beuys piled a wedge of fat on a chair, in the approximate vicinity of a sitter’s own abdominal fat and internal functions. The work’s German name, Stuhl mit Fett (“Chair with Fat”) puns on a polite euphemism for shit (“stool”), another product of caloric ingestion. In doing so, he inverted the “frozen moment” function of traditional food still life. The sculpture’s organic material immediately began to decay: Instead of “stilling” time, Beuys initiated a process to

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mark its passage, a self-undoing gesture that leaves its residue in the viewer’s imagination. The same self-sacrifice might describe the life of Beuys himself, or of any human.12 The seemingly irreverent placement of fresh loaves of bread on a f loor littered with military paraphernalia pointedly abandoned the bread to harden into lumps of sculpted mass. Against the backdrop of the end of the Cold War and borders just beginning to open, Matson’s confrontational installation was both political and playful, challenging viewers’ cultural preconceptions in a world ruled by propaganda. All of this was triggered thanks to our social and emotional ties to a loaf of bread. Throughout histories of famine and strife in war-torn lands, food, and especially bread, is tied to survival and life. The Czech artist Margita Titlová drew on the same passion for the national staple food in creating a performance and installation in a town square in the northern part of the country. Invited by the town of Kamenice nad Lipo, she set up a large table in the middle of the square under a 1,000-year-old linden tree, in the middle of the day. She ceremoniously brought out loaves of bread, knives, chairs, and glasses of champagne from the local wineries. Curiosity caused people strolling by to watch her as she began to carve the surrounding buildings out of the bread loaves. She invited people to sit down and join her in constructing architectural renderings of the surrounding landmarks, which ranged from baroque to Gothic to modernist, all in one 600-square-meter area. After a few hours, a miniature town began to grow in bread. Locals wandered back and forth, sat down to carve a favorite tower or façade, joked, chatted, drank a little wine together, and built a miniature version of their hometown in bread, thus reinforcing the connection between the sustenance offered by food and the town square’s culture of everydayness, where news is exchanged, commerce is enacted, and people become a community. Titlová’s project, entitled “Bread City,” literally created the companionship and civic-ness expressed in the Latin word for bread, panis, which is also ref lected in words such as “companion.” As we write this book during the Covid-19 pandemic, which has sequestered people to their homes in a way that would have seemed unimaginable in the twenty-first century, reports of bread-making marathons are common. Americans, in particular, seem to have taken up bread-making as a sort of healing process, a comfort activity. Perhaps for them the activity marks a return to a tradition that did exist not in the country as, during the last five decades, it raced toward modernity and the loss of bio-diversity at an unheard-of scale. Ancient stories, like that of the golem in Central Europe, bring humans to our core connectedness with the earth and its resources, which in turn feed us. So when Titlová recently started creating a series of “embryo dolls” out of bread, it is no coincidence that they attempt to bridge our core connectedness to sustainability and existence. In

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her old studio in the center of Prague, where she has lived and worked her entire life, she brings out a magnifying globe glass so that a visitor can see the miniature figures she has molded. They indeed resemble sonar scans that we now receive during pregnancy, showing us fetal forms never before imagined. The artist connects these tiny baked figurines to the female life force, the miracle of procreation and sustenance that is carried in the female human for nine months. It is a wry wink to the golem myth, which is all male, and a reclamation of the feminine by this artist who lives in the heart of ancient Prague and its myths.

Performative Repast The word “repast,” a fourteenth-century Middle English word derived from Old French, has come to be associated with memory and coming together, often at funerals. More than a meal, a repast is the remembrance of a community that shares a place and often a past. Food scholar and artist Scott Alves Barton has documented the African diaspora experience focusing his early research on the African diaspora experience of secular and sacred cuisine in northeastern Brazil. In his paper “Repasting: A Metonymy,” he describes in vivid detail the celebration and “performative repast” of an event on Malaga Island, Maine, in the United States.13 In the early twentieth century, the island was inhabited by free Blacks, Indigenous peoples, descendants of Portuguese settlers, and other mixed-race folks, who in 1912 were evicted or killed in a sweep of racist land-grabbing. The incident still haunts the state of Maine as a blemish on her reputation for tolerance. Curated and designed by Myron M. Beasley, a banquet of locally sourced foods was served on elaborate period cutlery and crockery on a summer day in 2018. The organic meal “produced from heirloom grains and foodstuffs by local artisan bakers and chefs and served by high school students in nineteenth-century costume who lived in Phippsburg on the shore near Malaga”14 created a living performative food event honoring the dead. It was a political-social catalyst to recreate, heal, and remember a historical injustice in U.S. history, which, like so much of the country’s history, has long been hidden behind the discourses of elites who wrote the books. The idea of a meal as a sensorial experience that opens our aesthetic view beyond the “ just visual” to the connection of art and food has been explored deeply by food philosopher Nicola Perullo.15 He points out that in Western thought, since Aristotle, the senses have been placed in a hierarchy, with the visual and aural (art and music) at the top, and smell, taste, and touch relegated to the lower but necessary levels of existence. This ethical, religious, and moral imposition of value on the senses had given food a place in European history that wavered between a condemnation of gluttony, on the one hand, and the sacred connotations of bread, on the other.

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Eventually, with the feminist revolution of the early twentieth century, food practices grew respected as women reclaimed their importance both in and out of the kitchen as the traditional preservers of family life and community. Contemporary women philosophers brought critical thinking to bear on food processes, production, and presentation, elevating food to the position it enjoys today. Embedded in this new appreciation of food as art is the rise of social practice in the arts, which reaches beyond the individualistic modernist trope of artistic production. Engagement with community has itself become a field of art, spurred by the rejection of the twentieth-century patriarchal practices and consumption modes that used to dominate Western galleries and museums. This engagement brings a reunion of sorts of body to object, the reclaiming of the subject-object division imposed since the Greeks determined that food, and by extension plants and animals, are somehow subordinate to human beings and therefore unworthy of elevation to art. In this re-revolution, the act and process of art and its making were exposed in performative works of the post-modern world, which recognize the viewer as integral to the act, forming what we traditionally call a community. “Convivium is a fundamental metaphor, linking the social essence of humanity to the peculiar action of dining together,” Raymond D. Boisvert and Lisa Heldke wrote in 2016.16 Food actions, like the repast on Malaga Island, embody food and the meal and hold meaning like any other art form: they have beauty, composition, create emotion, inspire, remember, and link past to present in a leap of time and space. The viewer becomes the performer as the meal is shared and new meanings are cocreated at the table. “Beauty is the language of care,” chef and founder of the slow-food movement Alice Waters recently said.17 Her ground-breaking culinary and social achievements in Chez Panisse restaurant in Berkeley, California, have revolutionized the food movement globally. Describing how the restaurant’s foods were sourced locally and grew into gardens, educational spaces, books, and other forms of outreach, the passionate chef presents food as so much more than just what we eat. Waters attributes values to food. “Food communities love,” she states, because one takes the time and care to grow, make, and present the foods we eat. Not only have we lost our understanding of biodiversity, but we have also lost some of our values, as we lost ‘real’ food. Michael Pollan echoes his friend’s sentiment that eating is teaching, that eating is culture itself and not just an act to satisfy hunger.18 The defense of food goes back to the 2,000-year-old dichotomy set up by Aristotle, when taste, smell, and touch were relegated to the basement of experience. Or worse yet, to the judgmental ethos of bad and good. Waters equates the creation and production of food with a near spiritual experience. What she calls the “comradery of the table” includes all the preparation that each family and friend puts into a shared communion. This comradery celebrates life itself and can also express memories of those

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deceased, estranged, migrated, disappeared, or erased. The connection of food to the cultures of Indigenous peoples is especially charged with meaning, given their colonization and genocide. Barton relates this meaning back to bread, vis a vis the lens of anthropologist David Sutton, (whose own research has focused on Macedonian cooking practices): Consider how Sutton describes the transmogrification of home-baked breads whose rising doughs were stamped with religious symbols. The fresh loaves were brought as church offerings, where priests sprinkled crumbs into sacramental wine become metonymic symbols for the deceased now “named” to the saints (Sutton 2006:34). Food thus provides structure to the lives of the living, and the legacies of the dead.19 Similar to Paky Vlassopoulou, Iranian artist Bahar Behbahani equates the kneading of dough to caring for the body in her work “Kneading Memories” (2013). Setting up various “massage parlors” at sites in Turkey, Italy, and New York, Behbahani kneads emotional responses out of tired bodies, much like the kneading of bread releases emotions in the baker and the eater. Using the semi-private space of the massage table, the viewer/ client/stranger is enveloped by the artist’s hands as she touches and transforms pliable skins. Baked breads are then served in an atrium after the performative massage, thereby creating a shared experience and memories. “Each iteration explores the power of bread through people’s personal memories amid larger political and economic spheres of this universal sustenance,” the artist explains. 20 Inspired by the bakeries of her childhood home of Tehran, the artist gently brings out similar stories of migration and assimilation in the ethnic communities in which she performs the piece. Bread is the common denominator, along with the shared memory, be it painful or pleasant. Bread attempts to penetrate the collective amnesia about the history and culture of bread, and in the process, connect diverse communities within today’s detached culture. In these immersive performative installations, Behbahani explores the role of sensoria in reproducing forgotten memories.21 In describing the performance massage, she mentions the uneasiness of the situation: as a female in the often male-dominated cultures of the Middle East, for example, she performs a ritual that is both profane and sublime. The eroticization of the touching of two bodies that are strangers is tempered by the domestication of baking and sharing bread, a common substance. In this way, Behbahani equates the sensorial pleasure of touch with taste and deemphasizes the homo-erotic culture of bodies for sale or trade. In this way, Behbahani’s Bread series is profoundly political as well as aesthetic.

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Sweet Rolls as Social Practice? In the Civic Women project at ArtMill in the Czech Republic in 2018–19, Behbahani worked with the traditional Czech sweet bread, koláče, in a series of works instigated by two other artists taking part in the project, Sara K. Khan and Meeta Mastani. The two-year program, as mentioned in the previous chapter, brought nine international artists to the village of Horažd’ovice to work with ten local women who have contributed in some way to the civic life of the rural society. They were teachers and farmers, a theater manager-creator, a gallery manager, and even a vice mayor. The idea was to cocreate projects or ideas that could ferment into something else or, even more, a cross-cultural exchange that would bring new ideas to each of the participants and the surrounding community. The koláče, a long-time research project of Benish with local women (paní Vlčková, Miluška Bejvlová, Marketa Okroupcová, et al.) served as an entrée to the local women’s kitchens, creating discussions, debates, and a platform for sharing. Meeta and Sara, originally from South Asia, had already worked together for many years creating traditional batik textiles from native dyes in workshops around the globe. Both are passionate about their cultures and sharing the craft of mainly women, whose artistry is underrepresented globally. Two local women opened their kitchens and recipes to the entire group of visiting artists, creating chaotic messes and also delicious sweet breads, each with the specific design of their villages. The patterns are created from plum, strawberry, and raspberry jams, ground almonds and walnuts, and creamed cheeses, all sweetened according to custom. The round shape of the f lat bun creates dozens of pattern variations, from spirals to swirls to circles and dollops. The entire process was documented by Khan, who then created a large screened mixed-media collage of hands kneading the dough and applying the designs, transfixed onto a multi-image projection entitled The Cookbook of Gestures (2019). In the artist’s words, she was “reframing the act of cooking as a learned, skilled, and embodied practice reveal[ing] the power of cooks and undermin[ing] the notion of cooking as a ‘menial art.’” 22 In the context of this exhibition, which the curators conceived as a social practice engagement, the video was projected at the local vintage movie house, a remnant of communist-era village modernization in the 1970s and now closed because of the loss of interest and an aging population. As a nexus for other performances, screenings, workshops, and installations, the space was revitalized during the Civic Women days. In another reiteration of the koláče exchange, Khan and Meeta presented a table of the collaboratively baked sweet rolls on a tablecloth that they created during their residency at ArtMill. For this textile work, the artists had line images of photographs of koláče made into traditional line blocks in India, which they used to print the cloth at ArtMill’s studios during their stay. They also presented a workshop to the public on traditional

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techniques of making and using natural dyes and inks, which was created on site. The journey of koláče symbolism, cultural significance, and cocreation was an ode to both the local women who kept these traditional recipes intact over generations, as well as a contemporary reiteration of the landscapes we share in baking, foodstuffs, and designs that hold the f lavors through the ages. At the opening local women from the village viewed their Czech bread made by foreigners and presented in a new table setting in large photographs and Khan’s digitally created montage. The experience gave new life to women across cultures (and elicited some strange looks from the elder generation), who could communicate without language via shared recipes.

Maize Perhaps one of the oldest research-creation food stories comes from South and Central America, where the development and breeding of wild corn grains were documented in Aztec wall glyphs and manuscripts and, even earlier, in Mayan and Olmec sculptures. Scientists believe that corn was domesticated about 10,000 years ago, although that assumption has been challenged recently by new carbon dating techniques and archeological discoveries. At any rate, the species Zea mays in the Poaceae family of grasses has given us more than just food. In the cosmology of many ancient cultures, the plant was honored not only in artistic visual documentations but as actual deities. In Aztec mythology, Centeotl is the son of an earth goddess who in an earlier historical account was perhaps Chicomecóatl, the maize goddess. The markings on depictions of gods and goddesses resemble the colors of corn: black stripes, browns, rich reds, and golden yellows. The elaborate rituals and festivals at the time of planting, harvest, and feasting ref lect the importance of maize in the Mesoamerican cultures. What we call “art” today is, in fact, a cultural representation of living plants that sustain and nourish the human species. There is a reciprocal give-and-take as the humans sow the seeds and water the plant, it grows, and then in turn it produces nutrients for the human life force. A sense of reciprocity and respect for the non-human plant world is common in most traditional and Indigenous cultures even to this day, which understand “community,” communion, as not only with fellow humans but with the entire cosmos of companions. The Codex Borgia is one of the oldest recorded images of food from the Americas. Ancient Aztec in origin, the book dates to about 1500 A.D. It is one of the few surviving books predating the invasion of the Spanish, who pillaged and burned down libraries of ancient knowledge. Its remaining pages, full of glyphs, iconographic symbols, and the remnants of the Aztec language, bear witness to the highly sophisticated agricultural practices of Indigenous peoples in Mexico and Central America. The corn god is represented by Quetzalcóatl, and the book features, along with depictions of the

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Figure 7.4 Codex Borgia, c. AD 1500, Mexico. Courtesy of Vatican Apostolic Library.

goddesses of wind, f lowers, and water, a complex agricultural almanac. We now understand that by 6000 BC the Aztecs had domesticated common grass into maize.23 Their deep connection to the plant, the source of today’s corn, still exists throughout Mexico and Central America. According to activist and organic farmer Vandana Shiva, . . . All Indigenous people . . . the minimum we can claim is 10,000 years . . . 10,000 years we have farmed. One rhizome became hundreds of thousands of rhizomes . . . Maize, one teosinte became the thousands of maize varieties in Mexico and in Peru and in the First Nations of America. That brilliance of breeding is denied and the corporations here when I shoot a gene, I create a seed. It is so ontologically wrong, but it’s also ethically wrong and epistemologically wrong. So, when you asked

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me what I’m critical of, I’m critical of the worldview of arrogance, the worldview that came with colonialism.24

Figure 7.5 Ana Quiroz, “Diatrabos Plásticos” installation. Mexico (2001–06).

Mexican artist Anna Quiroz celebrates her cultural history in painstakingly ornate sculptures, often created with dangerously sharp glass shards. One such object, from the series X-Tinct Species (2007), is built of bright red glass shards recreating the shape of a kernel or perhaps mushroom. Her

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series, “Diatrabos Plásticos” (2001–06), recycles “nylon bags, glass containers, bottle caps, corks, rakes, wires, etc., just some of the infinite waste and misery of consumer culture,”25 into shapes resembling corn husks. So, the industrial culture is returned visually at least, to a material, agri-culture in its form. In another disturbing graphic work from the same period, a figure, possibly a farmer, leans forward heavily with the giant burden of an oversized corn stalk on this back. In lieu of kernels, the graphic design inserts dozens of skulls. Quiroz refers to an earlier anonymous graphic design from 2015, which remembers the death of 43 students killed in a police massacre the year before. In this work, a peasant figure of indigenous bearing holds with a rattle in one hand and in the other the straps to what seems to be a load of maize but instead is a coffin. The cross on the box has been altered in graffiti style to become the numbers 4 and 3. The disappearance of Indigenous activists, farmers, and students has become an international cause, especially as increasing numbers of environmentalists disappear each year. Prolific disappearances in the southern hemisphere, where issues of land rights and native sovereignty have led to clashes with government forces, are expressed in the rich visual tradition of Latino and LatinX graphic works. Protest art addressing struggles against corporate extractive energy and agriculture conglomerates is alive and well in southern countries. Quiroz’s artworks point to the generational fight of small farmers and Indigenous peoples over their right to grow their own food and keep their water clean for future generations. The connection to Meso-American memory and multi-cultural, interspecies communities is evident in the Great Tortilla Conspiracy, a project in California by the collective of artist-printmakers Rio Yañez, Jos Sances, and Art Hazelwood and conceived by the late René Yañez, Rio’s father. Tortillas are the cultural identity food of many Latino cultures, from Spain where they are made of potatoes and eggs in a quiche-like pancake, to Mexico, where they are adaptations of the indigenous corn-based f lat breads of the Aztecs. Using a f lour ground in stone mortars, tortillas are is similar to f lat breads that the northern American tribes make from acorns ground into meal. Identifying as Chicano artists, the collective’s idea stemmed from the rich Chicano art movement in Los Angeles in the 1980s, when the second- and thirdgeneration Mexican-American artists reclaimed their heritage. The idea for the Great Tortilla Conspiracy came about when the elder Yañez was asked to put an image of the iconic Frida Kahlo on a tortilla for an exhibition at the de Young Museum in San Francisco, which was to feature work by Cheech Marin. Drawing on street art and popular culture, the screen-printed images began to attract a following, which then led to community spaces being set up for the public to create their own designs, like those on t-shirts that could be heat transferred to the tortillas. The collective created edible inks from chocolate, food coloring, and natural f lavors, which made the events both

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popular and populist. Families lined up to create their own tortilla designs and emblems, which echoed the street art, murals, and car painting still found in bustling east Los Angeles neighborhoods today. Members of the collective thus acknowledge their ancient identity while connecting to contemporary youth and non-hierarchal populations and rejecting the elitism of museums and their audiences.

Notes 1 Randa Kakish, “Ancient Bread Stamps from Jordan,” Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry 14, no, 2 ( January 2014): 20. 2 “About [Tavros],” Tavros (website), https://tavros.space/about/. 3 “About [Tavros],” Tavros (website), https://tavros.space/about/. 4 See Locus Athens (website), http://locusathens.com/lcu/. 5 “[Bread Sessions],” Locus Athens/Tavros, https://tavros.space/projects/ bread-sessions/. 6 Paky Vlassopoulou, email message to Barbara Benish, June 22, 2021. 7 Paky Vlassopoulou, email message to Barbara Benish, June 22, 2021. 8 For more information see https://www.hypercomf.com/biosentinel 9 Lai made the statement in a label for her exhibition [MUSEO NAZIONALE DELLE ARTI DEL XXI SECOLO] at the Venice Biennale in 2017. 10 Katherine Waters, “On the Trail of Maria Lai in Sardinia,” Apollo, May 29, 2019, https://www.apollo-magazine.com/on-the-trail-of-maria-lai-in-sardinia/. 11 Different versions/translations of the Book of Revelations, variously mention ways of “eating the Word,” digesting it, then rejecting it in a visceral form. From the King James Version 10:9 And I went unto the angel, and said unto him, Give me the little book. And he said unto me, Take it, and eat it up; and it shall make thy belly bitter, but it shall be in thy mouth sweet as honey.10 And I took the little book out of the angel’s hand, and ate it up; and it was in my mouth sweet as honey: and as soon as I had eaten it, my belly was bitter. 12 Kevin West, “Will Work with Food,” Surface, December 8, 2017, https://www. surfacemag.com/articles/artists-using-food-in-art/. 13 Scott Alves Barton, “Repasting: A Metonymy,” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 15, no. 2 ( January 2019): 1–19, http://liminalities.net/15-2/ metonymy.pdf. 14 Barton, “Repasting,” 1. 15 Nicola Perullo, Taste as Experience: The Philosophy and Aesthetics of Food (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 16 Raymond D. Boisvert and Lisa Heldke, Philosophers at Table: On Food and Being Human (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 2. 17 Waters made the statement in a live interview event with Michael Pollan, [We Are What We Eat: A Slow Food Manifesto], [University of California, Santa Cruz Humanities Department and Santa Cruz Bookstore], June 1, 2021. 18 See: Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food (Penguin Books, 2009) 19 Barton, “Repasting,” 2. 20 From the artists’ website: https://baharbehbahani.com/public_art-bread.html 21 “Bread Project,” Bahar Behbahani (website,) https://www.baharbehbahani. com/public_art-bread.html. 22 “Cookbook of Gestures,” Sarah K. Khan (website), http://sarahkkhan.com/ portfolio/a-multimedia-cookbook-of-gestures/.

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23 Ellis Helen Burgos, PhD thesis, UCLA. [Aztec Science: Plant Sexuality, Pollination and Maizes’ Origin in the pre-Columbian Codex Borgia. Boulder, CO: University of Colorado Press, [in preparation]. 24 “Vandana Shiva and the Hubris of Manipulating Nature,” interview recorded on July 30, 2021, Climate One, https://www.climateone.org/events/ vandana-shiva-and-hubris-manipulating-nature. 25 From the artist’s website: http://anaquiroz.com/index.php/portfolio_page/ diatribas-plasticas-2001-2006/

Bibliography Barton, Scott Alves. “Repasting: A Metonymy,” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 15, no. 2 ( January 2019): 1–19, http://liminalities.net/15-2/metonymy.pdf. Boisvert, Raymond D., and Lisa Heldke, Philosophers at Table: On Food and Being Human. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Book of Revelations, Chapter 1:1. King James Version. Burgos, Ellis Helen. “Aztec Science: Plant Sexuality, Pollination and Maizes’ Origin in the Pre-Columbian Codex Borgia,” PhD thesis, UCLA. Boulder, CO: University of Colorado Press, in preparation. Kakish, Randa. “Ancient Bread Stamps from Jordan,” Mediterranean Archaeology and Archaeometry 14, no, 2 ( January 2014): 20. Perullo, Nicola. Taste as Experience: The Philosophy and Aesthetics of Food. New York: Columbia University Press, 2016. Pollan, Michael. [We Are What We Eat: A Slow Food Manifesto], [University of California, Santa Cruz Humanities Department and Santa Cruz Bookstore], June 1, 2021. Waters, Katherine. “On the Trail of Maria Lai in Sardinia,” Apollo, May 29, 2019, https://www.apollo-magazine.com/on-the-trail-of-maria-lai-in-sardinia/. West, Kevin. “Will Work with Food,” Surface, December 8, 2017, https://www. surfacemag.com/articles/artists-using-food-in-art/.

8

In-Between Places

The links between art and territories are marked by hybridization. Artistic initiatives may drive territorialization processes (such as “artialization,” or the staging of art and/or tourism, and territorial development), and a territory can be used as a source of inspiration, location, or even material for an artistic practice (as in land art, artistic cartography, and art in public spaces). But beyond these dynamics, we also see hybrid experiences in which art merges with the logic of territories or forms the basis of aesthetic and sensitive mapping processes, enabling artists and territorial actors to express themselves and jointly understand one or more territories. Research-creation becomes a method of producing geographical knowledge in a different way. Art becomes more territorial—that is, it begins to reinforce links with various economic, social, political, cultural, environmental, and topographical components of the territory. We will therefore look at the extent to which the territorialization of art contributes to an “ecologization” of artistic practices—that is, to more effective territorialized ecosystemic processes. As we have discussed in earlier chapters, artists “engineer” territories in a special way. In addition to their ability to work on different scales, artists deploy a singular desire to work with people in different trades and social and professional practices, such as urban planners and developers, scientists and experts, and inhabitants. Territory provides a context that affects the production of art and vice versa. Art then f leshes out the link between imagination and transformation. Thus an “art-use value” is acquired on site in the territory itself. Let us provide a few brief examples. Among the leading pioneers of the ecological art movement, the studio of Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison (see Chapter 3) has worked with scientists for nearly 40 years to support collaborative and creative solutions to environmental problems. From 1970, when they created Making Earth, which addressed the cleansing of polluted land, until 2009, when the multi-media installation Greenhouse Britain was exhibited at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York City, the Harrisons have contributed to planning and public policy and the development of plans of action. For example, their Vision for the Green Heart of Holland was proposed to the Minister of the environment in 1995. This artistic work and the line made in the image defining the Green Heart is now part of official Dutch maps.1

DOI: 10.4324/9780367433710-9

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The imprint of art on the territory is felt directly in the planning ambitions of the Harrisons and the essentially political gesture of placing the protection of nature at the heart of the country’s development. The nascent Walden Performing Arts Collective near Boston is typical of this type of landscape-focused work. Composed of a biologist, philosopher, mime artist, playwright, and art producer, the Walden Collective designs theatrical landscape experiences, which involve fairly academic performance lectures, storytelling, theater and mime, and land-art interventions or installations. In offering different coexisting media perspectives and manipulating landscape experiences, the Walden Collective attempts to create a more acute awareness of the value, significance, and vulnerability of our natural environment.2 Another example is Waterlanders, a Dutch artists’ collective that specializes in creating specific art and theater on site. It has developed events for internationally renowned festivals and performed at a wide range of venues, including empty factories, forests, beaches, bars, churches, and museums. Waterlanders has several small shows as well as a lot of commissioned work to its credit.3 Jony Easterby’s artistic work on landscape and architecture in the United Kingdom explores the boundaries between raw materials, natural dynamics, sound technology, and composition. Drawing on a wide range of artistic expertise, his projects include sound sculptures, audiovisual installations, architectural constructions, and the artistic direction of large-scale performance projects. Remnant Ecologies is a series of outdoor sound works that Easterby has developed over the last four years as an artistic response to growing anxiety over our relationship with the natural world. Finally, Collectif Etc, which emerged in Strasbourg in September 2009, channels its energies into a dynamic of questioning urban space. Organized from the outset as an association, the group is made up of a dozen architects, including the founders, who are all from the same school of architecture, the Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Strasbourg. One of their founding projects was Détour de France, a year-long bike trip around France that had two objectives: meeting architects who had taken a step back to becoming involved in “citizen production of the city,” and participating in project situations by working for a few days or weeks with some of these groups associating architects and city dwellers. Since completing this experiment, Collectif Etc has deployed about 60 initiatives both inside and outside of France. These experiences combine self-builds and do-it-yourself projects. Collectif Etc contributes to the production of ephemeral architecture that links experiments and partying, artistic, and architectural residencies. Collectif Etc aims at factoring the idea of the producer-inhabitant. These artists-urban planners-architects also invented “situations” that gave rise to new forms of civic involvement.4 Collectif Etc imagines that collective fictions can be powerful drivers for transforming the environment. In 2012, in the Blosne district of Rennes, it took up residence in a small wood and proposed to “re-enchant” it by creating huts, fables, and animal masks. The participants played on popular imagination of the enchanted wood.

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According to Paul Ricoeur, history incorporates the heterogeneity of affects and events and weaves them into a meaningful narrative that transforms the subject-object relationship.5 Territories also have a wealth of narratives. By building architectural objects, it is possible to spatially mobilize people in a given situation and get them participating in the production of the environment. The invitation to participate extends to all the inhabitants of a territory, as was the case in the small village of Châteldon, located between Thiers and Vichy. For six months, Collectif Etc took up residence in Châteldon, and its activities ranged from meeting people to making recommendations for action to prototyping proposals. Other architectural collectives, such as Bellastock and Le Bruit du Frigo, have a similar focus. However, research-creation involving the territory is limited by the ability of those who govern these territories to share power.”6 If these different works are to be part of a remodeling of the territory (or territories) or a dialogue with its inhabitants based on its production, involving artists in the production of the food territory (or territories) ref lects very different issues, as shown by the examples provided.

Greece to Italy via the Czech Republic and Spain We have already spoken of three very different projects in Greece that place food, and bread in particular, at the center of the territory. The projects involve two territories: Tavros, a working-class district of Athens, where a project and art space established in the territory partners with that municipality as well as the communities and people living in the territory; and the island of Tinos and its inhabitants, where the Hypercomf collective harnesses the territory and different vegetation that grows there to produce fermented food products. Hypercomf also attempts to produce these same ingredients for fermentation from the vegetation of Athens, which it hopes will be a source of food. In this way, both rural and urban territories are engaged in the Tavros mission of transforming and respecting local cultures. The Czech NGO ArtMill focused on supermarket food for The Table and The Territory project in 2019. The changes that occurred in Czechoslovakia and other former Soviet Bloc countries of Central Europe, after 1989 were somewhat the opposite of what happened in many other Western countries, in that supermarkets seemed a luxury because of the previous scarcity of food and the way it was produced in rural areas of the country. When supermarkets popped up in regions at a distance from Prague, they became status symbols. ArtMill wanted to work with local people to help them rediscover the joy of growing their own food. Thus, the young people at ArtMill worked not only on ways to create gardens for growing food, but also on food transport systems, food packaging, and the environmental impact of transporting food in trucks. For example, young people in the region brought seeds from their grandmothers’ gardens to put in a seed bank. A handbook or sort of step-bystep guide was produced on growing one’s own garden on a tiny parcel of land.

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Various performances and artworks on this theme were also produced at ArtMill, as outlined in earlier chapters. For example, the American-born, half-Welsh artist Denise Davis displayed an acorn collection basket in the Art Barn. She had learned to collect and store acorns for food, an ancient food practice drawn from the local environment that was actually Celtic in origin as well as her own Indigenous culture of California (Mountain Maidu). The pleasure of food and the territory was usually interpreted literally. The Czech artist Martin Zet joined and produced a work that links the earth and the materiality of bodies. Tomáš and Andrea Hrůza, two artists based in Prague, embarked on a year-round project with local villagers to find traditional Czech recipes still in use in the countryside. They put together a recipe book and proposed to convert a local bus stop into a small farmers’ market, where local farmers can drop off their produce in a small shared space instead of having to go to the supermarket to sell their products. In Spain, INLAND-Campo Adentro is a collaborative platform that since 2010 has connected art workers, cultural producers, and farm producers. It is a form of artistic institution that gives its backing to different missions involved in the production of knowledge, including, for example, publications and training about pastoralism. INLAND has run a school for shepherds since 2005, operating first in Madrid and then in the surrounding mountains. Over 100 people have applied to the training course, which shows growing interest in these forms of life and culture. Some members of the INLAND platform studied 22 villages in various locations across the country, ranging from the mountains of rural northern Spain (minifúndio) to the large productive territories in southern Spain (latifúndio). The artistic collective has also published books and made cheese, especially in the mountains, where its efforts are headed by study groups and have contributed to an international movement to renew pastoral populations. INLAND is somewhere between a start-up, a social movement, and a retreat. It works differently in each village that it visits. In its early years, between 2010 and 2013, its members worked with local people to organize weekly village market, for example. This work with villagers was the subject of an exhibition in Madrid, which highlighted the importance of villages by putting them at the heart of public debate in museums. INLAND also showcases the importance for cities of sustainable food production in the country. Students joining the project are from a university of architecture and design. The village has even become an international cultural production forum attracting architects, landscape engineers, and artists from European universities. The Madrid site is becoming an important epicenter for testing methodologies and bringing city dwellers closer to the land. The fact that it is outdoors works very well and allows people to learn about transhumance— that is, the seasonal movement of herds from the north to the south of Spain. One of the artists in residence, Stefan Laxness, is from Forensic Architecture, a London-based collective that studies land use in terms of environmental restoration, especially in sparsely populated areas of Spain. He f lies a helium balloon equipped with a camera that produces chromatography. This tool,

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which produces something similar to an aerial view, except that the balloon starts from the ground, helps the artist understand changes in ground vegetation. Laxness asked to work with a village involved in transforming a eucalyptus monoculture into an edible forest. Native forest and other species such as cherry, chestnut, and oak, can be combined with food crops. As part

Figure 8.1 Casa de Campo/INLAND Collective, sheep grazing project by Campo Adentro in Retiro Park, Madrid, Spain.

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of The Table and the Territory, Campo Adentro even organized a workshop to build an enclosure for sheep that can be put to other uses. According to Fernando Dory-Garcia, visual artist and one of the main coordinators of the deployment of INLAND and The Table and the Territory, such a research-creation necessarily involves relationships with local elected officials, since the territory gets involved in rural and urban social transformation processes. However, it is notable that these relationships differ across different scales, from local and regional to national governments. There are many ways to leverage the local environment to create a stir in the international arts community. Political party ideologies are diluted at the local level, and as a result, people and neighborhood relationships are what really count. At the regional scale, though, the Madrid City Council struggles to understand the meaning of such projects, the artist being considered as a catalyst of social and natural processes. Campo Adentro also works with supranational organizations such as the Food and Agriculture Organization or the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification. As a result of this gathering, the movement has established a global organization, the World Alliance of Mobile Indigenous Pastoralists, currently registered in Switzerland. It hopes to organize a symbolic international shepherd and nomad year to promote this forgotten way of life at the level of national, regional, and local governments. Agrocraft This preoccupation with territory (or territories) echoes the latest trends in art, which is once again grappling with the utopian challenges of social transformation, although in a concerted manner, as Campo Adentro demonstrates in its cheesemaking and training for shepherds. Since the European Renaissance, art and life and art and craft have gradually separated, but the contemporary period is forcing us to rethink this separation. Food allows artists, as cultural producers, to connect to the most visceral aspects of bodies. Food also allows artists to get close to the metabolism of not only bodies, but of the earth itself, including growth and decomposition. Food is a way of grasping these connections between bodies and natures. A food production model is a form of cultural expression, and artists and their cultural creations can have an inf luence on rethinking the model. “Terroir” equals culinary identity. A terroir is the result of the crossings between a productive land and a local culture of food. That is part of the link to the land and how this link can be spelled out meaningfully. To be certain, rural populations have declined considerably, to the point that they make up only a small portion (between 2 and 7 percent) of working populations in western European countries. In contrast, farmers in Greece and Romania still account for between 30 and 45 percent of the working population.7 The agricultural model shows the disconnection of urban dwellers from useful craft-based skills in a period of ecological breakdown. In Turin, Parco Arte Vivante (PAV), located in an old industrial and automotive district, comprises a central building and a 23,000-square-meter

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park with a permanent collection of open-air art. This “living art” park was designed in the mid-2000s by a group headed by artist Piero Gilardi, who was convinced of the importance of links to nature. Although art is often perceived as a tool of urban regeneration and an instrument for increasing local real estate values, often without adding any real awareness of the territory or its citizens, the Merio Furi district of Turin is still not a creative district. However, after almost 15 years’ existence, PAV has demonstrated a real investment in building the local community. Gilardi’s work highlights the importance of stimulating critical thinking with research and education as pillars of environmental practices. PAV’s exhibitions and workshops cover different fields of research, ranging from creative biology to herbalism to aesthetic research on the relationship of humans and nature. PAV’s collaboration with curator Marco Scotini began in 2014 with its Vegetation as Political Agent exhibition, which was based on the idea that plants are not neutral and are bound up with power dynamics. For example, plants played an especially important role in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when navigators and explorers sent out to discover the world by colonial empires transformed the planet’s f lora and fauna. After they were brought back to zoos and botanical conservatories, some species ended up spreading all over the world, sometimes in an invasive and aggressive manner that is still a challenge today. The exhibition also focused on the other end of the spectrum—that is, communities that built alliances with plants from the 1970s onwards to demonstrate their political resistance to oppression. PAV can therefore be considered as serving as a laboratory for art and ecology-related research insofar as it challenges different ways of living at the periphery of urban and rural space. The artists Andreo Caretto and Raffaella Spagna have worked with PAV since its beginning and in 2006 were in charge of the first workshop held at the future center’s construction site. Pedogenesis, their biggest project, studies soil as a space of relationships. Organic and inorganic matter comes into contact in soil, triggering metamorphoses and exchanges between solid, liquid, and gaseous matter. But for these artists the encounter with the soil is primarily aesthetic and sensitive—“aesthetic” in the original sense of the Greek word aisthēsis, perceived through the senses. Their attraction to soil was instinctive, a confrontation with the dynamic of exchange and transformation between the organic and the inorganic, living and non-living matter. Caretto and Spagna depicted the soil production process, or pedogenesis, in two closely related components. The Transmuter of Organic Matter is a composter only a few meters high, while the Vegetable Garden Ark is a 20-meter-wide inverted arch made of plants. Both components are built from modular galvanized iron components typical of those used by farmers to build tunnel greenhouses, which are very common in the agricultural landscape of Piedmont (not only the Po Valley). For the artists, farmers are

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the most important, most legitimate landscape architects, and their installation acts as a catalyst for sensitive encounters between people, places, and materials. In The Transmuter of Organic Matter, the tunnel greenhouse is folded into a sort of toroid, like a particle accelerator. Citizens living in the area and people working at PAV were invited to put organic waste in the composter inside the greenhouse and, during the first two years, received a certain amount of free food in exchange for their compost. Organic waste and food were thus put on a similar footing in terms of value. Are they not composed of basically the same constantly changing materials? The transmuter transforms organic matter into compost that fertilizes the soil of the installation’s other component, the Vegetable Garden Ark. This is an inverted or sort of upside-down tunnel greenhouse that separates the vegetable patch from the public space. The greenhouse excludes the outside environment as a sort of arch, like a big, welcoming, and inclusive whale skeleton. The land bounded by the ark is a vegetable garden cultivated by people from Turin who are chosen by lottery. A second project, Esculenta, named after the Latin word for “edible things,” edere, “to eat,” began in 2002 to collect edible foods. Esculenta focuses on the natural and ancient impulse to gather things in nature to sustain and nurture our existence and physical vitality. It is a collective project insofar

Figure 8.2 The climbing gardens at the PAV center in Turin, Italy. Photograph by authors.

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as different people may immerse themselves in the landscape in which food is collected. With Esculenta, feeding oneself is seen as the most radical example of the inter-specific relationship. The “other,” whether vegetable, animal or mineral, is actually transformed into the human body in a carnal encounter. This deep-seated encounter with otherness is central to ecology. For Caretto and Spagna, ecology is not only an environmental discipline but a concept that concerns the meaning of things at their most fundamental level. Ecology is bound up with ontology, becoming eco- ontology. Esculenta is both a project and a term that has proved to be highly relevant. It focuses on the micro level of individual plant specimens but ends up being about a larger landscape and the relationship between different species and different environments, topographies, plants, and communities. Esculenta is a collective project open to anyone interested in the process. The arrangements and degrees of involvement vary enormously depending on the activities, which include collecting, treating, and processing natural materials, preserving raw materials, culinary experiments, and individual and collective contributions of knowledge and information. The project, which has reenacted in numerous artistic contexts as well as by foundations, museums, and other institutions, is used not just to display process-related documentation but to involve new people in direct initiatives and experiences in different territories. There are numerous other special places where a new relationship to edibles and nature is reinvented involving artists and artistic work. Such a place is the La Mhotte farm in France. Built in the nineteenth century, this farm is linked historically to a dozen farms in the vicinity, with which it has maintained more or less strong contacts. The estate has about 50 hectares along with many buildings that allow for individual and collective housing and work. Until the 1960s, the farm was a place of residence and activity for about 40 people. The living conditions were sometimes very precarious, as the living quarters did not always have heat or running water. Operating as a breeding farm until 1990, the La Mhotte farm was bought in December 1991 by a group of subscribers, friends, and supporters of anthroposophical initiatives in Allier, who formed a formal farmers group (société civile agricole), with about 50 shareholders. The group was associated with some social experiments at the end of the 1970s that took place on an adjoining property at a self-managed school, the Home Michaël, housed in the castle of La Mhotte, which followed the Rudolf Steiner pedagogical model. The intent of the purchase was to create a “third pillar” to complete the other social research initiatives formed by the school and the farm of Béguets, a biodynamic farm. After long discussions, during which different solutions were examined to settle the question of ownership of the farm and establish a shared governance, it was collectively agreed by the users of the La Mhotte farm to set up a common governance tool and donate the shares held by the farm’s legal entities to the Terres Franches Endowment Fund, whose goal is to take the land and buildings out of the ownership. A collective

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of administrators, including the inhabitants and assets of the place, was set up in 2012 including artists Bureau d’Études. Today, the La Mhotte farm is managed and organized by an association. Since the 1980s, the La Mhotte farm of has participated in the creation of a social and educational experimentation zone around Saint Menoux. It contributes to the formation of a territory of projects and serves as a social, agricultural, and cultural incubator with surrounding farms. This dynamic is tasked with restructuring itself so as to be inserted into the local environment. The La Mhotte farm exemplifies the experience of a community that survived in the midst of collapse and continues to open up habitable space. The community did not fantasize about a return to something. Instead, the La Mhotte farm relied on the experience of a certain reality to make this experience the collective condition of the world’s habitability. This critical community established a form of life in realizing social principles other than those dominant in society. Existing principles were questioned in the name of other principles that aimed to be generalized. They provoked social reorganizations. The La Mhotte farm is in the tradition of nineteenth- or early twentieth-century rural communities and anarchist colonies known as “utopian.” However, such communinities are first and foremost a response to the conditions of existence, whether they are current or anticipated. These resilient microsystems, subject to the unpredictable variations of the ecosystem and of industrial society, do not claim to be a model that can be repeated or enlarged. Nor do they claim to embody an ideal society on a small scale. They know they are finite, imperfect, in the process of becoming, and constituting themselves very slowly, through trial and error, in uncertainty and contingency.

The Transformation of the Parisian Urban Periphery While urban agriculture involves growing plants and breeding animals in locations in and around cities, from vacant land to orchards, gardens, and balconies, the term also refers to the products of these spaces and the way in which they are grown. In France and elsewhere, the agricultural periphery—fields, orchards, and gardens—were long used to ensure food supplies in the event of shortages or a siege.8 However, demographic pressure has caused agricultural areas to gradually be pushed out of cities and become peripheral market garden strips or orchards. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, natural landscapes were increasingly used merely to beautify cities. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the arrival of heavy industry and infrastructure intended to serve the capital favored the construction of roads and links that helped create a significant physical and symbolic break between cities and countryside. The rural areas surrounding the city became suburbs and the countryside was pushed out a long way from the large urban centers. But during the Industrial Revolution, the first French workers’ allotments were created to overcome

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the “idleness” of rural populations that had come into the city to provide labor. The allotments had a multifunctional—that is, social, cultural, and environmental—character.9 But in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and especially after World War II, these urban and suburban market gardens gradually disappeared as a result of industrialization and urbanization. Allotments become family gardens, managed by nonprofit associations: with the return of prosperity, the food-production role of the gardens lost its importance, and they were above all leisure spaces much appreciated by their working-class inhabitants.10 But eventually, as a result of the economic crises in the twentieth century, it once again became essential for cities to feed their populations, and food-producing urban districts reappeared in Europe and North America. Against this backdrop of profound transformation, a decision was taken to maintain agricultural activity and biodiversity in the metropolis. The decision ref lected multiple warnings from international bodies about climate change, as well as the agricultural and working-class values that form part of the legacy of the area’s powerful history. Citizens must become responsible consumers, and urban agriculture is once again back on the agenda. A growing number of initiatives, such as the Parisculteurs competition in Paris, are supported by public authorities, who see them as a way to achieve their sustainable development objectives. At present, the peripheral areas are growing more quickly than cities themselves. These areas provide land reserves for urban development and transform “socio-spatial” relations and “urban organization . . . as a whole.”11 Urban sprawl is characterized by a significant increase in the urbanized area, which chips away at natural areas and agricultural areas in particular. In France, over a long period, soil sealing consumes tens of thousands of hectares of land every year.12 In peri-urban areas, under-utilized brownfield sites are being built upon, driven by land revaluation.13 According to a study published in 2016 by the regional and interdepartmental office of Food, Agriculture, and Forestry, in the early 1970s, 30 percent of farms in the Paris region were still involved in specialized fruit and vegetable production. In 2000, this figure was only 12 percent and by 2010 had dropped to 9 percent. This trend went hand in hand with development and urban planning projects that left nature essentially with an ornamental and recreational function. As such, we need to distinguish between urban agriculture in countries where it is used exclusively for food production purposes, and agriculture in the cities, where it has a recreational and social function, although this dichotomy only partially ref lects reality.14 Indeed, there has been renewed interest in urban agriculture since the 2008 economic crisis and growing awareness of climate change and the importance of ecological transition. Numerous initiatives have developed, including private vegetable gardens (or window boxes at the very least), shared gardens that focus on the origin of products, and an increasing tendency to promote short circuits for food consumption.

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These changes create opportunities as well as inequalities and conf licts. Conf licts occur in the limits of contradictions between activities, spaces, and the perceptions of others, and, as Georg Simmel puts it, they “are one of the most active forms of socialization.” Conf licts make it possible to shift from an optic of “against others” to “for others,” which is the negation of unity and the observation of a vibrant society.15 As Coline Biot ultimately concludes,16 the Paris basin remains an important agricultural area, as urban territory represents only 28 percent of its surface, while agricultural land represents 48 percent (569,000 hectares) (the remaining 24 percent is occupied by woods, forests, ponds, and rivers). The regional council is committed to supporting this important food sector and ensuring that it is both productive and sustainable. A regional agricultural pact is currently being prepared to boost support for young farmers, develop short circuits between food production and consumption, preserve agricultural land, and help with training in agricultural professions. The region invested €33 million (approximately $38 million) in agriculture and rurality in 2017, and in November of the same year approved an “innovation” agreement with the Île-de-France Chamber of Agriculture (Greater Paris region), which was designed to boost the competitiveness and the economic and environmental performance of farms via new technologies while providing support for innovative projects and local circuits. It is interesting to note that in ten years, the amount of land being used for organic production in the Paris region has almost tripled, from 3,904 hectares in 2004 to 9,445 hectares in 2014.

A Territory in Search of an Identity Given these general developments, the history of the territory of Saint-Denis in particular shows how artists and the positions they adopt respond to choices made over centuries. As early as the twelfth century, the growth of Paris led to both increased demand for agricultural products and a reduction in arable land, which increased the value of the marshes located on the old branch of the River Seine. In the Middle Ages, Plaine-Saint-Denis and the territories further north already performed key functions for the city of Paris. The religious function was performed by the Abbey of Saint-Denis, which became the necropolis of the kings of France. Indeed, Saint Denis was the patron saint of the king, and his entire kingdom and the town was a place of pilgrimage and a burial ground especially valued by the royal families from the seventh century until the French Revolution in 1789.17 However, Plaine-Saint-Denis’s importance was ensured more by its natural resources, especially water. Plaine-Saint-Denis was a major supplier of fruit and vegetables to the city of Paris and neighboring areas.18 Renowned for open field vegetables, the Plaine des Vertus (Plain of Virtues), which mainly covered Aubervilliers and La Courneuve, had the same agricultural

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functions from the fourteenth to the early twentieth centuries. According to Jean Jacques Péru, who headed up the ethnology mission of the local vegetable eco-museum, until 1876 Les Vertus was the largest vegetable growing plain in France. The development of Gennevilliers subsequently came to compete with it, and both urbanization and industrialization pushed vegetable growers further and further out.19 A site was especially reserved for growers in the ancient Parisian Halles, the old fruit and vegetable market that operated from 1183 through 1971.20 Every day, these growers came into the city to sell their produce.21 Other towns around Paris, such as Bonneuil en France, Gonesse, and Bobigny, were also important and recognized centers of food production. The Saint-Denis area developed a cloth industry as early as the thirteenth century, attracting many people from the surrounding towns (including Clichy, Aubervilliers, Aulnay, Stains, Villetaneuse, and Sarcelles).22 The first wave of heavy industry arrived in the nineteenth century. In 1843, as part of the industrial and urban development of the capital, the railway arrived in Saint-Denis, paving the way for numerous factories in the area, which became a center of industry, particularly in the fields of chemicals, metallurgy, energy (especially gas), and manufacturing (such as glass, textiles, and foodstuffs). Railways were also built in many other towns in the future SeineSaint-Denis department (created in 1968), enabling them to make the most of the industrial revolution. The neighborhoods of La Plaine and Pleyel were among the largest industrial zones in Europe.23 This industrialization policy also gave rise to a housing policy, particularly during the twentieth century, as housing had to be found for a workforce largely made up of immigrants. The policy of building large housing complexes in the wake of the World War II had a strong impact on urban planning in the municipalities of what would become the Plaine Commune urban community. The first social housing projects were launched in 1946 in the heart of downtown areas on land formerly used for market gardening.24 In political terms, Plaine is an emblematic territory in Paris’s “red” suburbs. In the interwar period, the Communist Party made Plaine one of its strongholds. Saint-Denis, Stains, Pierrefitte, Villetaneuse, and Epinay elected communist mayors, and all of the communes of the present-day urban community authority were led by communist mayors between 1945 and 2001.25 However, in the mid-1970s, the economic crisis challenged the way in which these red suburbs operated by cutting off the resources of municipal communism. Despite attempts to withstand deindustrialization, many businesses went bankrupt and the territory lost much of its population, which also became much poorer. This former red industrial heartland at the gates of Paris26 underwent massive deindustrialization as, for example, 103 large companies closed between 1968 and 1980 in La Plaine, a commune of Saint-Denis. Entire sectors of industry have disappeared, including metallurgy, chemicals, and machine tools, replaced by industrial wastelands. Collective gardens,

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which had f lourished during World War II as a means of alleviating supply difficulties, have been revived.27 In the 1990s, the territory underwent a major transformation.28 The local communist elite departed from the orthodox party line to propose a “reformist” alternative. In 1985, local elected representatives reacted to territorial changes by creating an inter-municipal authority, Plaine Renaissance, the crucible of the earlier urban community authority set up in 2001, which has comprised nine municipalities since Saint-Ouen joined in 2013. After 2005 the territory became the largest intermunicipal authority in the Greater Paris region under the presidency of Patrick Braouzec. Saint-Denis, Stains, Pierrefitte-sur-Seine, Épinay-sur-Seine, L’Île-Saint-Denis, La Courneuve, Saint-Ouen, Villetaneuse, and Aubervilliers make up the public authority, Etablissement Public Territorial de Plaine Commune. With a population of approximately 411,000, it is a territory in the midst of a massive transformation and the most dynamic area of the Greater Paris region, especially in sectors such as economic development, urban planning, culture, and neighborhood renovation. The intermunicipal authority is tackling territorial transformation by harnessing land opportunities arising from deindustrialization. It is an entrepreneurial strategy aimed at economic development: service providers and high-value-added companies are arriving in large numbers. The construction of Stade de France for the 1998 World Cup in football spearheaded its positioning strategy, and the new industrial and urban dynamics of Plaine Commune are driving an increase in population. Plaine Commune is now a public authority within Greater Paris. The territory continues to witness rapid and radical changes; after deindustrialization, which led to a deterioration in the living environment, urban dynamics are shaking up the local landscape. There are very many unemployed people and foreigners, mainly young people, and the city’s population is marked by serious inequalities. More than 140 nationalities29 (versus 120 in Saint-Denis and 178 in Paris City) have been identified in Plaine Commune, with people of African origin among the most numerous. In Greater Paris, as part of a territorial development agreement signed with local councils and the central government, Plaine Commune has been recognized as a “territory of culture and creativity.” The public authority is especially dynamic in the arts and culture, as ref lected in a multitude of cultural and artistic venues and projects as well as heritage sites. Saint-Denis has real dynamism, driven by the numerous associations and collectives that have long been present in the city and more broadly in Seine-Saint-Denis department. In 2011, according to a report by Île-de-France prefecture in Greater Paris, the associations of Seine-Saint-Denis represented 10 percent of all associations in the Paris region. This association-based culture stems from the department’s working-class history. Among the commitments made by the city council is a pledge to host and help associations, cooperatives, and structures by integrating them as much as possible as vital stakeholders in the social and economic development of the city.

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Figure 8.3 Permaculture gardens, Zone Sensible, Seine-Saint-Denis, France. Photo credit: by Andrea Mantovani. Courtesy of Zone Sensible.

The Wager of an Artist-Beekeeper The owners of Saint-Denis Urban Farm therefore wish to turn it into an “atypical cultural amenity,” enhancing both the agricultural heritage and offering and artistic and cultural services and activities. This puts them in step with the strategic development objectives of Plaine Commune. Finally, since expertise in managing cultural facilities is now subject to public policy and local amenity pooling agreements (to offer inhabitants a quality and egalitarian public service), Saint-Denis Urban Farm is of even more benefit from an intermunicipal perspective and among public authorities. As early as 1983, the Saint-Denis local council acquired 3.7 hectares of local land belonging to a Breton family of market gardeners, the Kersantés.30 The idea was to preserve this plot, a pledge that was confirmed in 1998 when the land was reclassified as part of the city heritage. A construction ban was put on the land in the local council’s 2016 Local Urbanization Plan. When Mr. Kersanté retired, the council arranged to transfer the management of the farm by issuing a call for bids. The council wanted to develop organic farming and to do so had to have the soil tested by experts. The analyses revealed that the soil was contaminated with lead. The pollution is thought to have been caused by mud brought from Paris by the farmers who sold their produce there and recovered fertilizer for their land, unaware that it had been polluted by industrial activities in the capital. The pollution was probably also

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linked to the industrial history of Saint-Denis itself, especially the development of polluting industries such as chemicals and hydrocarbons. The other challenge to the council was to ensure that the land’s administrative structures were both viable and in step with the council’s wish to encourage short-circuit market gardening and food-based commerce. The council wanted the new operators to continue to sell the farm’s produce on the open market, as Mr. Kersanté had done. The farm was intended to become a resource for raising awareness and educating both children and adults about agriculture, food, and sustainable development, particularly the preservation of biodiversity. The ultimate aim was to inform people about healthier eating. The council deemed the food offering available in Saint-Denis too limited, with most restaurants serving fast food, and few shops offering organic or local produce from the Paris region or elsewhere in France. Cécile Ranguin, the deputy mayor, claims that showcasing urban agriculture allows us to combat and raise awareness of junk food, because this is currently a real problem. We believe that people really want to be informed because it is also about their health. We feel that people are increasingly interested in what they consume.31 Whether it is a fight against massive concrete developments in the city or making access healthier local food easier, Rangin notes that for several years residents have come up with an increasing number of initiatives. For example, in La Plaine, as soon as there is wasteland, people jump at the opportunity to do something other than just build on it. Right in the town center, there is a project to give a small plot over to market gardening. Associations are requesting permission to develop urban agriculture on the rooftops of city buildings. Cooperatives are emerging together with food stores managed by local people . . . and this all demonstrates that there is both a demand and an awareness.32 Michel Ribay, deputy mayor for energy, air, and climate in the Porte de Paris, Pleyel, and Conf luence neighborhoods, believes that in this extremely densely populated and polluted city, the greening of space is of benefit in the “fight against the effects of heat islands” and represents “a solution to urban sprawl.” The aim is “developing spaces that restore the day-to-day quality of life.”33 In response to the call for bids, the council selected two very different structures to take over the running of the former Kersanté farm, which is now known as Saint-Denis Urban Farm. One was a local association, the Poetic Party, and the other was an agricultural company from the Yvelines department called the Gally Farm. These two groups decided to submit a joint bid, believing that their differences would actually be a strength in terms of managing the farm. In their agreement with the local council, which

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remains the owner of the land, the Poetic Party and the Gally Farm will continue market gardening and the sale of produce to local inhabitants. They also intend for the farm to become a resource for raising awareness and educating people about agriculture, food, and sustainable development. Each structure also has its own objectives. The Poetic Party aims to develop permaculture, a technique that harnesses biodiversity in an efficient and natural way and uses the land, referred to as a zone sensible (sensitive zone), as a place for artistic and cultural performances, such as open-air theater and cinema, concerts, and exhibitions. The Gally Farm wishes to demonstrate different agricultural techniques and showcase the market gardening and agricultural heritage of the farm and broader area. These two ambitions are fully in tune with the specific features of the area, its working-class past, and its current cultural diversity as a result of immigration. The founder of the Poetic Party, Olivier Darné, was born in the department of Seine-Saint-Denis and has lived in Saint-Denis itself since 1995. Since 1996, the visual artist has had a passion for bees, “those creatures that play such a crucial role in ecosystems and in agriculture.”34 He placed the first hive on his roof to produce honey and show local inhabitants that “SaintDenis could produce food.” For a few years, while he was learning about bees and beekeeping, he continued to install hives (up to eight) on his roof and collect honey. In 2000, he proposed installing an experimental hive on the roof of Saint-Denis Town Hall to combat the disappearance of bees. There are now 80 hives in the area and 6 million bees, making it the largest urban apiary in Europe. Since 2001, “Miel Béton” or “Concrete Honey,” a brand name that evokes the omnipresent concrete of Saint-Denis, is well known to locals and has received several awards. As part of the city pollination project, other hives have been added in Plaine Commune, and every year between 200 and 300 kilos of honey are sold on the sidewalks and in squares and theaters where beehives have been installed. In 2002, in response to an invitation, the artist installed beehives in the interior of the gallery and produced a graphic work for the façade. The exhibition is now out in the street. In 2003, harnessing the enthusiasm and media buzz generated by the Galeruche, as the exhibition was called, Darné installed 80,000 bees in various places in the region, notably Paris City. The big increase in the number of hives along with the 2005 Rendez-vous sous les abeilles (Let’s Meet under the Bees) project culminated in several exhibitions in France and abroad. In 2006, in collaboration with the Paris Pompidou Center, Darné installed an urban pollinator in front of the building and invited adults and children to come meet bees in complete safety. In Parc de la Villette, Darné enables people to participate in a luneur (honeymooner) on the sidewalks of Paris. Darné continues to work as a graphic designer, although conscious of the fact that these experiments are being appropriated by business, he is trying to adapt his approach. In 2003, together with other visual artist, and researcher colleagues, Darné created an association called the Poetic Party, with the aim of setting up a

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team to help him with his work on bees and, more particularly, research everything that bees and beekeeping can contribute from a societal perspective. In 2011, the Poetic Party created its first research space, the sensitive zone, in a 1920s workers’ house in the heart of Saint-Denis in the Bel Air neighborhood (near the Francs-Moisins and Joliot Curie neighborhoods) that they had renovated. The house also serves as their headquarters as well as an observatory of the city, and a place of ref lection, debate, and experimentation. Beehives are installed and local inhabitants are regularly invited to film screenings, performances, exhibitions, and meetings of citizens, artists, and experts, mainly on the theme of nature and bees. In 2009, the Poetic Party decided to create a banque du miel (honey bank). The idea was to bring together members to invest in the Poetic Party’s beekeeping activity. The honey produced and sold would be the return on investment. For Darné, this artistic project, which aimed to get people investing in the living environment—that is, “transform dead money into living bees”35 —quickly became a big hit with people, and investors f locked in from Seine-Saint-Denis, the rest of France, and even abroad. Clearly, Darné’s ideas were based on word games and symbols. Indeed, following the bee’s symbolic meaning as local territorial riches, the artist played on the French word butinage (gathering of pollen), which contains the word butin (loot), evoking the idea of shared wealth and resources. His “bee savings account”—or “bee-saving account”—was set up as a traditional bank account with the same aim: “to foster trust, speculate, multiply—and pollinate.” To get beyond the “industry of death” responsible for the massive dying out of bees, this art project, which encountered rapid success, transformed dead money into living bees. In 2012, the Poetic Party set up the banque de reines (queen bank) as an offshoot of the honey bank. The idea was to split eight hives off from a single hive and give them to f ledging beekeepers to help them get started.36 This “guarantee fund for the living environment” has led the Poetic Party to participate in numerous artistic residencies outside of France. In 2014, the famous French chef Alain Ducasse invited Darné for a meal in his iconic Plazza Athénée restaurant to learn more about the honey bank project. Olivier Darné seized the opportunity to draw the decorated chef ’s attention to the products used in his cooking: for example, were they produced locally and biodiversity-friendly? The artist also sought to highlight the untapped culinary riches of Seine-Saint-Denis.37 During this same period, the Poetic Party wanted not only to grow its business but also achieve long-term financial sustainability. The association eventually convinced Ducasse to work with it to establish a culinary academy in Saint-Denis.38 In 2016, just as the Poetic Party managed to gather sufficient resources and partners to create a culinary academy, the Saint-Denis City Council put out the call for tenders for the urban farm. Conscious of the environmental and societal potential of the farm, Darné was determined to submit a bid on behalf of the Poetic Party. Moreover, this project could be the perfect culmination

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of the collective’s work on biodiversity. A circular economy with the future culinary academy could be created: the academy would cook the fruit, vegetables, and plants grown at the farm and recycle the organic waste from the academy back to the farm.39 However, to get the project up and running, funds were needed to settle the debts of the previous operator, renovate and upgrade practically all of the farm buildings, and restart agricultural activity. Darné turned to an agricultural company that he knew well, which had sufficient funding and real experience in teaching people about agriculture: the Gally Farm.40 The company, also known simply as Gally, is a family business created in 1746 in Yvelines department. In the 1960s, the company began to diversify into horticulture, landscaping, educational activities, the delivery of fruit to businesses, garden center management, and a pick-your-own produce business run out of its large 50-hectare vegetable garden. Gally currently operates two large farms open to the public, one in Saint-Cyr and the other in Sartrouville in Yvelines department. In 2011, the company had 500 employees, 150 hectares of crops (including 60 hectares of specialized crops in the plain of Versailles), 7,000 square meters of selling area for the public, and 70,000 square meters of nurseries, workshops, and warehouses. By teaming up with the Poetic Party to run the Saint-Denis Urban Farm, Gally was bidding to extend its activities to the Seine-Saint-Denis area. It was the Gally Farm–Poetic Party proposal that ultimately convinced the local council to approve them as the new operators of Saint-Denis Urban Farm.41 To Grow a Food Hub Although the farm is operated as a whole, the two operators have very different structures, operations, and objectives. The Poetic Party is a French association under Law 1901 (i.e., a nonprofit organization) focused on art and environmental cultural projects, particularly in the area of beekeeping. Although Olivier Darné has demonstrated his commitment to biodiversity over a number of years, the Poetic Party had no track record in formal farming. The local council and the Poetic Party negotiated a 25-year lease, with no charge for rent, since it is regarded as a subsidy in kind that enabled the Poetic Party to set up its business on a hectare of land in financially sustainable conditions. Because the Gally Farm had more financial resources than the artists’ collective, it was ceded three-quarters of the farmland, i.e., 2.7 hectares, along with nearly all of the buildings, and pays rent to the Saint-Denis Council. However, to allow the public to visit in appropriate conditions and in accordance with safety standards, virtually the entire property needed to be renovated. As the council is still the owner and landlord, as part of a multi-annual investment program, it will fund part of the costs of renovation. However, the vast majority of this work will be paid for by the Gally Farm. Although they share the location and certain objectives (such as education, food production, and the preservation of farming activities), the two structures have each developed independent projects. The Poetic Party wishes to

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develop permaculture on their hectare of land and use the large open space to create a new sensitive zone—that is, install beehives and organize artistic, cultural, and educational activities. The Gally Farm, on the other hand, wishes to develop responsible agriculture and create an educational farm for school groups and recreational centers for family-oriented activities. About 1,500 people attended the opening of the farm on May 19, 2018. Food and drinks were offered by the Poetic Party and a food truck. Tours were organized on both sides of the farm, and visitors could also just wander around or sit quietly on the deckchairs set up in the sensitive zone. The Gally Farm also allowed the public to observe an animal care session, and the Poetic Party got a musician to perform. Shortly after the public launch, a large open-air stage was built and the Poetic Party organized a day of open-air theater, with an afternoon session for children and an evening session for adults featuring a Marguerite Duras monologue. It seemed important to organize this event as soon as possible to set the tone for their project. The program consisted of cultural exhibits, plays, concerts, and film projections structured around three themes—nature, culture, and food. The aim was to preserve and showcase the farm’s original purpose while providing the area with a major cultural amenity. The idea is to preserve the place and turn it into an atypical cultural facility, because there aren’t too many art farms. There are a few in Europe, but very few in France, and it is important to promote this type of amenity in the department, in the Paris region and throughout France at a later stage.42 With this same aim in mind, in September 2019, the Poetic Party inaugurated Espace 365, an open-air exhibition space. Events organized in the sensitive zone also have other objectives. The first objective is to transform the farm into a space for meetings, learning, exchanges, and discussion between the different publics of Saint-Denis, SeineSaint-Denis, and the wider Paris region. During the first summer a local African music group gave a concert. These social objectives were stressed by Franck Ponthier, the head gardener: “This is a place for people to meet . . . to exchange ideas, discuss things, try to change things, or simply live together.”43 To realize its mission of raising awareness and educating people about food and agriculture, the association frequently organizes visits to the farm by schools, leisure centers, companies, and social clubs such as retirement groups. The visits include a tour of the grounds and explanations about crops cultivation, in particular, the principles of permaculture. Other activities include refreshments from farm produce and beekeeping workshops. As part of this program, the Academy of the Living Environment, which will include Alain Ducasse’s cooking school, will be located on a plot adjacent to the farm. The plan is for the academy to offer up to 200 meals a day, with the

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bulk of the produce coming from the farm and the rest from local businesses. Meals will be delivered by and to local organizations. At the same time, plans are being developed to offer a quality food product in liaison with the cooking school. For the academy and the farm, the challenge is twofold: encouraging the population to consume quality products and enhancing the image of Seine-Saint-Denis. This means giving local people the means to improve their own self-image and getting people to take an interest in the area for the right reasons. As Jean-Philip Lucas explains: We can see this to a certain extent with the concrete honey, which is the honey of Department 93 [the postal code of the Saint Denis department]. Local people ultimately feel a part of the project. It’s nice to have 93 honey and for 93 to be a vector of positive developments. Too often, when we talk about 93, people think of negative things. This is also the theme of the sensitive zone, because Saint-Denis is a sensitive area. But the people are sensitive too and that’s the whole point. . . . That’s why we’re going to have a food brand from 93 called “Mieux!” [“The Best!”] with its own products. A proper 93 brand is really important.44 The collective also offers motivated people an opportunity “to get their hands dirty” either occasionally or more regularly. This helps the Poetic Party consolidate its teams, as local people are trained and allowed to make the most of the large vegetable garden. To be able to work, the artists’ collective had to make a number of adjustments. Mobile wooden buildings were brought onto the site and a building known as the honeymooner is used as a team meeting and projection room for Espace 365 exhibitions while the chalet houses offices. Second-hand containers were also recovered to store tools and equipment needed for the farm. Toilets and a large stage for artistic performances were installed. Opposite these amenities, the market garden of the sensitive zone produced 200 different plants in 2019, including f lowers (such as sunf lowers and meadows with f lowers), vegetables (including carrots, pumpkins, lettuce, onions, beetroot, cucumber, and corn), varieties of mint, and fruit (such as black currants, raspberries, and cherries). Like the Poetic Party, Gally’s primary objective is education. Above all, it wants to demonstrate the diversity of growing methods: traditional, organic, and permaculture, with everything above ground as well in containers, bags, aquaponics, hydroponics, aeroponics, etc. Some of the crops, such as spinach and lamb’s lettuce, are intended to capture the lead in the soil. Activities are centered all year round for families, school groups, leisure centers, and businesses. As part of the project, 60 percent of buildings and a 5,000-squaremeter outdoor area are used to receive the public. Outside, visitors discover crops produced in various ways together with sheep, goats, rabbits, and chickens. Eventually, the farm would like to acquire sheepdogs so that the goats and sheep can graze and maintain the entire farm.

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The second objective is to continue producing vegetables. To this end, 2.2 hectares of farmland are used for market garden produce such as lettuce, fennel, celery, turnips, zucchini, rhubarb, and strawberries. Other varieties of produce, including tomatoes, peppers, and zucchini, are grown overground. This effort is quite successful and great for demonstration purposes. Gally also produces sweet corn, which is especially popular with the different populations of Saint-Denis. The idea is to produce large quantities to obtain fairly reasonable prices and reach as many people as possible in the surrounding neighborhoods. The produce of Gally Farm is sold directly at fixed sales points. The last but not least objective is to promote the market gardening and agricultural heritage of the site and the territory through exhibitions on topics such as tools, their use, and their value as well as older farming techniques. There are plans to demonstrate these old techniques in the field with hotbeds, containers, and mixed sowing. The Gally Farms wants to reach a broad public, including schools and businesses, by organizing meetings, seminars, and open-air events. The Saint-Denis Council continues to monitor the progress of the Poetic Party and the Gally Farm very closely. The deputy mayors involved in the farm’s projects take turns attending events at the site, and various offices ensure that safety conditions are complied with, particularly with regard to lead pollution in the soil. A team of experts from a school of agronomy inspects the site and analyzes the crops regularly. The council also keeps a careful eye on the entrance fee charged by the Poetic Party and Gally Farm. Although it would be best to come up with a system that allows the inhabitants of SaintDenis to get in for free or at a reduced rate, with public subsidies making up the shortfall, the Gally Farm has fixed an entrance fee of €3 per person for people from neighboring areas. Without this income, they believe they would not have the financial resources to carry out necessary work for welcoming the public. The sensitive zone is only open to the public on Saturdays and is free of charge. During the low season, the sensitive zone is closed apart from educational workshops for schoolchildren and visits by professional guides. The Poetic Party’s ultimate goal is to finance the sensitive zone from the sale of meals produced by the cooking school. But until the school is up and running, the association funds itself by other means. The produce of the sensitive zone is sold to about 12,000 restaurants selected by the collective because of their menus, which prioritize quality and, preferably, local produce. They include large restaurants such as Plazza Athénée and Le Meurice, which belong to their partner, Chef Ducasse, as well as restaurants run by talented young chefs. As a local association, the collective receives support from public funds, notably from the region and the department. However, grants come mainly from private foundations run by large groups such as Bonduelle, Vente Privée, or Engie; small local businesses such Linkbynet; and philanthropic institutions such as the Fondation de France. Businesses award grants under their corporate social responsibility programs, usually as a first step in developing a long-term project with the farm. With certain partners, projects

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are much more specific and are in the process of being created. For example, the Poetic Party has teamed up with one of the nez (noses, French slang for perfumers) at the renowned luxury-goods company Cartier to create a range of herbal teas and scents using aromatic plants grown on the farm. There are also plans to use the land for photo shoots and filming. The team organizes private events. For example, along with head chef Julien Dumas and caterers Fleur de mets, they have created sensitive dinners, or meals for about 50 people featuring the farm’s produce. Banquets are organized at the farm and the team can count on the support of Alain Ducasse, a precious partner who occasionally organizes meals with current or potential financiers. In addition to such entrepreneurial activity, Olivier Darné continues to give artistic performances with bees: for example, meals with beeswax cutlery and dishes and works containing beehives. Part of the proceeds are reinvested in the farm’s projects. In conclusion, the farm enables the Poetic Party to forge ties between nature, culture, and food. Darné believes that the sensitive zone, this “open-air lab sponsored by an artistic collective that works with geography but also in symbiosis with an animal that showcases our geographies, i.e., the bee,”45 takes things to another level. There is more space for productions, for holding exhibitions in appropriate conditions, and for hosting artists inside its walls. For these artists, taking over the farm highlighted critical contemporary food and agriculture-related issues: It is very politically expedient to focus on the disappearance of bees but questions arise. It is a right as well as a duty to consider that eating remains a comfort and—not just for those who have a garden—a way of life. It is a relational act, as much as art can be.46 The development of Saint-Denis has not left the local people behind: 70,000 people come to work there every day, eat mainly in their company restaurants and not venturing out to see what is happening in the wider neighborhood. Saint-Denis Urban Farm could be an opportunity to “recover the money from the other side of the canal (i.e., in Paris) and put it to work for the untapped know-how of these mothers.” In this way, “the crops planted will be used at the cooking school and emerge in the form of a dish that can be sold. And the money obtained from this can be reinvested for the needs of the farm and replanted.”47 The idea is that the money will be reinvested in the area to finance cultural and artistic initiatives. The Poetic Party wants to create a multifunctional hub for the production of art and food.

Notes 1 See “A Vision for the Green Heart of Holland,” The Harrison Studio, https:// theharrisonstudio.net/a-vision-for-the-green-heart-of-holland. 2 See the Collectif Walden website at https://www.collectiefwalden.nl.

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3 See the Kunstenaarscollectief Waterlanders website at http://www.waterlanders. info. 4 Guy Debord, “Introduction a une critique de la géographie urbaine,” Les lèvres nues 6 (1955): 11–15. 5 Paul Ricoeur, Temps et récit, vol. 1, L’intrigue et le récit historique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1983). 6 Florent Chiappero, “Du Collectif Etc aux ‘collectifs d’architectes’: une pratique matricielle du projet pour une implication citoyenne” (PhD diss., École nationale supérieure d’architecture de Marseille, 2017). 7 See “EU Country Fact Sheets,” European Commission, https://ec.europa. eu/info/food-farming-f isheries/farming/facts-and-f igures/performance-a gricultural-policy/agriculture-country/eu-country-factsheets-0_en. 8 The bulk of Chapter 8 and some examples in Chapter 1 are based on the research of Pauline Le Bras and Coline Blot as part of their master’s internships under the direction of Nathalie Blanc, Laboratoire Dynamiques Sociales et Recomposition des Espaces (LADYSS, a multi-disciplinary research unit specialized in social dynamics and shifting spatial patterns). 9 Béatrice Cabedoce and Philippe Pierson, eds., Cent ans d’histoire des jardins ouvriers, 1896–1996 (Paris: Créaphis, 1996). 10 Françoise Dubost, “Introduction générale : évolution sociologique et questions de sémantique,” in Béatrice Cabedoce, “Du jardin ouvrier au jardin partagé : un rôle social et environnemental,” Bibliothèque numérique de l’INP 4 (2007): 4–5. 11 Frederic Rouxel, “Le périurbain, ou les mutations de la ville périphérique,” summary note and bibliographic guide (Paris: Centre de Documentation de l’Urbanisme, Ministère de l’Équipement, des Transports, du Logement, du Tourisme et de la Mer, 2002). 12 Commissariat Général au Développement Durable, Ministère de l’Environnement, de l’Écologie et de la Mer, “Indicateurs nationaux de la transition écologique vers un développement durable 2015–2020: premier état des lieux,” Études et Documents no. 142 (2016). 13 Sandrine Baudry, Julie Scapino, and Elisabeth Rémy, “L’espace public à l’épreuve des jardins collectifs à New York et Paris,” Géocarrefour 89, no. 1–2 (2014): 41–51, http://geocarrefour.revues.org/9388. 14 Pascale Scheromm, Coline Perrin, et Christophe Soulard, “Cultiver en ville . . . Cultiver la ville ? L’agriculture urbaine à Montpellier,” Espaces et Sociétés 3, no. 158 (2014): 49–66. 15 Georg Simmel, Le conflit (Paris: Le Ciré, 2003), 19–22. 16 Pauline Le Bras, “La Table et le Territoire” (master’s thesis, MECI, Université Paris, 2017); Coline Blot, “Urban Farms: Places of Artistic Experience and Heritage” (master’s thesis, Université de Paris 7, 2018–2019). 17 Roger Bourderon, ed., Histoire de Saint-Denis (Paris: Privately published, 1997). 18 Michel Philipponneau, La vie rurale de la banlieue parisienne. Étude de géographie humaine (Paris: Armand Colin, 1956). 19 Philipponneau, La vie rurale de la banlieue parisienne. 20 Charlotte Denoël, “Les halles de Paris à travers l’histoire,” L’histoire par l’image (website), January 2007, https://www.histoire-image.org/fr/etudes/halles-paristravers-histoire. 21 “Le maraîchage en Seine-Saint-Denis,” Seine-Saint-Denis Tourisme (website), https://www.tourisme93.com/maraichage-seine-saint-denis.html. 22 Bourderon, Histoire de Saint-Denis. 23 “Histoire de la Ville,” Saint Denis (website), http://ville-saint-denis.fr/ histoire-de-la-ville.

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24 Bourderon, Histoire de Saint-Denis, 286. It should be noted that social housing had already existed for a long time in France, but low-cost social housing complex responded to different planning and social regulations. One of the main features of these complexes was the speed at which they were built after war, ref lecting the urgent need to rehouse many people in France. See Jean-Marc Stébé, Le Logement Social en France (Paris: Presse Universitaire de France, 2019), 128. 25 Emmanuel Bellanger and Julian Mischi, eds., Les territoires du communisme. Élus locaux, politiques publiques et sociabilités militantes (Paris: Armand Colin, 2013). 26 Jean-Pierre Brunet, Saint-Denis, la ville rouge (1890–1939) (Paris: Hachette, 1980). 27 Cabedoce and Pierson, Cent ans d’histoire des jardins ouvriers. 28 Marie-Fleur Albecker, “Du déclin urbain à la dynamique retrouvée? Le rôle des stratégies locales dans la première couronne de la banlieue Parisienne (Issyles-Moulineaux, Ivry-sur-Seine et Pantin),” in Villes et régions européennes en décroissance, maintenir la cohésion territoriale?, eds. Myriam Baron, Emmanuelle Cunningham-Sabot, Claude Grasland, Dominique Rivière, and Gilles Van Hamme (Paris: Hermès-Lavoisier, 2010). 29 See “Sociodémographique 2013 et projections de population 2026,” Revue SaintDenis au fur et à mesure 66 (2017), http://ville-saint- denis.fr/sites/default/files/ content/documents/sdfm_ndeg65_aout2016.pdf. 30 “Seine-Saint-Denis. L’irréductible Breton,” Le Télégramme, September 1, 2009, https://www.letelegramme.fr/ig/generales/regions/bretagne/seine-saint- denisl-irreductible-breton-01-09-2009-530627.php. 31 Pauline Le Bras in discussion with Cécile Ranguin, deputy mayor in charge of urban agriculture, ecology, soft mobility and the reduction of highway fractures and pollution, June 2018, Saint-Denis. 32 Pauline Le Bras in discussion with Cécile Ranguin. 33 Pauline Le Bras in discussion with Michel Ribay, deputy mayor in charge of energy, air, and climate in the Porte de Paris, Pleyel and Conf luence districts, July 2018, Saint-Denis. 34 Nathalie Blanc in discussion with Olivier Darné, September 2017, Saint-Denis. 35 Nathalie Blanc in discussion with Olivier Darné. 36 Splitting is when a group of bees are separated from the original colony to form a new hive, generally comprising workers and a few queens. 37 According to the Michelin Guide 2017, there is only one restaurant in SeineSaint-Denis with a Michelin star: Auberge des Saints Pères in Aulnay-sous-Bois. 38 Nathalie Blanc in discussion with Olivier Darné. 39 Nathalie Blanc in discussion with Olivier Darné. 40 Nathalie Blanc in discussion with Olivier Darné. 41 The Poetic Party put together its bid in a month and a half and raised €400,000 to settle the previous operator’s outstanding accounts. The artist contacted Ferme de Gally, a large family business practicing traditional agriculture and specializing in agricultural services, including an educational farm, events, and deliveries of fresh produce. While these activities were totally different from Poetic Party goals, Darné felt the farm might be interested and would have the money needed to get the project off the ground, i.e. key money of €400,000 plus about €800,000 to rebuild the buildings due to their dilapidated state. The council was offering a 25-year agricultural lease, which entitled bidders to grow crops and develop their own business model but also required them to pay back the money invested over time, meaning that at the end of the 25-year period they would not be entitled to sell the land to recover any costs. It was therefore necessary to build a multifunctional amenity. To convince the Gally Farm, which was skeptical about the project’s capacities, Darné took them to visit the site and managed to make them understand that it was an “unmissable opportunity that only comes around every eighty years, linked to a celebrated market gardening history that

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In-Between Places is dying out, and which used to feed Paris.” The Gally Farm eventually realized the tourist and cultural potential (with a target of 25,000 visitors a year, via the development of an eco-museum that would serve as a demonstrator of various market gardening techniques since the nineteenth century). The differing objectives of the two partners ultimately turned out to be a good thing, as it attracted different publics and resulted in the place being used for different purposes. This partnership eventually submitted the winning bid, but Poetic Party would have to pay for its own share of work on the farm, meaning that it had to find about €300,000. Pauline Le Bras in discussion with Jean-Philip Lucas, June 2018, Saint-Denis. Pauline Le Bras in discussion with Franck Ponthier, agricultural manager of the Poetic Party at the Urban Farm of Saint-Denis, April 2018, Saint-Denis. Pauline Le Bras in discussion with Jean-Philip Lucas. Nathalie Blanc in discussion with Olivier Darné. Nathalie Blanc in discussion with Olivier Darné. Nathalie Blanc in discussion with Olivier Darné.

Bibliography Albecker, Marie-Fleur. “Du déclin urbain à la dynamique retrouvée? Le rôle des stratégies locales dans la première couronne de la banlieue Parisienne (Issy-lesMoulineaux, Ivry-sur-Seine et Pantin),” in Villes et régions européennes en décroissance, maintenir la cohésion territoriale?, eds. Myriam Baron, Emmanuelle CunninghamSabot, Claude Grasland, Dominique Rivière, and Gilles Van Hamme Paris: Hermès-Lavoisier, 2010. Baudry, Sandrine, Julie Scapino, and Elisabeth Rémy. “L’espace public à l’épreuve des jardins collectifs à New York et Paris,” Géocarrefour 89, no. 1–2 (2014): 41–51, http://geocarrefour.revues.org/9388. Bellanger, Emmanuel, and Julian Mischi, eds. Les territoires du communisme. Élus locaux, politiques publiques et sociabilités militantes. Paris: Armand Colin, 2013. Blot, Coline. “Urban Farms: Places of Artistic Experience and Heritage,” Master’s thesis, Université de Paris 7, 2018–19. Bourderon, Roger, ed. Histoire de Saint-Denis. Paris: Privately published, 1997. Brunet, Jean-Pierre. Saint-Denis, la ville rouge (1890–1939). Paris: Hachette, 1980. Cabedoce, Béatrice, and Philippe Pierson, eds. Cent ans d’histoire des jardins ouvriers, 1896–1996. Paris: Créaphis, 1996. Chiappero, Florent. Du Collectif Etc aux ‘collectifs d’architectes’: une pratique matricielle du projet pour une implication citoyenne. PhD diss., École nationale supérieure d’architecture de Marseille, 2017. Commissariat Général au Développement Durable, Ministère de l’Environnement, de l’Écologie et de la Mer. “Indicateurs nationaux de la transition écologique vers un développement durable 2015–2020: premier état des lieux,” Études et Documents no. 142 (2016). Debord, Guy. “Introduction a une critique de la géographie urbaine,” Les lèvres nues 6 (1955): 11–15. Denoël, Charlotte. “Les halles de Paris à travers l’histoire,” L’histoire par l’image (website), January 2007, https://www.histoire-image.org/fr/etudes/hallesparis-travers-histoire. Dubost, Françoise. “Introduction générale : évolution sociologique et questions de sémantique,” in Béatrice Cabedoce, “Du jardin ouvrier au jardin partagé: un rôle social et environnemental,” Bibliothèque numérique de l’INP 4 (2007): 4–5.

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Le Bras, Pauline. “La Table et le Territoire,” Master’s thesis, MECI, Université Paris, 2017. Philipponneau, Michel. La vie rurale de la banlieue parisienne. Étude de géographie humaine. Paris: Armand Colin, 1956. Rouxel, Frederic. “Le périurbain, ou les mutations de la ville périphérique,” summary note and bibliographic guide. Paris: Centre de Documentation de l’Urbanisme, Ministère de l’Équipement, des Transports, du Logement, du Tourisme et de la Mer, 2002. Scheromm, Pascale, Coline Perrin, and Christophe Soulard, “Cultiver en ville . . . Cultiver la ville? L’agriculture urbaine à Montpellier,” Espaces et Sociétés 3, no. 158 (2014): 49–66. “Seine-Saint-Denis. L’irréductible Breton,” Le Télégramme, September 1, 2009, https://www.letelegramme.fr/ig/generales/regions/bretagne/seine-saint- denis-lirreductible-breton-01-09-2009-530627.php. Simmel, Georg. Le conflit. Paris: Le Ciré, 2003. “Sociodémographique 2013 et projections de population 2026,” Revue Saint-Denis au fur et à mesure 66 (2017), http://ville-saint- denis.fr/sites/default/files/content/ documents/sdfm_ndeg65_aout2016.pdf. Stébé, Jean-Marc. Le Logement Social en France. Paris: Presse Universitaire de France, 2019.

9

Nomads, Shepherding, and Territory

On the Iberian Peninsula, there is a great urban-rural demographic imbalance. The population is concentrated in urban areas; 90 percent of the population occupies only 30 percent of the land; and since 1975, Madrid’s population has increased by 73 percent. In addition, rural areas are turning into desert because of climate change, not to mention inequalities in land ownership and latifundiary and capitalist agrarian structures. Campo Adentro is a nonprofit association whose actions at the intersection of art, agriculture, and territories study the role of culture and identity in the city-country relationship, geopolitics, and territorial management. It harmonizes with the history of the territory and the management of natural resources by communities. The art collective works in three places: an art center in Madrid, a shepherding school in the nearby Sierra de Guadarrama Mountains, and, most recently, a site hosting a residency program in northern England. The collective explores links between rurality and an urban sheepfold and, from its site nestled in the mountains in northern Spain, the idea of pastoralism. Ideas surrounding the term “territory” can be a way of thinking about space, inhabited space, and the assemblage between the living and the non-living and between energy and material f lows. Campo Adentro’s explores such issues of territory and community, with initiatives that seek to contribute to sustainable development and improve the quality of life and innovation in rural areas. To achieve this objective, Campo Adentro founded the INLAND project in 2009. The project’s first phase, which lasted until 2013, took Spain as a case study and produced an international conference, a program of artistic residencies, exhibitions, a publication, and various national presentations. In addition, various training programs were developed: a shepherding school, created in 2004; an elementary school of crafts; trainings for farmers; workshops for artists, rural inhabitants, and cultural professionals; meetings between artists, scientists, students, and rural villagers; and a research group studying the ecology of art. The INLAND project now hopes to cooperate on the European level by setting up collaborations with other territory-based organizations and communities of practice. For example, INLAND Europe publishes books, produces shows, makes cheese, advises the European

DOI: 10.4324/9780367433710-10

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Commission on the use of art in rural development policies, and has taken over an abandoned village to create a place for all of these activities to take place. INLAND Village is a typical artistic and agricultural creation: a center of art and agroecology that aims to serve as a laboratory for rural development and create a multidisciplinary program based on the relationship of art, farmers’ knowledge, and agroecology. The collective’s interdisciplinary, cross-habitat exploration of territory and learning is exemplified by the urban project at Casa de Campo, one of the largest parks in Europe located in the center of Madrid. The organizers bring a herd of nearly 300 sheep to the park each spring to graze and delight park visitors. The activity works as a soil enhancer and fire inhibitor, thus helping maintain the park. Through workshops and other activities, the project teaches children and the public about sustainable food production, pastoralism, and alternative lifestyles. It also ties into INLAND’s shepherding school, which is near the village of Guadarrama, 40 kilometers outside of Madrid. In much of the work at INLAND, as at many eco-art actions, there is a larger desire to exchange old systems of social activity that no longer support a healthy and equitable life in either cities or rural districts. The celebration of rural life, which is slower, more labor intensive, and more dependent on weather, animals, and the land, is an underlying message in the work presented to the public at INLAND. But even more so, INLAND seeks to present fundamental ties to the past and a future not yet imagined as alternatives to contemporary land use and territory. On a recent visit to INLAND’s shepherd school in summer 2021, we saw the conf lict of past and present as we pulled up to the rural site, which lies in a somewhat deserted area surrounded by brush and olive trees. A police car was parked outside the gate of the grazing area, and a young woman was in animated conversation with police officers. As it turned out, the local ranch owners had, once again, threatened the young shepherds and their sheep with loaded rif les, telling them to get off land that they needed for their own cows to graze. Although Campo Adentro has permission from local authorities to herd their sheep during the summer on the land of some landowners in the region as they travel to the high mountains for cooler temperatures and more water, these neighbors were not happy with the arrangement. Battles over land use between public and private, rural and developed, entities occur everywhere on our planet. They perhaps sum up the alarmingly finite resources we have left and highlight political and moral questions of who owns what and how. During an afternoon at the base camp in Guadarrama, we spoke with some of the young people who were teaching and studying shepherding. Emilio, a former computer programmer, came to learn about shepherding as a way to get away from the fast-paced life of the city. In my life I have worked too much, so many hours. In the city there are so many people, and everything moves too quickly. [Besides], it is a part

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of the larger petrol-oil system. Finally, I stopped and collapsed and [now] am starting a new life. And now I am here.1 He wants to buy a heard of goats and return to his ancestral home west of Madrid, where his grandfather still lives and is a shepherd himself. “I want to have my own goats, because in my region, this valley, there are goats. It’s a very good place. It’s very beautiful. There are no crops but we have goats and goats!” Students like Emilio spend about three weeks in an online course preparing for practical training in herding sheep up to the mountains. The course includes standard veterinary studies, ecology, and economics. There are no art classes or discussions about art. But the culture of sheep, of living symbiotically with them and for them, is embedded into the program. One of the current teachers talks glowingly about the beauty of a life connected to animals and land. She recites poetry as we eat our delicious tapas of fresh tomatoes and local olives, spread out under the shade of the silver-green pine trees. It is obvious that she is passionate about shepherding and believes that the lifestyle has the potential to change people. Another INLAND project, Cheese Design, is part of an artist residency program in a remote and mountainous area of the Lake District in northern England. For Fernando García-Dory, the creator of Campo Adentro, a new look at a landscape can help it transform entirely and induce new populations—for example, tourists—to visit. Therefore, the artist includes these new populations in his work. He invited two main social groups, farmer-breeders and tourists, to participate in Cheese Design workshops. The farmers created the cheeses and studied ways in which to add value to milk production. After each workshop, participants at tastings offered feedback on the aromas, textures, and sizes of different cheeses. They filled out forms that allowed us to distinguish between the preferred tastes of each social group and then combine them into a recipe for a universal cheese. However, this universal cheese was uninteresting as it represented a mediocre universal. Its making mainly brought the involved social groups together. Cheese is only the vehicle for Cheese Design, which is more about craft in the English Victorian tradition of arts and crafts than about cheesemaking. As Campo Adentro rethinks the utility of art, cheese is a tribute to John Ruskin, the great man who was also a local figure. GarcíaDory also came up with the idea of creating a mobile cheese- production unit that could go from farm to farm and help farmers diversify their sources of income while developing a new local economic base. They then began to imagine the mobile unit, starting with containers for transferring the milk. But García-Dory’s aim is not only to transform the production tool but also to make people stronger and more capable so that they can resist the erosion of the territory’s food capacities. Thus not only the INLAND project but

Figure 9.1 A g raph of the circu la r economy beh ind Ca mpo Adent ro’s project. Photo cred it by the author s. Mad r id, Ju ly, 2021.

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also Campo Adentro work to rethink the functioning of territories and confer new powers of action on their inhabitants. The goal is as much about the micro level of the terroir, the different lactic bacteria that inhabit the cheese, as it is about the macro level of the territory: it is all about keeping rurality alive. The fundamental question is whether we, as artists and transformers of ideas and imaginations, can encourage transformative behaviors and avoid becoming a factor in the gentrification or revalorization of the rural on behalf of interests other than those of the vulnerable communities that inhabit the land and have a crucial role in its future.

Artists as Agro-Thropologists Georgina Hill, who was an artist-in-residence at Campo Adentro and García-Dory’s collaborator, was born into a farming family in England. For a recent project, she interviewed a fisherman in a small coastal port who buys eels, a tiny, translucent animal that can cost up to €1,000 per kilogram. From this research, she drew a series of astonishing critical positions. The reason for eels are so expensive is that, like many economic products in our current system, they have become very rare and difficult to find. Eels are only available in November, during the most difficult weather of the year. And they also have a very strong cultural cachet because they are considered a delicacy during the winter in Spain as well China and Japan. The interviewed fishermen got permits and went out at night to collect baby eels. Because they are too expensive for people with low and middle incomes, eels are also available in a more affordable processed form made of substitute ingredients. Thus, it is possible to buy an alternative version of this little delicacy at the supermarket. The mechanism is the same as for a fake bag or a fake brand: a kind of facsimile is created, which can, in some cases, increase the value of the original. The eel industry is emblematic of many types of business models, and Hill’s research was new in the art world. Widespread perceptions of this industry ref lect a sort of idealized soft nostalgia, but in fact the perception on the ground differs. Hill’s project will culminate in films that can be easily distributed and serve as springboards for political discussions about the future of this industry and its inherent destruction of nature. With this kind of artistic project, it is evident that modernity is changing color. For a whole generation, getting away from the earth and manual labor was a sign of success. Today, movements like Campo Adentro and its sister organization INLAND are rethinking the collective, questioning ideas of power, talking about the rural and links to the city, and even trying to think about their complementarities. It is an artistic discourse with a political tone, which is changing very quickly at the moment. A few years ago, many artists did not feel like ecologists and did not want to carry a message. Art was not a message. And now, more and more artists are addressing climate change and other issues in different ways.

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At an abandoned monastery near Cordoba in southern Spain, an artist couple founded an eco-art residency program and restored the gardens over a six-year period, beginning in 2010. Javier Orcaray Vélez is from Balacazar and received a master’s degree in visual culture theory at New York University. He and his American wife Gaby Mangeri are both practicing artists as well as culture managers, and thus, they are able to infiltrate and excavate knowledge from the local agricultural histories of the region they have chosen as home. They named their center La Fragua (The Forge) after the metal workshops that once occupied the medieval buildings. Their residency program, which hosted over 200 artists and projects, allowed artists to mingle with local villagers, learn and absorb rural culture, and create new works that responded to the site at the monastery. Their research revealed that, as at many medieval church organizations, the gardens and cellars were rich in food stuffs, medicinal herbs, and, of course, wines. They once again gave water to the hot and dry enclosed gardens, plowed, planted, and seeded and created a giant spiral garden that filled the ancient walls with new life. This community effort brought together artists and local farmers (along with problems with the city council, which eventually, in 2016, did not renew their lease on the monastery). Yet during La Fragua’s short existence, the agricultural knowledge of the region was restored and renewed, giving both artists a crash course in bio-culture farming, organic wine growing, and agro-ecology, which they then shared with the visitors, students, interns, and artists passing through the convent arches. In a short narrated film about the process of making clay pots in the ancient tradition, a local artisan describes the connection of form to the elements: The earth, we call it mud, which is mud or clay. The water to shape. Because the casting slip helps our fingers slide over the mud and we create the pieces. The fire, to cook them. And the air, without the air there is nothing. There is possibly no other profession in the world that united the four elements of nature.2 Both Orcaray and Mangeri have continued the agro-ecology work begun at La Fragua in their highly successful organic wine shop-café in Cordoba. Their art-think-tank project Plata Cordoba, which was established in 2020 with the support of the Carasso Foundation, explores the intersections of art, science, agriculture, and popular knowledge. These collaborations bring fruitful new resources from rural regions to urban centers and preserve traditional knowledge and craft practices based on agriculture. In a recent performance work, Water and Wine, the couple recited incantations to the gods of the vine and, delivering a prayer of gratitude, invited the audience to drink from the traditional botella, a ceramic vessel filled with water. Freshly uncorked sparkling wine was then shared via the small spouts, which protected visitors from touching the same bottle with their lips while offering a waste-free solution to shared imbibing. The beautiful handmade spouts are a tradition of the Spanish countryside spanning eons of wine drinking.

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The resurrection of such simple (and organic) practices brings cultural memory and contemporary artisanal values together. Like INLAND, La Fragua planted seeds a decade ago that are still sprouting astonishing alternatives to faltering social and political systems in Spain. Both economically and culturally, Orcoray and Mangeri are part of the new trend in agro-art research and practice that is renewing traditional means of existence.

Food Sovereignty, Ecological Transition, and Habitat habitat noun. (from the Latin. habere, to have; and formerly from the IndoEuro. ghabh, to give, to receive). The space, natural or artificial, where one lives. In an ecosystem, the habitat is the place where the community lives. 2. LIT. A space permitting reciprocal adaptation between an organism and its surroundings. 3. PSYCH. The habitat is cause and result of the action of inhabiting and stabilizing a habit. 4. FIG. Synonym of trap: Welfare, being an adaption of inhabitants’ devices to their environment, and vice versa, to the point of becoming trapped by what protects them.3 In her 2021 exhibition Irreversible at the Sala Alcalá 31 Gallery in Madrid, Spanish artist Bene Bergado took issues of territory and food into a sculptural critique of contemporary food systems and the poisonous trap that we humans have built for ourselves. Various works in the show, which was actually a retrospective of her work over some dozen years, confronted elements of our destruction of agriculture, from pesticide use, mass farms, the global shipment of foodstuffs, food factories, and animal rights to our clinging to all of the above despite dire warnings that these structures are poisoning us. Bergado’s delightful installations and sculptures, some with humorous overtones, others more ominous, eventually asked whether we humans even have an ecosystem to share anymore. The central installation in the large, luminous space was filled with an oversized black fish net-trap, which filled the entire lower f loor. Behind this room and looming over the large hall was a looping video of names scrolling constantly downward. After a moment one realized that was it not a text in Latin but in fact a list of chemicals and pesticides. We are informed that they were all additives in store-bought foods that we consume unknowingly as feeders in the food chain. The reference to industrialized fishing practices implied by the large room-sized net is just one of the artist’s many critiques of fast food, the ensuing loss of habitat for wildlife, and the loss of species, which took a disturbing twist in this installation. In place of fish in the trap are colored sleeping bags, referencing homeless people on the streets. They are filled with garbage, which, according to the wall text, could begin to fester and mold to create organic and inorganic smells of decay. As the inequalities in the contemporary economy create more and more displaced persons through climate crisis, migration, and housing shortages, we are challenged to think about the loss of habitat for the human species as well, and what its future will be.

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Wall texts in Spanish and English by the artist referenced specific themes in the exhibition but also had four definitions for each area. The semiotics of Bergado’s ecological descriptions included not only the standard dictionary definition but also the “literary,” the “psychological,” and the “figurative.” The texts of these definitions, which were blown up into painting-sized canvases, were matched and interspersed with stretched canvases of iridescent fabric that ref lected light and maintained a f lat, two-dimensional plane. These canvases with no field of depth were the artist’s comment on our historical accumulation of knowledge and education. As she stated, This abyss between images and policies, between words and deeds, allow us to often remain in the world of human disputes, while the Earth is devastated until life is unviable. The silence about that gulf between deeds and words is overwhelming.4 Like the canvases that ref lected only light and shadow in the room, an open-ended question was presented in these definitions and visual installations: the meaning was ever-shifting and mirrored the uncertainty of the inhabitant-viewers. In this way, Bergado expands meaning in various works in the show and gives the viewer multiple lens through which to step into the artists’ world of critique and play. Ultimately, as in her definition of “habitat,” she points to the future of a world without a livable habitat for humans, a hell we have created for ourselves where no one can escape, not even the rich. She equates habitat with a trap, a planet without oxygen or food, a journey that, as the show’s title indicates, may be irreversible. Habitat diversity is at the root of culture itself. Monocultures, whether of crops or humans, do not thrive and eventually cannot survive. Biodiversity in food is not encouraged by either the EU or the big agriculture politics of the United States. Which is why, of course, small farms that grow non-GMO crops encourage cross-fertilization and exchange, or dare to go up against big corporations and governments that support a deadly monoculture are so vital. Food sovereignty is the movement or the idea that there should be no authority controlling what we grow and how we grow it, especially regarding our rural inheritance and heirloom stocks. As Bergado states, it is “the social movement that claims responsibility for public policies regarding food production and consumption, prioritization of access to land, protection of rural workers and small producers in relation to industrial and commercial concerns, and protection of the environment.”5 The Swedish artist, agitator, researcher, and amateur plant breeder Åsa Sonjasdotter has worked for over a decade on breeding and cultivating ancient potato varieties. Her research has looked at pre-industrial farming practices in Europe and the usurpation of this knowledge by corporate food organizations and even scientific institutions, at the cost of the loss of hundreds, if not thousands of diverse breeds.

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“This circumstance brings awareness of the fact that the memory of knowledge accumulation that these varieties carry is still alive and functional in the plant, even though it has been widely marginalised or even lost to humans,” Sonjasdotter says.6

Figure 9.2 Åsa Sonjasdotter, Heirloom Potatoes project, 2014. Photo by the artist.

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In her proposal for the 2014 COAL prize, Sonjasdotter presented her heirloom potatoes for “installation” at various historical locations around Paris, recalling particular times that the potato played a crucial role.7 “The notion of terroir is typical for French farming culture. . . . Many old potato varieties that were discarded from modernization programs were saved by farmers and re-vitalized for cultivation.”8 Her project called attention to the loss of habitat in old urban farms and small farmers’ fight against EU regulation of monocontrol breeding and food varieties. In alluding to public gardens around Paris, such as the Jardin des Tuileries, Jardin des Plantes, and La Ferme de Marconville, which at times have been allowed to grow food for the population, the artist points out the loss of land known as commons, especially in urban settings. Her High Diversity project sets the tone for some of her more recent work, which equates human and plant crossbreeding and life forces with biodiversity and survival. In her recent book, Peace with the Earth: Tracing Agricultural Memory, Refiguring Practice, Sonjasdotter talks about the history of cultivation and territory and the way in which place is related to growing practices. The book stemmed from her artist residency at the Project Arts Center in Dublin. Looking at the history of small household gardens in Europe, she makes the argument that proximity to growing food probably contributed to a more intimate connection to and understanding of plant breeding, seed collecting, and more intensive cultivation in general. This greater familiarity between cultivator and plant in intensive systems may have given rise to greater experimentation and the development of new varieties, and may have generated a more prominent role for the plants in people’s ritual life, medicine, etc.9 She goes on to connect kitchen gardens to food sovereignty, in the sense that these gardens were historically private and parts of small farms and not controlled or monitored by governments or, later, corporations. In this way, we learn that dwelling histories and the stories of territory are connected to ecological thinking and living. Artists such as Sonjasdotter, Dory, Hill, and even Bergado are working with crafts to tell stories about new ways of envisioning and living in the environment. “Habits, in short, are not embodied; rather the body—in its habitation of a world—is ensounded,” says Tim Ingold.10 Like Sonjasdotter’s thesis that in the past farmers with kitchen gardens knew how to propagate, cultivate, and expand their horticultural knowledge to adjust to changing weather and climatic conditions, these artist-farmers bear witness to the connection of body to earth, movement to practice, and stories to meaning. The activity of making cheese gives the student of shepherding a tool for her craft box for sustainable living. The bonus is that food is made. But like Ingold’s philosophy of craft, there is another innate activity that can happen beyond the chemistry of turning milk into solid cheese. All

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of the actions leading up to that process—the herding of the animals, the hot days in the fields, the chilled nights by the fire watching out for predators to keep the beasts safe, the acidic scent of medication for the young ewes, and even an unpleasant altercation with local ranchers on the dusty hills of central Spain—become the ingredients of the cheese. This haptic experience is more than embodied knowledge, Ingold argues, more than traditional recipes that become habit. Culture is in fact created by the happenstances, and maybe mistakes, that happen when the artist or farmer or shepherd utilizes learned knowledge and allows something else to build on it. “‘Making knowledge’ is a process entailing interaction between interlocutors and practitioners with their total environment,” Trevor Marchand observes.11 Allowing craft to become habit “enables practitioners to move on in the accomplishment of their tasks [which] are not so much sedimented in the body as generated and enacted in an attentive and kinesthetic correspondence with tools, materials and environment.”12 This is perhaps what the confluence of art and farming is bringing to our futures: a creative way of growing food, eating, and remembering in new environments that have not even happened yet. Artists are showing us ways in which to integrate our bodies with the action of food production, to learn the craft of saving seeds or fruit-tree splicing, and maybe even to master the art of composting. All of these actions mean digging into the earth and getting dirty, sleeping under starry skies with wooly animals nearby, or rejoicing in the warm pinkness of earthworms burrowing in black soil. In the same way that Campo Adentro brings young would-be shepherds to the mountains to interact with the animals and elements, there are urban aspects of the knowledge-sharing happening across Europe and around the world, as we have shown in previous chapters. INLAND, the urban brick and mortar house of Campo Adentro, is in a post-war working-class neighborhood of Madrid. The bright yellow building holds up an adobe-fired ceramic mural adorning its eaves high above the sidewalks, which was commissioned by a visiting artist some years ago. The images hold memory of the original jardin (garden) area of the neighborhood, where the river that fed the gardens still runs underground, hidden by concrete. After World War II, this area, which was then on the outskirts of Madrid, was built up by individual workers, who built homes in the empty campo (field). INLAND honors that history by keeping community alive in its co-productions with local residents in art, food, and commerce. The delightful director, Amelie Aranguren, who has worked alongside García-Dory for decades, explains INLAND’s connections to local growers, beekeepers, bakers, and visiting artists. It is all integrated and co-dependent, just as the neighborhood used to be when locals shared foodstuffs and seeds. On any night there could be a film showing in a room adorned with vintage black-and-white images of Federico García Lorca’s last home and study in Granada. INLAND keeps dozens of projects going across Europe simultaneously, but one of the pet collaborations, at least for Aranguren, is with the Federico García Lorca Foundation in Granada. The poet’s political involvement, which eventually contributed to his assassination in 1934 by the Franco regime, has become today something of a cause

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célèbre, and INLAND hopes to keep his socialist beliefs alive and well. This utopian design, never far from the culture promoted and nurtured at INLAND, is but one of the alternative concepts to the current status quo alive in contemporary Spain. In reaching back to the beloved international poet, the organization places itself solidly in the tradition of radical thought and art. It is not lost on the modern visitor that the poet’s politics were never separated from his poetry and plays and that even today his brave stand against totalitarianism is imitated in cultural circles across the world. Lorca’s sense of community and collaboration is evident in much of INLAND’s programming and predictions about ways in which art can change and inf luence society. The two stories at Centro de Acercamiento a lo Rural (CAR) house a restaurant, a library, offices, a little shop, and, of course, a kitchen. Visiting artists and collaborators meet and eat here under the large fig tree on the patio. This is where the territory of the campo meets the table of the casa (house). As described brief ly in earlier chapters, the vocabulary of agriculture hints at technological and cultural changes in its history. In Spanish, “campo” can refer to fields, the outer edges of a town, and cultivated crops. “Jardin” means something entirely different. After the Moors first brought the enclosed garden to Europe (as seen at the Alhambra in southern Spain, one of the finest intact examples of an enclosed garden in the world), the practice morphed into medieval cloister gardens filled with herbs and healing plants and then into expansive English gardens of manicured discipline and textures. And yet Persian gardens continued to create a sense of wonder and spirituality, a meditative space in which poetry hangs in the air and f loral scents and bubbling water fountains awaken the senses. Compositions of arches, intricately carved and decorated like lace, and long stretches of open pools that reach a distant perspective in the enclosed space open the senses to an experience that can only be called art. And if beauty is food for the soul, then cannot these gardens of light and moving water-making music in tiled courtyards be the ultimate connection between heaven and earth? Is not this the artist’s role even today: to bring us closer to eternity via our physical bodies? The physicality of skin, air, water, and scents are expanded in these gardens much as in kitchen gardens around the world, where cooks are immersed in daily chores of clipping fresh herbs or digging up the harvest of the season: beets, potatoes, onions, and carrots. There is not an audience, only performers.

The Table At first, I had celery, purple cabbage, dandelion, sage, pumpkin, black pepper, kale, tomato, green beans, garlic, sweet potatoes, purple and green basil, swiss chard, chives, lentils, carrots, bay leaves, ginger, fennel, onions, and spices. On my counter, I reach for a knife and start chopping them up. . . . These ingredients gradually lose their integrity. They gain something else, though—an ability to relate to other ingredients on an intimate level. A potato, when whole, can only relate to the ingredients

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by rubbing its skin against them. If undressed and chopped up, its relational surface expands, its inner letters are loose to fool around, create entanglements such as in . . . shit, the knife fell on the te-xt.13 In the first edition of their beautiful risotype magazine Enzyme, the Brazilian artists Joey Buggilla and Jorgge Menna Barreto published an illustrated text stemming from their participatory Restauro (Restoration) project at the 2016 São Paulo Art Biennial. They wanted to create a work that would be sustainable, not just talk about sustainability, and so they took over one of the restaurants at the Biennial and made it into a performative food project. Working with local farmers and harvesters from Brazil’s food forests, they brought in organic foods produced through regenerative agricultural practices. They called the project an environmental sculpture and involved visitors to the art fair as participants. Restauro, whose name is a play on the words “restaurant” and also “restore,” was like a guerilla activity, since the artists chose to keep signage to a minimum and focus instead on food, eaters, and the results of eating. These topics have been a long-term source of fascination for the artists, and they see digestive systems “as sculpting tools that have a direct transformative ability of the landscape through the kind of agriculture we support while making our food choices.”14 This and other projects, poems, interviews, and essays by Buggilla and Barreto are documented in the second edition of Enzyme, which was distributed to an international mailing list and gallery visitors.

Figure 9.3 Restauro, Jorgge Menna Barreto, restaurant food project, Sao Paulo Biennale, 2016. Courtesy of Jorgge Menna Barreto

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In the text for Soup of Biodiversity (2019), quoted above, the artists describe making a soup of local ingredients, thereby creating a metaphor for biodiversity in that each plant gives up its identity to blend with other plants and make something better. Soups are the food that feed many, last for days, and in many cultures are served first to fill up the stomach with a little more. It is what the artists call a “landscape photograph” read by our guts. The celebration of food as not only a source of nourishment for humans but as habitats of beauty, and even desire, is evident in these public iterations of various performances and installations performed across Europe and the Americas. In their work 1,000 Ecologies, first performed at Le Commun in Geneva in 2019, Barreto and Buggillo presented 50 types of weeds and other plants found in a random search of the courtyard of the art space. The plants became the subject of cyanotypes, which were printed on fabric for a tablecloth, which in turn is presented in the installation Soup of Biodiversity. Barreto has spoken of the table as a text, a place in which certain types of discussions and interactions take place, either literally or metaphorically. It is a place of communion and dialogue, like the pages of a book. In their installation Mesa-Lingua, a tongue-shaped surface covered with dozens of aesthetically arranged vegetables on diverse and stunning ceramic and glass objects was meant to “project the interior of the space to the exterior.” This architectural reference is intentional, and in much of Barrera’s work the physical body and other sites are connected. He envisions the table as a “mediating surface” on which various activities of the project and the public convene. The plants captured in the photo-based images of the 1,000 Ecologies installation are recognized as integral ingredients and carriers of information. Each herb and weed printed on the fabric has a story, a history, a medicinal recipe to share. There is a playful implication of inter-species communication, confirming Barreto’s interest in the table as a metaphor for the text, a place of dialogue, exchange, and creative meanings. As part of the first Table and Territory Festival in 2020 at ArtMill, the Czech performance artist Martin Zet also used a table as a symbol of connection to cultivation, culture, and making. For his work Mlynek (Meat Grinder), the artist set up, on the green hill above the mill’s gardens, a long banquet table adorned with white lace to mimic an elegant outdoor feast. Plates were set around the table, which stood alone in a grassy pasture. As visitors to the festival began to gather around him, the artist quietly attached a traditional hand-cranked meat grinder to the table and pulled some very brown soft material out of a bag. The malleable mush, somehow reminiscent of our bodies, meat, earth, mud, and excrement all at once, was mechanically pushed into the grinder at intervals. Long, spaghetti-like brown strings emerged, to be gingerly removed from the orifice of the machine and tossed on the shiny white plates on the table. This gesture was repeated dozens of times until each plate was adorned with a messy mound of worm-like material, which also gathered in drops around the wind-blown tablecloth. The feast began to

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look like a shamanistic altar, an earthen table once built by humans but now deserted to the elements from which it came: wood back to trees, meat back to animal, and textile back to wind and earth. Zet’s confrontation with the history of the mill at ArtMill through the process of grinding and making presented the audience with an ode to or a critique of agriculture, tools, and perhaps our identification with and as culture itself. In the atmosphere of a farm and fields, the territory of human’s industrialization of the environment gave pause to the viewer to experience the place in an alternative way. References to the physical labor of milling and making by grinding material (the artist performed with such great effort that by the end of the performance he was sweating profusely) were a thought-provoking comment on our laborious culture of extraction. And it owing probably to this artist’s profoundly satirical Czech humor that the final result of the work looked, in fact, like shit. The excremental reference, however, can be interpreted not only as satire but in fact as a connection to many of the other artists we discuss in these pages, who similarly remind their audiences of the innate linkages of biological ecosystems on a planetary scale: from our bodies to the earth itself, the life cycles of all species are interconnected and interdependent. Our agricultural and culinary histories as humans have now put the very existence of our species in a perilous position of extinction. Like Menna Barreto, Zet connects our digestive system back to the earth in a visual, visceral way. “Food itself carries information from the forest [sic], which is read by bodies.”15 The reference to the table as a place of reading, meeting, gathering, and sharing food is deliberate in these performances, as well as in the 2020 work by Barreto performed at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. At the launch of the magazine Enzyme, Barreto and Buggilla also placed an upside-down table, covered in a white tablecloth, into freshly dug earth on the grounds of the academy gardens. The connection of table to page, of surfaces that can be read or interpreted, of printmaking and impressions, and of metaphors between a physical and intellectual plane were manifested in a daily “print” of the tablecloth in the dirt. This relationship of language to the feast of the table is evident in the Latin root of the word: tabula, a tablet or written document, board, document, list, record; a f lat slab.16 Artists have used the table, the food upon it, and the territory from which it originated as contemporary signs of our cyclical and finite relationship to our earthly destiny. Whether using it to critique or to mirror of our current choices artists working with food as their theme take part in an ancient history of visual representation. Dating to at least the ancient Egyptian wall tomb paintings, we have images of tables stacked with foodstuff. In the burial chamber of the tomb of Menna (c. 1422–1411 BC), for example, food items are depicted as both offerings for the dead to take on in their journey to the next life and also, perhaps, displays of abundance and wealth. Ancient wall tableaus from Pompeii depict images of wine, eggs, and hanging foul ready for the preparation of a meal.

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Figure 9.4 “Meat Grinder,” performance at ArtMill, 2020 by Martin Zet, Czech Republic. Photo: Natália Kalná.

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In her videoart series Table Manners (2014–16), Nigerian born filmmaker, curator, and artist Zina Saro-Wiwa presents people facing the camera straight on as they eat the local foods of the rich Niger Delta. The table settings and backgrounds are simple and colorful, each shot to highlight the dynamic patterns of West African textiles, rich foods (such as roasted ice fish, mu, garri, okra soup with goat meat, and sorgow salad with palm wine), and classic tableaux such as patchwork architectural lean-tos. The “eaters,” as she calls them, hold the viewer’s eyes and quietly chew while they delicately pick up with their hands in the local tradition. Like the artist’s use of food in many of her works, this series is not only an ethnographic exploration of food and farming practices in West Africa but a longer view of the exploitation, cooptation, and extraction of the region’s resources by colonial powers and today’s oil, petrochemical, and forestry corporations. Each extraction for foreign export not only robs Saro-Wiwa’s culture of its resources but affects the food chain from fisheries to local farms. The videos present a moving memento mori in the tradition of European painting while reframing the composition as a post-colonial critique. As performative acts, each of the eight people in the series is shot in a documentary style, ref lecting the artist’s earlier career as an international reporter and filmmaker. The repetitive hand-to-mouth movement of the eaters is like a healing act, a sort of “metaphorical suturing,” Saro-Wiwa says. “With this movement, I see this as them insisting on their place in the environment and repairing their broken landscape, all the while implicating the viewer in this process through their gaze. It’s an important work of bonding.”17 In the exhibition gallery, the table metaphor is emphasized again, with each television screen on a table or pedestal with a matching chair in front of it. The artist, whose father, a beloved poet, environmentalist, and human rights activist, was killed by Nigeria’s military junta when she was 19, feels a deep relationship to the ecology of her land and its survival. In this work she celebrates the Ogoni people—their food, their customs, their struggles—and subtly criticizes the industrialized North that has plundered, colonized, and extracted goods from their land and soul. “Table Manners thus opens us not only to a shared bodily encounter but to the physical and philosophical horizons of eating and the art of ingestion in the Niger Delta as another modality of living and being.”18 The tables in each scene are inviting and full screen, as in performances by Barreto and Buggillo and Zet. The audience sits metaphorically at the table with the performer, engaging in a virtual feast. In this way the series “materializes how the act of eating and ingestion have historically been utilized to shape categories of race and gender in the ongoing construction of biopolitical subjecthood.”19 Like other artist-ethnographer-scientists who engage in the language of food and agriculture, Saro-Wiwa uses the table as a metaphor to understand and enter into her cultural landscape. Through food and eating we are literally invited to sit at the table with a generation of peoples who have suffered the consequences of colonialism and extraction.

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Environmental devastation and land use and abuse are intricately connected to global politics. The radical subversions in this artist’s imagery, which are now shown in international art exhibitions and residencies, are even more impressive as her art creates a new paradigm for plant-people understanding. Her most recent project, The Illicit Gin Institute Assemblies (2021), presented at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles, explored this symbiosis further. Her “radical creative think tank,” as she puts it, introduced traditional “spirits” (or alcoholic botanicals) from the Niger Delta and “contemplates how gin, as a spirit, can be used to explore spirituality in our conceptions of environmentalism.”20 These performative presentations and “events” brought taste and ritual together in Los Angeles, an oil town that conjures the artist’s homeland, the oil town of Port Harcourt, Nigeria. SaroWiwa describes her anthropological ecology of art: I see the value in good journalism and some forms of ethnography. But I myself am far more interested in experimental ethnography. It gives me permission to think about and comment on knowledge production and play with it—to perhaps create something new and expand the sense of self.21 The scholars Anna Tsing and Donna Haraway have recently proposed a new name for what we call the “Anthropocene,” the present era in which human impact is changing the climate. The label “Plantationocene” specifically addresses capital and production, especially in agriculture: In many small, independent farming situations, dozens of crops are raised that need to be tended by farmers who are invested in attending to each one. In designing systems for coerced labor, ecological simplifications entered agriculture. The plantation was precisely the conjuncture between ecological simplifications, the discipline of plants in particular, and the discipline of humans to work on those. That legacy, which I think is very much with us today, is so naturalized that many people believe that that is the meaning of the term agriculture; we forget that there are other ways to farm. The plantation takes us into that disciplineof-people/discipline-of-plants conjunction.22 Food activist and writer Vandana Shiva also attributes our loss of biodiversity and food insecurity to human greed and accumulation of wealth by the few. In extracting our earth’s resources for so many years, humans have ignored reciprocity, regeneration, and the ideas of restoration and replenishment. All living systems are self-regulated. Our body is an amazing selforganized system. Our gut microbiome, every one of those trillions of microbes in our gut are organizing themselves, every organism in the soil is organizing themselves. They don’t have an external master . . . they are

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in mutual gifting. So the mycorrhiza fungi will bring nutrients from far away to the plants that need them, the pollinator will come to a f lower and give fertility to that f lower and get honey. What an amazing system of reciprocity and giving.23 The colonial past, which is one of capital built on plant products, from cotton to palm oil, and the slavery that it enabled, is a dominant subject in many artists of African descent. Yet our research shows that many artists have moved out of a memento mori mode with their art. Although predictions for our climate in the future are dismal, even apocalyptic, many creative people are turning to a vision of healing and reciprocity, of regeneration and the exchange of seeds, both figuratively and literally, as Shiva describes. There is indeed a global movement of artists who are talking about food and farming to discover new-old ways of putting food on the table. And this undertaking does not need large amounts of land or even a rural environment to be successful.

Notes 1 Emilio, in discussion with the authors at the Shepherd’s camp, Guadarrama, Spain, July 3, 2021. 2 Culto Culinaria. Chapter 1, directed by Julia Soler [2016], Vimeo, https://vimeo. com/215115636. 3 Bene Bergado, wall text in exhibition Irreversible at the Sala Alcalá 31, Madrid, Spain, June 15–July 25, 2021. 4 “Entrevista a Bene Bergado: Exposición,” Bene Bergado in conversation with Susana Blas, May 26, 2021, https://www.ivoox.com/entrevista-a-bene-bergadoexposicion-audios-mp3_rf_70555009_1.html (authors’ translation). 5 Wall text, Irreversible. 6 Åsa Sonjasdotter, “The Order of Potatoes: On Purity and Variation in Plant Breeding,” Third Text 32, no. 2–3 (September 25, 2018):6. 7 Nathalie Blanc and Barbara Benish, Form, Art, and the Environment: Engaging in Sustainability (New York: Routledge, 2017). 8 Åsa Sonjasdotter as quoted in Blanc and Benish, Form, Art, and the Environment, 119. 9 Åsa Sonjasdotter, Peace with the Earth: Tracing Agricultural Memory, Reconfiguring Practice (Berlin: Archive Books, 2020). 10 Tim Ingold, “Of Works and Words: Craft as a Way of Telling,” European Journal of Creative Practices in Cities and Landscapes 2, no. 2 (2019): 4. 11 Trevor H.J. Marchand, “Making Knowledge: Explorations of the Indissoluble Relation between Minds, Bodies, and Environment,” abstract, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 16, no. 1 (May 2010). 12 Tim Ingold, “Of Works and Words: Craft as a Way of Telling,” European Journal of Creative Practices in Cities and Landscapes 2, no. 2 (2019):7. 13 Joelson Buggilla and Jorgge Menna Barreto, Enzyme (Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Academie, 2020), 5. 14 Buggilla and Barreto, Enzyme, 1. 15 Ministério da Cultura, Bienal e Itaú, 32a Bienal de São Paulo, Jorge Menna Barreto: Restauro, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IXvj_x0qs7U&t=3s. 16 Ministério da Cultura, Jorge Menna Barreto: Restauro.

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17 “Zina Saro-Wiwa Discusses Her New Show in London,” Artforum, October 2, 2018, https://www.artforum.com/interviews/zina-saro-wiwa-discussesher-new-show-in-london-76934. 18 Rizvana Bradley, “Zina Saro-Wiwa: Performing Table Manners in 21st Century Nigeria,” Art Basel, https://artbasel.com/news/zina-saro-wiwa-tablemanners-tiwani-contemporary-art-basel-miami-beach. 19 Bradley, “Zina Saro-Wiwa.” 20 Zino Saro-Wiwa, “The Illicit Gin Institute Assemblies,” Active Cultures Digest, https://www.active-cultures.org/illicit_gin_institute_assemblies.html. 21 Bradley, “Zina Saro-Wiwa.” 22 “Ref lections on the Plantationocene: A Conversation with Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing, moderated by Gregg Mitman,” Edge Effects Magazine, June 18, 2019, 8, https://edgeeffects.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/ PlantationoceneRef lections_Haraway_Tsing.pdf. 23 “Dr. Vandana Shiva on Becoming Untameable /212,” Vandana Shiva in conversation with Ayana Young, For the Wild, 2019, https://forthewild.world/ podcast-transcripts/dr-vandana-shiva-on-becoming-untameable-212.

Bibliography Blanc, Nathalie, and Barbara Benish. Form, Art, and the Environment: Engaging in Sustainability. New York: Routledge, 2017. Buggilla, Joelson, and Jorgge Menna Barreto. Enzyme. Maastricht: Jan van Eyck Academie, 2020. Ingold, Tim. “Of Works and Words: Craft as a Way of Telling,” European Journal of Creative Practices in Cities and Landscapes 2, no. 2 (2019): 4. Mitman, Gregg “Ref lections on the Plantationocene: A Conversation with Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing,” Edge Effects Magazine, June 18, 2019. Shiva, Vandana. Transcript: Dr. Vandana Shiva on Becoming Untameable /212. For the Wild. 2019. Sonjasdotter, Åsa. “The Order of Potatoes: On Purity and Variation in Plant Breeding,” Third Text 32, no. 2–3 (September 25, 2018). Sonjasdotter, Åsa. Peace with the Earth: Tracing Agricultural Memory, Reconfiguring Practice. Anagram Books, 2020.

10 Poisons

We are sick, many of us—a fact that relates to many environmental problems: pesticides and agricultural inputs of all kinds, air and water pollution, and deleterious inhabited environments. We are sick, and we must characterize our sick bodies by what makes them sick—what they feel, what they ingest, what they digest. It is again a question of food and agricultural production: if it concerns viruses, it also concerns agricultural production, since we are talking about deforestation, the way in which natural environments and ecosystems are disrupted and essential balances are lost, never to return. Diseases owe much to agro-chemistry, and artists use various ways to denounce the collusions at work in this domain and become carriers of awareness and living alternatives—that is, with works of resistance to the poisons of capitalism that make the body into a theater. “Body burden” is the term used to describe the specific, scientifically measurable level of non-naturally occurring chemicals in our bodies at any given time. Most of these chemicals bio-accumulate over time in our fatty tissues (as well as those of other mammals, such as whales and dolphins), passing from mother to embryo. This chemical fingerprint is difficult for most of us to determine without a laboratory blood test (usually costing about €150) and special analysis. The amount of industrial chemicals in our bodies increased steadily during the twentieth century as our exposure to them grew at the same time that they were passed on to fetuses. Numerous campaigns and public reports over the last two decades have aroused awareness of the toxins inhabiting our bodies, but medical reviews and analysis take many years to complete in the lab, as it passes through experimentation and eventually peer review. Yet artists and activists have been digging for transparency on this topic for years. Corporate lobbyists representing petro-chemical conglomerates have fought against publishing scientific data on the topic, and in fact their resistance is an ongoing challenge at the UN and other international bodies that are responsible for human, plant, and animal health. The Safe Planet campaign mentioned in earlier chapters, was launched at the UN Environmental Program (UNEP) in 2010 working under the auspices of the Basel, Stockholm, and Rotterdam conventions. Michael Stanley-Jones persuaded then director of the Stockholm Convention, Donald

DOI: 10.4324/9780367433710-11

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Cooper, to launch a campaign in which art and artists would raise awareness about hazardous chemicals and waste in our environment. The mission was to make these invisible poisons visible to a wider public, which was perhaps uninformed about the hazards posed to human health by our foods, our beds, and our landscapes. The program’s first exhibition, Substantialis Corporis Mixti (Substantial Form of the Blended Body), was shown at the Czech Center in New York City in its new space at the Bohemian National Hall.1 Curated by Mark Cervenka, director of the University of Houston’s O’Kane Gallery, the exhibition brought together 12 artists working in various visual media to describe and inform viewers about the chemical body burden that we all now live with. This successful intervention launched the campaign led over the next decade by one of the authors who served as an Advisor to Safe Planet. Each exhibition focused on a specific area of concern about the planet’s health, from persistent organic pollutants (POPS) to electronic waste to DDT and endocrine disrupters present in food and farmland. “The Stockholm Convention is the definitive global instrument for assessing, identifying, and controlling the most hazardous chemical substances on the planet,” a report from the Endocrine Society and International Pollutants Elimination Network (IPEN) observed in 2020.2 Pamela Miller, IPEN cochair, commented, This report clarifies that the current acceleration of plastic production, projected to increase by 30–36% in the next six years, will greatly exacerbate EDC exposures and rising global rates of endocrine diseases. Global policies to reduce and eliminate EDCs from plastic and reduce exposures from plastic recycling, plastic waste, and incineration are imperative. EDCs in plastics are an international health issue that is felt acutely in the global south where toxic plastic waste shipments from wealthier countries inundate communities.3 The coauthor of the report, Pauliina Damdimopoulou of the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, goes on to explain about the dangers of these toxins that are now being passed on generationally in our very DNA: Endocrine-disrupting chemical exposure is not only a global problem today, but it poses a serious threat to future generations. When a pregnant woman is exposed, EDCs can affect the health of her child and eventual grandchildren. Animal studies show EDCs can cause DNA modifications that have repercussions across multiple generations.4 The art exhibitions under the Safe Planet campaign engaged artists around the globe working on environmental issues that cause and allow these toxins to enter our bodies. Connected to various UN conferences and Conference of Parties (COPs), the exhibitions brought visual inspiration and accountability to the challenging environmental policies confronting the diverse countries

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Figure 10.1 Exhibition talk with students at Universidad Technològico de Cancún: “What Will Be” with the U.N.Safe Planet Campaign at 2010 at United Nations, Convention on Climate Change COP16, Cancún, Quintana Roo, Mexico. (Barbara Benish, co-curator, with video by Gilberto Esparza, Mexico). Courtesy of ArtMill Archives.

at their meetings. Body burden was an emerging theme in 2010, and at the Fifth Annual International Marine Debris Conference in Honolulu in 2011, in a gallery at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, eight artists presented works on plastic pollution, a major endocrine disrupter in our body burden that can lead to catastrophic disease.5 As we now know, micro-plastics that f low into waterways, rivers, and streams that eventually empty to the ocean are ingested by fish. These micro-particles have now worked their way up in the food chain, from fish to humans. Headlining the exhibition of artists working mainly in the “plasticpollution genre” was an exquisite wood-block print of ocean waves by Masami Teraoka, who has humorously depicted the American fast-food phenomena in delicately rendered ukiyo-e-style prints and paintings. Born in Japan, Teraoka moved in the 1960s, during the heyday of pop art, to Los Angeles, the city in which Andy Warhol first showed his paintings of Campbell’s Soup cans. Teraoka eventually migrated to Hawai’i, where his studio

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Figure 10.2 Nomadic plants/plantas nómadas, Gilberto Esparza (2008–14). Courtesy of the Artist.

sits in the sleepy seaside village of Waimanalo, and the Asian-Hawaiian-white cross-cultural lifestyle inspires his wonderous mixed-media tableaux full of art-historical references. Beginning with his series McDonald’s Hamburgers Invading Japan in the 1960s and 1970s, in which he uses the hamburger to symbolize the United States’ cultural imperialism, consumerism, and homogenization, Teraoka has continued for decades to depict fast-food culture as disturbingly pervasive. Referencing such masters of the traditional wood-block print of the Edo period as Utagawa Kunisada and Katsushika Hokusai, Teraoka, often depicts waves, rippling water, fish, seaweed, sea monsters, and sushi: things tied to shared oceanic life that predominants in both his island home of Japan and contemporary Hawai’i. The pop additions of plastic wrappers on soy sauce, mustard spilled on chopstick holders, or Japanese noodle soup slurped by a tattooed woman point to the artist’s interest in a food culture gone astray. He is very aware of the dangerous chemicals now prevalent in the fish we eat; he mourns the micro-plastics now found in 90 percent of fish; and he knows full well that he has more pollutants in his body than his father, who survived the Nagasaki nuclear blast in World War II.6 The McDonald’s hamburger, as discussed above, is representative of a certain aspect of American culture. Around the time that the first McDonald’s opened in Japan, Den Fujita, the president of the company’s Japanese operation, declared: “The reason Japanese people are so short

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and have yellow skin is because they have eaten nothing but fish and rice for two thousand years. If we eat McDonald’s hamburgers and potatoes for a thousand years, we will become taller, our skin will become white, and our hair will be blonde.” This, of course, is both a preposterous statement and a clumsy attempt at marketing. If burgers have changed the bodies of Japanese people in any way, they have most likely lead to obesity. My point here is that the hamburger has been fetishized and endowed with magical powers it does not in fact possess.7 Connecting our everyday consumption habits to the health of our planet is challenging. Art that describes our impending death is not an easy experience. While the sea has been both the friend and life-giving companion of humans since time immemorial, she has come to be commodified and farmed as indiscriminately as the land. Sustainable fishing practices have only recently been introduced in only very few areas worldwide. Overfishing, the international transportation of tankers, pollution, chemical dumping, and warming oceans have contributed to the mass dying-off of kelp and coral forests around the world. Along with forests, oceans are the lungs of the planet and have provided our ecosystem with a balanced life that is now threatened with extinction. Yet tourists still f ly to far-f lung destinations to bask in the ever-heating sun and swim in the ever-warming waters. While the main focus of this book is land-based food and agriculture, the underwater world also supplies much food to the planet’s animal and human species. Its provision of food increases yearly despite dwindling fish resources. In 2018, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization recorded a 5.4 percent increase in wild fishing over the previous three years, with more than 96.4 million tons of fish caught—the highest level ever recorded.8 This happened in a world in which nearly half of the fish species that were alive in 1950 are now extinct. An intrinsic link in the marine ecology are the living corals that cover ocean f loors and shores across the globe. These microscopic animals build skeletal homes that then provide shelter and nutrients to larger life forms: fish. Much like the brambles and wilderness areas that surround fields, these underwater border regions are intricate, connected biological systems that support the growth of marine life. Without coral, the seas will die. And as the coral reefs die off, we begin to experience the web of life in startling decline.

New Materialism Artists Since they work with living bodies, some of the artists tackling issues related to our new materiality are sometimes considered feminists, either because of their connections to New Materialists or because they are, on the contrary, eco-feminists. For example, the feminist collective subRosa was born in 1998 at the initiative of Faith Wilding and a research group as part of their Sex and Gender in the Biotech Century project at the STUDIO for Creative

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Inquiry of Carnegie Mellon University. Strongly inspired by the work of Donna Haraway, these researchers engage in art activism. In 1999, at the Next Five Minutes 3 festival in Amsterdam, they distributed their manifesto, which reads: The name subRosa honors feminist pioneers in art, activism, labor, politics and science: Rosa Bonheur, Rosa Luxemburg, Rosie the Riveter, Rosa Parks, Rosie Franklin. subRosa is a reproducible cyberfeminist cell of cultural researchers committed to combining art, activism and politics to explore and critique the intersections of new information and biotechnologies in women’s bodies, lives and work. subRosa produces artworks, activist campaigns and projects, sneak attacks, publications, media interventions, and public forums that make visible the effects of the interconnections between technology, gender and difference, feminism and global capital, new bio and medical technologies and women’s health, and the new conditions of women’s work and reproduction in the integrated circuit. subRosa practices an embodied situational feminist politics, fueled by conviviality, self-determination, and the desire for positive alliances and coalitions.9 subRosa’s work, including their research on eugenic thinking and genetics, led to their performance U-GEN-A-CHIX or Why Women are like Chickens, and Chickens are like Women. This participatory performance compares the use of women and chickens as generative tissue producers of eggs and embryonic stem cells for the global biomedical market. A version of the performance commissioned by the City of Women festival in Ljubljana, Slovenia, in 2009 incorporated research findings on the rapid growth of fertility tourism and the increasing incursion of genetically modified crops into Eastern European and Balkan countries. The group Aliens in Green, which includes Bureau d’Études, Ewen Chardronnet, Špela Petrič, Mary Tsang, and a network of actors specializing in endocrine disruptors, questions not the taste but rather the toxicity of food.10 Aliens in Green includes a mobile investigative lab and tactical theater group that conduct research on “alien agents of Anthropocene xeno-power.” The lab implements cross-media processes that open up a critical public space by bringing together open science, do-it-yourself practices, serious games, speculative storytelling, cultural intelligence, and science fiction. Aliens in Green claims to act to enable “earthlings” to identify collusion between capitalism and xeno-political interests, believing that exposure to synthetic chemicals interferes with human and non-human hormonal systems. Despite warnings of the toxic effects of endocrine disruptors, the petrochemical, agricultural, and pharmaceutical industries continue to lobby to inf luence regulations and the agencies charged with implementing and enforcing them. These lobbyists can be seen as xeno-powers that regulate and pollute our bodies and our environment.

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At the same time, terms like “abnormal” or “disruptive” are central to much environmental and critical discourse and shape the debate about gender ambiguity and threats to the reproductive future. These arguments reinforce a politics of purity and ref lect our eco-hetero-normative value system. How do we account for the normal and the natural? Would our queer friends and our alien gender have no future in this increasingly toxic landscape? Aliens in Green exhibits bodies in crisis that leave room for subjectivities in the perpetual definition. Neither normative nor non-normative, these subjectivities demonstrate the alien resistance that these artists describe as xeno-solidarity. It is a strategy composed of a set of movements, and the research-creation developed by this artistic collective is a form of tactical theater. The performance allows the audience to experience the complexity of the issues sitting at the crossroads of food and toxicity. The research work is developed in a preparatory phase consisting of interviews with people who are directly involved with the endocrine disruptors produced by the food system, such as farmers, politicians, and affected people. The staging mixes meals with disruptors and detoxifiers, a stage play and stage device, projections, and real-time biological analysis. The theatrical work toured a network of theaters (including the Jeu de Paume and Cité des Arts), allowing spectators to take part in the debate about endocrine disruptors. The idea was to propose an aesthetic of the environment located between remedy and poison, with food participating in both, although the staging had more to with poison than remedy. In France alone, more than 10 million people are chronically ill. In this case, the idea that a healthy diet is the first medicine is largely thwarted by the importance of unchecked agro-chemistry. The complexity of this artistic approach is due in particular to the invisibility of the phenomena in play, which lie between drug and remedy, or scientific and technological progress and capitalist development. The artistic critical work, which uses theater as its raw material and operationalizes the spectators’ and public’s progressive awareness, is often dramatic and makes spectacular reference to science. Some of the artists, including Jens Hauser, curator and researcher affiliated with the Medical Museion of the University of Copenhagen, and Aniara Rodado, choregrapher, artist, and researcher, weave together witchcraft and science. Their goal is to force science and the arts to enter into a dialogue beyond the disciplinary boundaries in place for centuries. In the framework of the Green Revisited: Encountering Emerging Naturecultures (GREEN) project,11 financed by the EU and deployed between 2019 and 2021 in cooperation with universities and exhibition spaces, people from various disciplines and methodological currents questioned the green matter of plants as well as phytophilia (attraction to vegetation) and chlorophobia (aversion to the color green). The proposed perspectives are varied: the objective is to decolonize minds and bodies, starting from epistemologies of the South, to force the gaze onto contemporary capitalism and its ecological predations.

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For the curators of the exhibition OU\VERT: Phytophilia—Chlorophobia— Situated Knowledge in Bourges, France, from October 18, 2019, to January 18, 2020, the color green is always perceived positively. However, green is the wavelength of light that the plant rejects. Moreover, more vegetation is linked to more GHG emissions. In short, green is not necessarily positive. In the exhibition, American artists Adam Brown and Rebekah Blesing pay tribute to the report of the chemist Robert Kedzie, the author of the alarming 1874 book Shadows from the Walls of Death, known to exist today in only four copies, which alerted people to the danger of arsenic-poisoned paper and paint. “Here, a performance was played, which deconstructs the symbolic use of the color green synonymous with good health and return to nature from the nineteenth century while it contained at the time a highly toxic pigment that was then called the green of Paris,” explains Rodado.12 The first truly green pigments were highly toxic copper-arsenic compounds known as “Paris green” and “Scheele’s green.” They were developed in the nineteenth century for use as pigments by the Impressionists as well as in candy, clothing, and wallpaper. Thus, bringing nature’s green indoors effectively poisoned people and the environment that they wanted to recreate. For Adam Brown, Shadows from the Walls of Death is testimony to the way in which chemistry and microbes mediate the human experience of nature. Hauser’s and Rodado’s work aims to show the links between science and art as well as nature, science, and art. Beyond the issue of representation, they are interested in the way in which scientific and artistic mediations transform reality. The new reality recreated by art and science is poisoned and rebellious against human omnipotence. Science and art also have points in common, notably, their tools and techniques. For example, kinship exists between a genetic sequencer and a sampling beyond the symbolic. To open a debate on the links between art, science, and nature is to seek to modify the way that we, human beings, exist today. The result is a compromised world, and we passively watch the wreckage. However, we must use these scientific and artistic mediations to slow down the proliferation of financial and biotechnological capitalism at the heart of our cells. How can we resist and give ourselves the means to do so on multiple technological, biological, economic, and political levels? The French artist Camille Juthier turns our sick and hybrid world into a dreamlike, colorful universe by imagining the artificial and hybrid bodies of industrialized societies. These bodies ref lect a world that she imagines lacks hierarchy, is fantastic, sometimes gently dreamy. She works on the ways in which all kinds of materials can be impregnated by living phenomena decorated with multiple colors. In her 2019 video N’importe quelle chose glisse, routine végétale (Any Thing Slips: Vegetable Routine), ancestral knowledge is colonized by digital viruses that have escaped from stories spread on Instagram. In

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the video, an avatar of the artist, crossing fields of corn seed at a pace cadenced by the castration of male plants, wonders how to heal before the whole of life is patented and how to protect the land of the last farmer of Lyon.13 In 2002, Molecular Invasion, a work of bio-art and participatory sciencetheater that artivist group Critical Art Ensemble (CAE) created with students from the Corcoran School of Art and Design and exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery, caused a scandal in the United States. CAE was attempting to reverse the resistance of the Monsanto soybean to an herbicide. In addition to questioning the transgenic manipulations at the heart of public debate, the group’s artistic project came up with the concept of fuzzy biological sabotage to seize the tools that industries use. In the work, the artists CAE/da Costa/Pentecost and several students “attempted to reverse-engineer genetically modified canola, corn and soybean plants through the use of environmentally friendly, non-toxic chemical disruptors.”14 The proposed model of biology proved challenging. Sabotage operations are based on the idea that democracy will not be enough to respond to the deployment of capitalism, with its capacity to annex all aspects of life in its desire to create surplus value. One of the solutions proposed by the collective is farce. For example, releasing mutant f lies into research facilities and nearby offices can potentially have a disruptive effect. Implementing new modes of resistance is central to CAE’s work. For other collectives closer to design and the search for solutions to environmental problems, such as feeding the world or getting rid of plastics, the challenge is to propose new ways to instrumentalize the living. For example, in collaboration with the University of Utrecht and with funding from the Bio Art and Design Award, Livin Studio, a design studio founded by Katharina Unger and Julia Kaisinger, developed a new food product based on mushrooms grown on plastic waste, along with a prototype incubator in which to grow the produce and culinary tools for consuming it. The “Fungi Mutarium” incubator grows edible fungal biomass, primarily mycelium, on specially designed forms of agar in egg-shaped pods that the designers call FU. Agar is a seaweed-based gelatin substitute that, when mixed with starch and sugar, serves as the nutrient base for the mushrooms. The FUs are filled with plastic and fungi are then inserted to digest the plastic and occupy the entire pod. The FUs’ shape, which was inspired by mushrooms and other plants, is designed to retain the plastic and provide a large surface area for the mushrooms to grow on. This experimentation between art, design, technology, and plant and mushroom biology is based on the idea of a food revolution. Scientific research has shown that fungi can degrade toxic and persistent waste such as plastics and turn them into edible fungal biomass. Another tabletop device by Livin Studio is Farm 432, which breeds the black soldier f ly on a domestic scale. The goal is to advocate for insects as a sustainable choice in food and feed. At the place where nature and design meet, where humans interact with their living environments, and where current means and methods of

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production intersect with natural systems, original research is taking place in science and technology, agricultural production, food industries, health, and education.

Sick Bodies These artistic works refer to the intimate relationship of human bodies to what they ingest and the difficulties, poisons, and interrogations raised in our inner bodies by the innumerable substances that we swallow every day. How to think the body today, this sick, disturbed body, symptomatic of the wanderings of our time? We do not mean thinking of the body as a nostalgic remainder of the past. The sick body conditioned by the poisons of today’s industrialized society is not so different from the sick body poisoned by nature yesterday. But the origin of illness has become human and often financial. We must change the way we look at the body. Let us think of the body as a utopia, says Michel Foucault, a utopia that has become impossible to decipher and alienated by contemporary substances. Certainly, the term “utopia” has a past that sets it in opposition to an idea of the body as a utopia. In the fifteenth century, theoretical speeches appeared for the first time in the west that pretended to find the ideal procedures for a perfect society. Among these is Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), which still determines the approach of many urban-planning theorists today. In the twentieth century, Henri Lefebvre, a Marxist philosopher and sociologist, developed the idea of an experimental utopia. According to Claire Revol, experimental utopias return to the exploration of human possibility with the help of the imagination and in the context of a critique firmly rooted in reality.15 Lefebvre prolongs the experimentation and social effervescence of the nineteenth-century utopias envisioned by Robert Owen, Joseph Proudhon, and others. Certainly, the utopian space is a space without place, but it is also, according to Gilbert Hottois, philosopher of technology, a space at the heart of the functioning of contemporary societies. The technical society, pushed to the extreme, invades all domains of daily life. In other words, utopia is the dream that contemporary societies make for themselves. We dream of a body without body, or of a body transformed to be itself in excess, or we dream of nothing, and the body is transformed. We are now more than ever in the process of engaging in this dream, as shown by the success of Transhumanism, an intellectual movement that advocates for the use of science and technology to improve the physical and mental capacities of human beings and transform the human condition. We would then be far from the a-utopianism advocated by Hans Jonas, who in The Imperative of Responsibility attacked Ernst Bloch’s philosophy of hope, calling it unrealistic.16 However, for Bloch utopia is a Marxist tool of social transformation situated in contemporary societies. Concrete utopias, in particular medical utopias, include experimentation based on rationality and effective technical development. In sum, utopian writings comprise several defining features.

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In our thinking about art and food, remedy and poison, we retain a model society that is opposed to real society but the critique of which is inseparable from the description-elaboration of real society (although such utopias can be partial and concern only parts of society); recourse to the spatial and temporal imaginary to qualify the distance of the utopia to society; and an experience of thought that makes the utopia possible. It is as much an architectural and concrete possibility as an epistemological possibility directed at formulating new statements17 and finally, militantly engaging with this utopia. How, therefore, can the body be qualified as utopian, the thesis defended by Foucault in his radio intervention entitled The Utopian Body in 1966?18 The utopia, it is a place out of all the places, but it is a place where I will have a body without body, a body which will be beautiful, limpid, transparent, luminous, velocity, colossal in its power, infinite in its duration, untied, invisible, protected, always transfigured. My body is the opposite of a utopia, what is never under another sky, it is the absolute place, the small fragment of space with which, in the strict sense, I am one. My body, merciless topia.19 He returns to this assertion later and contradicts it: Incomprehensible body, penetrable and opaque body, open and closed body: utopian body. No, really, there is no need for magic or enchantment, there is no need for a soul or a death for me to be at the same time opaque and transparent, visible and invisible, life and thing: for me to be utopia, it is enough that I am a body. The utopia frees itself, then, from its spatial and temporal conception of an improved future to benefit a conception based on the lived experience of the body. According to Foucault, the excesses of our natures show the role of bodily transformation in utopias. The utopia is real, as it is made of diseases and pains. These malformations, deformations, and permanent dysfunctions cause bodies to attack themselves. It is not a question of reducing the word “utopia” to the idea of normalized space in the original sense or even to the idea of experimentation, which would come to disturb the course of the events, according to Henri Lefebvre. It is a question of the development of an idea of oneself, of carnal folds and a desire that plays in the abyssal depth of the body’s potentialities. The body and, more widely, the moving materiality of the f lesh, the f lesh, and the food it consumes become the new place of dreams to come.

Chronic Diseases The example of chronic diseases illustrates this version of utopia. Over the past 50 years, we have witnessed a reversal in the causes of mortality. If,

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before, the majority of deaths in the world were caused by infectious diseases, in 2008, according to estimates of the World Health Organization, out of 57 million deaths worldwide, 36 million were due to non-communicable diseases, such as cardiovascular disease, cancers, respiratory disease, and diabetes. A growing, significant number of people are affected by bodily failures or dysfunctions (such as cancers or autoimmune diseases) linked to the intensity of environmental exposures (air quality, water quality, endocrine disruptors, etc.). At this point, one of the authors takes up her pen to describe her own personal history, because she is sick of accumulated toxicity. Sickness and pain are difficult to say on all levels. Terms are lacking, and it is necessary to find new ones, both subjective and objective medical terms. This difficulty has a history touched on here. Disease arises, struggles to be said. Why does it happen? One hypothesis is that it does not make sense unless it is defined as nature and takes its meaning outside of us human beings. The difference with other natures is that it is our body, our own nature. Since the year 2000, many patients have taken to the internet to make the disease a common theme in forums and blogs. Nevertheless, each patient must invent his or her own language, his or her own terminological resources. Of course, this depends on the disease and the patient. It is both the illness that needs to be transcribed and the experience of the sick person as an inner world that slowly decomposes in confronting an illness that constitutes an otherness with which one has to live. Who is so sick, sick all the time, that the body rots while it exhausts itself to live? Who are these bodies that say they are decomposing and in pain? The bodies speak of themselves in their diminished illness. The bodies speak of the present (toxic environments, stressful conditions . . .) and of the past (defective genes, legacies of difficult lives as perpetually jostled or wandering migrants, lives in concentration camps). They speak of what we have not been able to see, the invisibility of a toxic environment, and the invisibility that we carry, incarcerated in this so-called fortress that is the gene, an invention of biologists in our time. The inheritance concerns bodies modified in the course of the history, by the history and the stories. We inherit genes and their curses. Are these diseases the product of chance crossings of a given environment and human activity? Or are the metamorphoses at work rather the result of dynamics inscribed in heavy trends, inscribed in the heart of socio-natural entities and their mode of intra-agency? Are we not aware of this pollution or contamination that has social costs, not to mention economic costs? Moreover, are we not damaged from before birth? The techniques for detecting malformations affecting genes allow us to partially measure their potential in terms of certain cancers and other diseases. It is possible that these genes have been transformed by the history of families and environments shaped by pain, torture, famine, and other sorts of adversities. In this sense, illness is a result, the product of ourselves but also the consequence and the cause of everything that happens to us, not only individually but also collectively, in the course of family trajectories whose historicity is inherited.

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There is history, but there is also a rewriting of history in all the opacity that the body represents. In what way can these illnesses, far from being happy places or even hypothetical constructions that we would like to see materialize, the bearers of promises and societal hopes, be a sort of utopia? There is an unspoken, a mis-spoken, a mis-said disease that materializes in the bodies, in their impenetrability. The sick body makes visible the opacity of the body, its impossibility to spell itself in clear terms. The disease that makes the body dysfunctional inscribes it in a reality distanced from the one shared by the greatest number, makes it possibly critical by a series of signs, as do the utopias that propose new realities, distant poetically, metaphorically, from lived realities. “My body, in fact, is always elsewhere, it is linked to all the other places in the world, and in fact it is elsewhere than in the world,” Michel Foucault says. The disease reinforces this elsewhere of the body by conferring on it the lived thickness of a suffering and undesired otherness. In the absence of hope, utopia constitutes a critical elsewhere, a form that is no longer simply poetic and therefore easy to inscribe in the register of promise but a nonnegotiable form of denunciatory distance. Given this denunciatory distance, this utopia that represents the sick body, it is the difficulty to say the suffering that takes hold of the f lesh while it is prey to substantial modifications and to enunciate it in connection with the ideas and practices that govern a reality. Whether it is a question of the capacities of nerves, brains, legs, feet, and hands or, on the contrary, of their incapacities, the disease modifies the feeling of oneself in its relation to others. The one who is sick becomes a stranger to one’s own person. One is, in a way that is renewed daily, another. Finally, illness refers to a socio-technical system to which you fall prey as it identifies what is happening to you and treats or stops its development. In short, to evoke certain diseases today that are difficult to diagnose is to venture into unknown territory. What is the pathology concerned? What are the causes? How will this disease develop and what are the triggers of crises? In this way, environmental diseases or chronic illnesses substantially change the rule of the game as far as the order of causality or changes in the body are concerned. However, what it changes most profoundly is the fact that, rather than dying of it all at once, one never recovers from it and lives in the non-place that the body becomes when ill. Such a way of stating this drama gives the word “utopia” a very particular place beyond even that to which Michel Foucault assigned it. It is a matter of bodies and materialities that have difficulty in being said and that, for the time being, oblige us to consider utopia in a completely different way. It is a utopia of the body that makes itself visible, a utopia associated with the materiality of the f lesh and socio-natural dysfunctions, a utopia that obliges one to engage with one’s own body to interpret the signs of it. What are these utopian spaces? What do they say about our era, sometimes called the Anthropocene in reference to the planetary transformations produced by human activity? These utopian spaces are not really spaces, or

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rather they are spaces with blurred contours, to the point that it is difficult to extract them from the unspoken dimension of their environment. Their utopian character is precisely the way in which they give a relative content to their environment and translate it into signs. We are in a dynamic opposite of that in the nineteenth century, when urban pathologies were caused by too much nature, too many insects and vermin, too many swamps and other fetid, unhealthy places. Cities were cleaned up starting in the nineteenth century so as to cut the links between our organisms and these fetid natural environments that favored the proliferation of disease and unhealthy areas. It was then that the dynamic was reversed and that which makes us sick is, on the contrary, probably the chemistry and physics implemented to make our urban environments too human, as proof against this degrading nature. Today, one can imagine—that is to say, project oneself into—this utopian space so that one sees living bodies as so many places of unspoken words, of disturbances in speech. These bodies move in the streets, on the squares, walk the main boulevards, the highways, and canals; they know of the dumps, the places for recycling and nuclear experimentation, of everything that shapes the faces haunted by physical and chemical experiments. These utopias are bodies waiting for death, living critics of the realities at work around them, possibly representing standing utopias, beings whose power of being is manifested by their inability to spell themselves fully in the silence of what affects them. This point of view consists in not knowing where we are going anymore, if we ever knew—although we pretended to know—and in making this non-place topple between the over-humanist technophile prophecy and the dark catastrophism in which, from then on and in fact, utopia degenerates into the incapacity to govern and terrestrial collapse. There is a lot of utopia in medicine, which would like to transform bodies into triumphant machines, into perfect filters of future pain. The Western paradigm of living is essentially centered on the idea of filter: the materiality of the city constitutes a technical capsule perfectly adapted to the needs of human beings. Spaces and techniques form a filter against an undesirable nature. In short, the body as habitat is the shell of the human being, a mode of coupling to technical objects. The lived reality is far from these utopian dreams if it is still impossible to make you pain free, if the body can turn into an iron maiden, if, short of putting you to sleep with opiates or other drugs, nothing much can be done. We think what needs to be said is that the body in the grip of biological wanderings is a learning machine in relation to a dysfunctional nature. After a while, while living in illness, the signals of pain, fatigue, shortness of breath located in various places in the body become habitual. One learns to read oneself in one’s illness like a text that is chewed and re-chewed and which becomes more profound because of this re- chewing. We would say that illness invites a dialogue between oneself and one’s desire to live as closely as possible to one’s body and its manifestations. Food is part of this.

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Figure10.3 Masami Teraoka, 31 Flavors Invading Japan/Today’s Special, 1982. Thirty-five-color woodcut printed from hand-carved blocks of cherry wood with natural dyes and with additional hand-coloring on handmade Hosho paper. Numbered edition of 500, plus 33 proofs. Signed and numbered in pencil on the verso. Carved and printed under the direction of Tadakatsu Takamizawa by Hanpei Okura and Kanjiro Sato respectively at the Ukiyo-e Research Center in Tokyo, Japan. Published by Space Gallery, Los Angeles, California. Sheet and image: 11 1/16 x 16 9/16 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Catharine Clark Gallery, San Francisco.

Notes 1 In the exhibition catalogue, Achim Steiner, UN under-secretary general and UNEP executive director, writes: The challenge of hazardous chemicals can appear invisible and remote to many of us. While science offers us the rationale and objective evidence of the risks, art connects the heart: In doing so it can move and mobilize each and of all of us to act in new and transformative ways. This is the twin goal of the Safe Planet campaign, an initiative of the United Nations and its three global chemicals and hazardous wastes treaties known as Basel, Rotterdam and Stockholm in short. Several high-profile individuals have agreed to have themselves tested in order to spotlight the sobering fact that all of us are tainted to a greater or lesser extent by chemicals. Equally, that these substances are everywhere and respect no gender, race, income bracket, country or Continent. Substantialis Corporis Mixti or Substantial Form of the Blended Body exhibition brings the power of art center stage into the debate, offering via the canvass and the camera a new dimension and perspective to this global challenge. The works underline not only the tragedy of an unsustainable path, but the beauty of the natural world at risk from a failure to intelligently and

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creatively respond. Chemicals have transformed the modern world including the worlds of science and of art. The challenge is not to live without chemicals, but to ensure their production, use and disposal leaves a footprint on this and future generations that is light and respects all living things. On behalf of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization, I would like to thank the Czech Center New York for their support for this pioneering artistic endeavor. And also thank the artists whose work is not only provocative but persuasive and perceptive. Substantialis Corporis Mixti (Substantial Form of the Blended Body, published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same title, organized by and presented at the Czech Center, New York City on the occasion of the eighteenth session of the Commission on Sustainable Development in May 2010. 2 Endocrine Society, “Plastics Pose Threat to Human Health,” Press Release, December 15, 2020, https://www.endocrine.org/news-and-advocacy/ news-room/2020/plastics-pose-threat-to-human-health. 3 Endocrine Society, “Plastics Pose Threat to Human Health.” 4 Endocrine Society, “Plastics Pose Threat to Human Health.” 5 Barbara Benish, “Safe Planet,” Success Stories, Stockholm Convention, 2001–2011 (Geneva: Secretariat of the Stockholm Convention, 2012), 106. 6 Masami Teraoka, in discussion with Barbara Benish, Waimanalo, Hawai’i, June 2012. 7 Qi Niu, “Geisha with Hamburger, Food, Sex, and Mirrors in the Narrative Art of Teraoka Masami” (senior honors thesis, University of Michigan, 2015), 22. 8 UN Food and Agriculture Organization, The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture, video, 2020, https://www.fao.org/state-of-fisheries-aquaculture. 9 subRosa’s founding manifesto declares: subRosa’s name honors feminist pioneers in art, activism, labor, politics, and science: Rosa Bonheur, Rosa Luxemburg, Rosie the Riveter, Rosa Parks, Rosie Franklin. subRosa is a reproducible cyberfeminist cell of cultural researchers committed to combining art, activism, and politics to explore and critique the intersections of the new information and biotechnologies in women’s bodies, lives, and work. subRosa produces artworks, activist campaigns and projects, sneak attacks, publications, media interventions, and public forums that make visible the effects of the interconnections of technology, gender, and difference; feminism and global capital; new bio and medical technologies and women’s health; and the changed conditions of labor and reproduction for women in the integrated circuit. subRosa practices a situational embodied feminist politics nourished by conviviality, self-determination, and the desire for affirmative alliances and coalitions.

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“Manifesto,” subRosa: a Cyberfeminist Art Collective, http://cyberfeminism. net/about/manifesto/. Aliens in Green is a mobile investigative laboratory and tactical theater group, which implements intermedia processes that bring together various disciplines: science, DIY practices, speculative storytelling, serious games, cultural intelligence and science fiction. It is a group composed of five people, two artists, Spela Petric, Mary Tsang, and art critic Ewen Chardronnet. See the Aliens in Green website at http://aliensingreen.eu/. See Green Revisited (website), http://green.rixc.org. OU\VERT : Phytophilia – Chlorophobia – Situated Knowledge (Bourges, EmmetropTranspalette Bourges, 2019). Camille Juthier, N’importe quelle chose glisse, routine végétale, video (2019), YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ERV8tNc1_Ag&t=2s.

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14 Critical Art Ensemble, Molecular Invasion (2002), Archive of Digital Art, https:// www.digitalartarchive.at/database/general/work/molecular-invasion.html? tx_vawiz_pi1%5Baid%5D=0%3Fkeyworduid%3D166&cHash=a4814bdc440 f b7a7157a4c93aaf 7ef05. 15 Claire Revol, La rythmanalyse chez Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991): contribution à une poétique urbaine (doctoral these, Université de Lyon, 2015); Henri Lefebvre, “Right to the City,” in Writings on Cities, eds. Leonore Kofman and Elisabeth Lebas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 63–81. 16 Sébastien Broca, “Comment réhabiliter l’utopie? Une lecture critique d’Ernst Bloch,” Philonsorbonne 6 (2011–2012): 9–21, http://philonsorbonne.revues. org/374. 17 Pierre Furter, “Utopie et marxisme selon Ernst Bloch,” Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions 21 (1966): 3–21, www.persee.fr/doc/assr_0003-9659_ 1966_num_21_1_2580. 18 Michel Foucault, “The Utopian Body,” 1966, Fleurmach, https://f leurmach. com/2016/06/05/michel-foucault-the-utopian-body-1966/. 19 Michel Foucault, L’utopie du corps (Radio Feature, 1966), YouTube, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=NSNkxvGlUNY.

Bibliography Benish, Barbara. “Safe Planet,” in Success Stories, Stockholm Convention, 2001–2011. Geneva: Secretariat of the Stockholm Convention, 2012. Broca, Sébastien. “Comment réhabiliter l’utopie? Une lecture critique d’Ernst Bloch,” Philonsorbonne 6 (2011–12): 19–21, http://philonsorbonne. revues.org/374. Furter, Pierre. “Utopie et marxisme selon Ernst Bloch,” Archives de Sciences Sociales des Religions 21 (1966): 3–21. Lefebvre, Henri. “Right to the City,” in Writings on Cities, eds. Leonore Kofman and Elisabeth Lebas. Oxford: Blackwell, 1996 (1968). Niu, Qi. “Geisha with Hamburger, Food, Sex, and Mirrors in the Narrative Art of Teraoka Masami,” Senior honors thesis, University of Michigan, 2015. Revol, Claire. “La rythmanalyse chez Henri Lefebvre (1901–1991): contribution à une poétique urbaine,” Thèse de doctorat sous la direction de Jean-Jacques Wunenburger, Université de Lyon, 2015. UN Food and Agriculture Organization. The State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture, video, 2020, https://www.fao.org/state-of-fisheries-aquaculture.

11 Decolonizing Land and Body through Food Culture

In previous chapters, we talked about artists who are dedicated to what we might call the “semiotics of the gut,” a celebratory appeal to look at the human digestive system as part of the larger ecosystem that humans belong to (but without serving as the axis mundi). If we look at the etymology of the word that describes the intestinal track, that bodily highway that transfers nutrients to the physical systems of living organisms and then eliminates waste, we may find a useful metaphor for other extractive practices. Colonization, the exploitive political and economic practice of invading and conquering other humans or places, is in fact linked etymologically to the word “colon.” Colonies are living organisms that multiply and grow while feeding off the host (or land) and in turn creating waste. The human species has been particularly successful at such activities, except that our waste has become polluting and destructive instead of reentering the ecosystem in a way that replenishes and regenerates the colonized area. For many Indigenous peoples, from the Inuit of North America to the Lhamso of Cameroon, generations of colonization under white supremacist rule have left not only their lands and environment devastated but their cultures fighting for survival. The material culture of Indigenous tribes has been one of the fine red lines keeping many of them from disappearing completely during periods of colonization and outside encroachment. The genocide of Native American tribes was a particularly brutal event after Europeans came to America 500 years ago. It is poignant to see how Native American artists have used food and its preparation as a theme and, in fact, as a vital connection to keep their culture and heritage alive. As discussed in our earlier work,1 definitions of art are changing, and the forms inherent in those definitions have again become more tied to experiences of and with the environment in which they are made. “The recovery of the people is tied to the recovery of food, since food itself is medicine: not only for the body, but for the soul, for the spiritual connection to history, ancestors, and the land,” the environmentalist and economist Winona La Duke has said.2 Unhealthy diets and food insecurity, the double-edged sword of poverty that haunts Native American reservations, lead ironically to high levels of obesity, which is now rampant in the

DOI: 10.4324/9780367433710-12

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continental United States. Over 80 percent of American Indian and Alaska Native adults are overweight or obese; about half of American Indian children are at unhealthy weights; and it is estimated 30 percent of American Indians and Alaska Natives have pre-diabetes. Those numbers surpass those of American adults in general, two-thirds of whom are overweight or obese and 27 percent of whom are estimated to have pre-diabetes.3 In fact, the rate of heart disease and obesity among Native Americans is now higher than among any other cultural or racial group in the United States. Denied access to their native practices of foraging, hunting, and growing food, many Native Americans are forced into diets that lack nutrition and are high in sugar and fat. Increasingly, so-called food deserts, a unique phenomenon in the wealthiest country in the world, leave disadvantaged populations without access to affordable, healthy food. Fast-food companies move into high-density urban areas to supply cheap but non-nutritional food high in carbohydrates, chemicals, and fats. Corner liquor stores, often hosting the only “markets” in these neighborhoods, sell processed foods wrapped in plastic which is often high in sugar as well as preservatives. In rural areas and on Indian reservations, where there can be hundreds of miles between supermarkets, food deserts also exist. Often the food grown on Native American land is exported outside of the reservations to be sold into the larger food production cycle and returned, if at all, to the local markets in “Indian Country” at exorbitant prices. This is the vicious cycle that artist Sonny Assu (Ligwilda’xw Kwakwaka’wakw) has addressed since 2009.4 Combining the visual design patterns of his tribal ancestors, who lived near the location of what is now Vancouver, Assu has over the past decade critiqued Western commercial and pop inf luence over and disruption of the native cultures of Northwest Coast Indians, commonly known as the Salish linguistic group. In an ironic set of works entitled Breakfast Series, his strangely animated crossbreed of interdisciplinary art, incorporating sometimes sculptural, sometimes two-dimensional graphics, sometimes even large public works, embraces the dominant white settler culture of fast food and failed treaties. Pointedly critiquing the white man’s introduction of a high sugar diet and white processed f lour, not to mention the loss of habitats for salmon, the mainstay of the traditional diet, Breakfast Series presents five quasi-cereal boxes on pedestals under plexiglass display boxes. Each box is a humorous critique of Indian life under occupation: “Lucky Beads” plays off Lucky Charms children’s cereal; “Bannock Pops” is a satirical play on Indigenous fry bread; and “Frosted Treaty Flakes” has a cartoon showing a Salish-type stylized creature impersonating a lion. The word “treaty” refers, of course, to broken agreements between Indigenous tribes and the government of white European immigrants who took land from the tribes as they moved westward beginning in the 1600s, thus forcing the tribes onto smaller and smaller tracts that eventually became today’s reservations. The artist has painstakingly imitated the labels found on cereal boxes listing the ingredients, with joking references to nutritional information such as “cholesterol: too much” and “fiber: sure.”

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Figure 11.1 Breakfast Series, Sonny Assu, 2009. Courtesy of the artist.

These and two other created boxes by Assu are in the tradition of Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup cans, another critique of American consumerism, fast food, and pop culture. “Salmon Crisps” and “Salmon Loops” (the latter mimicking the heavily sugared Fruit Loops cereal) refer to the loss of the sacred salmon in the northwest regions of the United States and coastal regions all the way up to Alaska. In California alone, dozens of riverine, valley, and lake tribes relied on over 650 miles of rivers and streams in which the preferred king salmon f lourished.5 Dams and other products of “development” built in the nineteenth century by white settlers f looding west to grow rich from the Gold Rush (and massacre native tribes in the process) blocked the f low of water to the sea and upset salmon’s natural yearly cycles of runs. For over 100 years, the fish could not repopulate, which led to one of the most stunning losses of species in the Northern Hemisphere. The loss of habitat, a rise in water temperatures, and toxic run-offs from industry into streams also contributed to the near extinction of over seven species of salmon in just the last century. A recent report from the New York Times found that “before the twentieth century, an estimated 10–16 million adult salmon and steelhead trout returned annually to the Columbia River system. The current return of wild fish is 2 percent of that, by some estimates.”6 Despite the loss of land and other abhorrent civil and moral injustices that they have suffered, native tribes have often insisted on their legal right to

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traditional foods. Their food justice and food sovereignty issues grow relevant on a large scale as we enter a new era in which habitat and territory are affected on a global level. Salmon is extremely high in proteins and omega-3s, which can counteract the pre-diabetes brought on by obesity. Although debates in medical circles have, over the past two decades, recommended against the consumption of large amounts of fatty wild fish because of the increased mercury in our oceans, current research suggests that the larger benefits of wild-caught salmon outweigh the negative effects of the persistent organic pollutants that salmon can contain.7 More important, but intrinsically related to its health benefits, is the sacredness of the salmon in First Peoples’ culture. Represented in many forms of art, from baskets to wood carvings to jewelry, the fish is particularly respected by Northwest Coast tribes. Coastal Salish tribes such as the Tulalip were in fact named “People of the Salmon.” Their ceremony celebrating the first salmon catch of the season includes dances and ritual offerings to thank the fish and express gratitude for a hopefully abundant harvest. The sacred ceremony also recognizes the Indigenous creation story connecting the fish to human life. With this ceremony, the Indigenous groups make a demarcation between the sacred and the profane. The salmon is sacred because it is more than its physical self; it points to the infinite realm of spirit and higher forms.8 In sanctifying the salmon, Indigenous groups acknowledge the fish as a “sentient subject” and themselves as “sensible objects.”9 The sacramentality of the fish cannot be separated from its value as nourishment, nor can the perspective of the fish on the human be forgotten. In this way, the salmon becomes “sacred space.”10 Thus the struggle of most Indigenous people over the return of their lands stems from the simple need to protect their sacred food sources. The Elwha River runs 72 kilometers through the state of Washington, from its source in the Olympic National Park to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, which empties into the Pacific Ocean. After years of public pressure, spearheaded by local tribes and conservation ecologists, the two major hydroelectric dams that stopped the f low of the water were finally demolished to allow the salmon to return. Since the dam’s removal, the salmon show healthy signs of regeneration in the river. The Lower Elwha Klallam Nation, which once fished “the richest salmon runs outside of Alaska” but were removed from their ancestral land when the dams were built, have regained their tribal territory at the mouth of the river, and again exercise their inherent right to fish and worship. Wendy Red Star is a young Native American artist who humorously but poignantly pokes fun at the cultural appropriations inherent in white American history and racism. Her photograph-based work takes on many classic myths and interpretations of white representation, including false understandings of Native American culture, and puts them in the frame of colonial history and anthropology. A member of the Crow (Apsáalooke) tribe living in Montana, Red Star’s dioramas and deconstructions

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of colonial modernism are bitingly satirical. She is of the generation that grew up on television and Instagram and borrows images from contemporary culture that in turn have borrowed imagery from her own Indigenous culture. With a master’s degree from University of California, Los Angeles, Red Star grounds her work in contemporary critical race theories as much as her own tribal heritage. In her pigment print Last Thanks (2006), Red Star takes on one of the most enduring myths of American culture that is specifically tied to food. Various legends, enhanced and manipulated over time, have gone into the traditional autumnal feast of Thanksgiving, which purports to commemorate a meal shared by friendly Indians with immigrant colonists during the earliest days of what was to become America. Legend has it that in 1621, Pilgrim settlers in Plymouth, Massachusetts, celebrated their harvest with their Native American neighbors, the Wampanoag Indians, after they had nearly died during a famine the winter before, during which the local tribe gave them food. There are dozens of other versions and documentations of shared meals between foreigners and Native Americans, but the myth that remains today, like all myths involving harvest feasts, expresses gratitude for the food we have. In reality, the Pilgrims pillaged the food stores of the Wampanoag, stealing beans and corn and opening Wampanoag graves in search of food offerings. They abducted 21 Native Americans and sold them back in England for 220 shillings each. This was a practice before and long after the legendary Thanksgiving meal took place. Red Star’s depiction addresses at least two themes of the meal: the myth of a shared celebration and, in a gentle reminder, the fact that Indians were massacred following the meal. She herself sits at the center of the table in traditional Apsáalooke attire, her squaw feathers mimicking the paper festoons on skeletons sitting around her. The reference to Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper is obvious, and her outturned hands on the table signal suffering and martyrdom. In one hand, she holds a sacred feather fan commonly used in ceremonies, and her eyes gaze significantly at the fan. On the table in front of her, contrary to hundreds of years of Western art, in which still-life paintings celebrate the abundance of food, the artist has chosen to depict the remnants of a junk-food fest: processed cookies from a bag, salami in plastic, canned fruit and hash, all items typically available in reservation markets. In the foreground is the ubiquitous Wonder Bread, an ultra-processed and packaged “bread” that has become a signifier of white culinary habits. The artist overturns the Thanksgiving myth of generosity and sharing, which American culture prefers to embrace, to call attention instead to the genocide of Indigenous peoples and their descent into poverty and diabetes once their traditional foods were taken away. Red Star’s comical genre painting, reminiscent of the works of previous artists focused on food tableaux and performance art media (such as Mike Kelly, Paul McCarthy, Carolee Schneemann, and Rirkrit Tiravanija), bemoans the difficult theme she confronts. Not unlike the pioneering American television comedian Lucille Ball, Red

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Star uses her gender as a ploy in her theatrical representation of a skewed history. Seeing an image of an Indian woman in the role of Christ forces the viewer to question that history and who (re)wrote it. Other performative photographic tableaux by Red Star are perhaps inspired by Cindy Sherman’s early theatrical mise-en-scènes, such as Untitled Film Still #84 (1978). In a series of photo collages, the artist presents herself as a traditional 1950s housewife in full regalia serving up a perfect tray of frosted cupcakes. Like Sherman, Red Star places herself in the traditional female space—the kitchen—as a drama unfolds around her in the spilled groceries and abandoned buffalo skull on the f loor. The artist, like Sherman, presents the classic accessories of the suburban, white, dream-wife of the era: the subject is in high heels and a tight dress, with bouffant hair and long manicured nails, smoking a cigarette as she poses. Incongruencies are evident everywhere, from the impracticality of the “work clothes” to the peculiarly miniature-sized stove in the background. But in contrast to Sherman’s documentary-style black-and-white photographs, Red Star’s photograph veers into screaming technicolor. The iconic series of 70 images that Sherman produced to mimic various B-movie depictions of female stereotypes (vamp, suburban housewife, working girl, etc.) is further decoded and challenged as Red Star’s work adds, as always, an extra layer of indigeneity. There are at least two indications of indigeneity in the tableau: a wall painting of a painted face, perhaps in traditional wear, and the buffalo skull on the ground, which is juxtaposed with the suburban checkerboard f loor like a pawn in a chess game. Her apron, f lowered and ruff led over a petticoated dress, is in direct contrast (although with a matching palette) to the “native-looking” portrait on the wall. The reddyed cherries that were so prevalent in the era (and were, as we now know, cancerous) are perfectly placed on the white frosted cupcakes on the tin like so many bull’s eyes. The artist smiles coyly at the camera in a traditional seductress-like sassy pose, leaving the viewer to wonder just what sort of kitchen this is and what space has been created. For whom? There is a subtle but obvious culture clash taking place into which Red Star invites the unsuspecting viewer. Beginning with Karen Finley in the late 1980s, women artists have used food both as a cultural symbol and as a critique of the male gaze, which is connected directly to our bodies. Performances and other works by pioneers such as Linda Montano, Adrian Piper, Judy Chicago, Eleanor Antin, Janine Antoni, Marina Abramovič, Suzanne Lacey, Martha Rosler, Alan Sekula, Carolee Schneeman, and Eva Švankmajerova, paved the way. For many artists of the generation born about 1950, especially women artists, the objectification of women’s bodies and the “consumption” of them in male-dominated media was a topic for which food was the perfect metaphor. Coming out of the millennia-old patriarchal culture of the West, many women artists issued strong critiques that sought to remove their bodies (and labor) from traditional spaces such as the kitchen, the bedroom, and the movie screen,

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where they had been objectified for generations. The sensuality of food acts as a simulacrum for the sexualization of the female form. As Christine Bean has written: Food is a provocative, sensual material that has the potential to affect spectators viscerally and even interrupt the way they receive messaging in performance. Eating is a physical necessity but also an act coded with personal, cultural, social, and political meaning. When food enters a performance, therefore, it provides a unique intersection of the universally biological, intensely personal, and ideologically specific. It belongs to a unique category of real materials that increasingly made their way into performances since the advent of naturalism in the late nineteenth century. When food appears in performance, it is always itself, provoking a phenomenological response from spectators who can smell it, see it, sometimes even feel and taste it.11 So when Red Star superimposes a kitschy image of herself on the cover of a cheesy cowboy novel in White Squaw #14, she inverts the stereotypical white man’s fantasy of a wanton Indian woman “rescued” by a studly cowboy (shown in the cover foreground complete with a smoking gun). This sexualized racism is mocked by Red Star’s replacement of the Indian woman on the original cover with her own self-portrait, in which she dishes up a large, frothy spoonful of ice cream to her open mouth, framed in red lipstick, below the “White Squaw” logo of the original series. The satire, expressed as a white, sugary junk-food commercial looming larger than life over the pioneer pseudo-drama in the cover foreground, critiques the colonial fantasy of abducting and sexually exploiting Native American women (which still happens at an alarming rate 500 years after the first white settlement in the New World).12 The artist uses various tropes of Western culture—sexualization, white dominance, consumption, an open-mouthed woman in a compromising position, the “winning of the West” scenario with its myth of the “wild savage”—to throw back at the viewer the stereotypes that we have been fed by popular culture. The black humor of Red Star’s collages, which in White Squaw #14 comes forward in the caption proclaiming that “she’s got to blow off steam from a hot situation!” by eating ice cream, seems innocent enough. Yet the artist’s intent is deadly serious, and she looks critically at colonizing culture with not a little measure of contempt.

Food That Heals Growing food, foraging for it, cooking it, and serving it to those we love or care for is an integral part of healing. Many of the community activities we have discussed are about an art that is concerned with bringing people together in a space that constitutes a change from an older, perhaps destructive, past. As the boundaries between art, poetry, community activism, social

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practice, and gardening break down, many places across the globe are making art that concerns food from many perspectives. Artists who have worked on themes of colonialism and territory have found unconventional ways to highlight the materiality of the plant world that keeps us alive and frame it into a vision of spiritual or communal repast. When George Floyd was murdered in spring 2020, an international outcry acknowledged the United States’ well-known policy of police brutality against people of color. African American poet G.E. Patterson lives in the south Minneapolis neighborhood where a white police officer kept his knee on Floyd’s neck while the life slowly drained out of him before a crowd. As an artist-activist who knows how to write, Patterson visited the corner store where the murder occurred a few months later and documented what he found. He discovered that as visitors and tourists came from around the world to pay respects, the outpouring of love and healing had turned the site into a spontaneous memorial and art park. The corner became a square and is now a park in the middle of the city. Mourners at first brought f lowers, posters, and sculptures and then created murals that eulogized the slain man, who became a symbol of 500 years of white oppression in the Americas and called attention to colonialism worldwide. Statues of slave holders, presidents, statesmen, and other men who played a role in the slave trade and capitalism were torn down in European as well as American capitals. Floyd became a symbol of a new era in civil rights and spurred the Black Lives Matter protests in a hot summer during Donald Trump’s presidency. Patterson describes the transformation of the site of the murder in a beautiful article for the journal Places, in which he describes the way in which the impromptu memorial became “a made place.”13 He describes the “interventions” of the public’s love as f lowers turned into permanent herb gardens and vegetables started to sprout in make-do planter boxes. The names of other fallen citizens, all victims of police violence, were painted on the street, first by Indigenous artist Mari Mansfield and later, in what Patterson calls “annotations in a ledger of trauma,” by anonymous visitors. The impromptu gardens that have sprung up from the f loral bouquets given at the time of the funeral are still offerings. Street-side barbeques, grills, and food stands, which sprang up voluntarily in the community to feed the enormous numbers of visitors to the site, are testimony to the power of healing that food contains. An autonomous, spontaneous system emerged to deliver food donations. It was a place where white allies respectfully, for the most part, joined bereaved Black citizens to show respect, sorrow, and horror. Flowers were put next to tomato plants at the memorial: a sign of remembrance, but also of growth and the future. The idea of healing trauma with food, plants, and gardens has a universal history. This is evident in projects such as Create: the Community Meal (2014), in which G.E. Patterson and other artists organized a gathering of 2,000 people around a half-mile-long table in the middle of a street in downtown Minneapolis. While folks from different walks of life, who otherwise might

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not have had the opportunity to mix socially, were fed their meals, their conversations focused on food access, food justice, and healthy eating. As the lead artist Seitu Jones noted, “all 2,000 diners were artistic collaborators as they engaged in an artistic ritual of a meal, spoke words of grace and closing, and shared food stories of the world cultures that comprise our community.”14 In this and similar ways, many artists are refocusing their efforts to heal past trauma from object to activity, preferably one shared in a community. Food is the common denominator across cultures, times, and places. Food existed before the object and may be resurfacing as a process-oriented inclusive art form that engages the “audience” in a non-hierarchal way while nourishing body and soul. As Patterson says, If community is more important than objects, then our reasoning could be clear: If the mysteries of grief and traditions of oblation are, in a profound sense, anti-art; are antithetical to the museological and arthistorical practices of identifying artist and collector and provenance (and market value); then there could be a choice in the offing. If our values and understandings allow us to distinguish between the spectacular appreciation of art and artifacts, and the active, on-the-ground works of anonymous hands — if we accept such divisions between art-making and mourning, then every subsequent consideration would be modeled along the same binary.15

Foods That Survived/Cultures That Thrive The genocidal history of the European invasion of the Americas since the fifteenth century is slowly being documented and rewritten. Since the beginning of contact, the so-called discovery of the continents that became known as the Americas has been fought by the peoples who were originally there. The history of that confrontation is finally being re-named, re-interpreted, and even, in a growing number of locations, restituted with property, some financial paybacks, but perhaps most important, recognition of the genocide that occurred and the respect due to the surviving tribes. The ethnocentric term “discovery” has been challenged in the Americas from Hawai’i (whose Indigenous monarchy was overthrown by American businessmen in 1893) to Alaska, from California to Manhattan, as well as south to the Amazon forests of Brazil. The renaissance of Indigenous cultures and history is being realized in contemporary art forms, many of which include food, since it is so tied to traditional life, community, arts, the land, and prayer. The focus on food justice and food sovereignty to heal past injustices was at the forefront of demonstrations against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in 2017, when many Indigenous peoples joined together in song, dance, activism, prayer, and eating. Not unlike the spontaneous food events at the George Floyd memorial, portable kitchens

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were set up almost overnight to feed swelling crowds of both Indigenous people and white allies, who f looded into the camps at Sacred Stone and Standing Rock, the ancestral homes of the Sioux tribe (or Oceti Sakowin). At one point there were over 4,000 people camping in teepees, tents, make-shift lean-tos, and trailers at Oceti Sakowin. The food tents were highly organized places offering regular hot meals twice a day and fueled by passionate volunteers and serious donations. The meals were mostly traditional native foods but also included hot coffee (from organic fair-trade companies such as Alta Organic in California) and items sent from across the country to support the water protectors fighting DAPL. Propane deliveries arrived mysteriously seven times a week. Nobody knew who was paying for anything. Wood came in truckloads from across the country, since settlers had stripped the Dakotas of their forests long ago. Temperatures the first winter dropped below 15 degrees Fahrenheit, and the infamous North Dakota winds whipped it down even lower. The kitchen tent became an impromptu medical clinic, community meeting place, schoolhouse for longer-term protesters at camp, and place of warmth and laughter. Standing Rock would become the largest gathering of Indigenous peoples from around the world in over 150 years. The food that fed the demonstrators for nearly a year and half, as they survived police brutality, harsh weather, and various illness and rashes caused by daily sprays of unknown chemicals dropped from private helicopters (courtesy of Energy Transfer Partners, the oil company building the pipeline), was provided and cooked on site by an international group of youth and elders. Similarly, the Sioux Chef collective has worked since 2014 on “revitalizing Native American cuisine and in the process . . . re-identifying North American cuisine and reclaiming an important culinary culture long buried and often inaccessible.”16 Their effort broadens the definition of “art” and “artists” to recognize that they come from a culture that has long integrated all of the arts without separating them into separate categories. The revival of native foods, organic, local, and embedded in thousands of years of history, is extremely critical at a time that Native Americans, in particular the Lakota Sioux, are experiencing the shortest life expectancies of the US population. For men, it is 48 years, and for women, 52. The Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota has a 95 percent unemployment rate, and the death rate from alcoholism is 300 percent higher than in the rest of the country.17 Ninety-seven percent of the reservation’s population lives below the poverty level, making projects like the Sioux Chef and Munchies, a food access portal, critical for their health and survival. Founded by Sean Sherman of the Oglala Lakota tribe in Pine Ridge, the Sioux Chef partners with the Little Earth Community of United Tribes in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and dozens of other Indigenous producers of traditional foods. The collective fosters traditional farming techniques, hunting and fishing, food preservation, salt and sugar making, wild food harvesting, and Native American experiences of displacement and histories in the delivery and production of their unique cuisine. In 2018, the Sioux Chef ’s cookbook Indigenous Kitchen won

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the prestigious James Beard Foundation Book Award. Its food trucks are outfitted with native crafts and information on the artistic cultures of Indigenous peoples, which makes them popular stop-off points for customers seeking a healthy alternative to fast food while seeing friends and sharing stories. The Sioux Chef collective is about more than just food. It is about promoting and maintaining a way of life that is inclusive of prayer, sharing, community, and the regeneration of the land and all of her living creatures. This is the Indigenous way, which is shared and communicated through how and what we eat.

Ohlone Café: The Naming of Things For many Indigenous peoples, art is not separate from the rest of their culture but is integral part of each day through the food eaten, the baskets woven for

Figure 11.2a “Mak-huššištak—Our Vision,” Cafe Ohlone, Artwork by Patricia Wakida.

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food, the dances and ceremonial practices expressing worship and gratitude for food eaten, and the lives lived. This holistic, circular worldview is the antithesis of both traditional Western-based art practices and the colonial culture that nearly destroyed Native American ways of life as well as practices in Africa and other areas of the Southern Hemisphere infiltrated by the global North seeking to extract the earth’s riches. Two young men in the East Bay area of San Francisco, Vincent Medina, a Chochenyo Ohlone, and Louis Trevino, a Rumsen Ohlone, use Indigenous food to revitalize their Ohlone heritage, which was nearly lost when white men invaded the lands in California that had been home to their tribes for at least 12,000 years.18 First Spanish explorers and later missionaries and traders infiltrated the pristine valleys and prairies of the western part of the continent, which Indigenous peoples knew as Turtle Island. The foreigners brought disease and enslaved the Indians to farm and work their rancheros. When gold was discovered in 1848 at Sutter’s Mill (near today’s Sacramento, the California state capitol), the Native American population was estimated to be about 150,000. Over the next 30 years, a combination of disease, dislocation, and starvation reduced the number by nearly 80 percent, and in 1873, the appalling estimate was that only 30,000 Indigenous people were left in what became the state of California.19 Across the second largest state in the United States, all 420,000 square kilometers of it, the genocide was calculated and deliberate, with bounties placed on Indian heads and their lands seized. Today’s existing tribes occupy barely 2,900 square kilometers, which makes it nearly impossible for them to gather, grow, hunt, and fish for enough food to sustain their populations, which today again number over 300,000. How are Indigenous peoples of the twenty-first century dealing with this historic trauma? Louis Trevino and Vincent Medina started their popular restaurant, Café Ohlone, in 2018, in a small room at the beloved University Book Store in Berkeley, California. The café sourced only local and native foods and introduced a hungry public to the recipes of the First Peoples of Northern California. As they say on the café website: “We have developed a deep and personal love for these same foods and have personally seen how these foods can heal, empower and better connect us to our Ohlone cultural identity.”20 Before the pandemic, the restaurant had become a hub of Ohlone culture, offering language lessons, art shows, community meetings, and activism and nurturing a blossoming renaissance of traditional knowledge.21 Louis and Vincent have made a conscious effort to reintroduce Ohlone names for their foods in their menus and public presentations. Louis is a leader in the revival of the Rumsen language, which, like many Native American languages, was nearly lost as populations were decimated and forced migrations occurred over the past four centuries. Words were passed down and survived, anthropologists and ethnologists from famous universities did field work in the remaining remote tribal villages, and, since the 1960s, this

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combined effort has helped invigorate interest in the ancient languages. This new interest spills into song and dance, and, of course, food. The process of decolonizing diet is strengthened with a strong foundation of cultural knowledge, and especially frequent use of our Ohlone languages—Chochenyo and Rumsen. Weaving together language use and reconnecting with our traditional foods empowers us to look at these old foods through an Indigenous lens—by understanding these are the same foods our people have always eaten, and when we use language to celebrate these foods, to pray for them, to converse over them we are brought closer to our Ohlone ways and our family is collectively strengthened.22 Like many Native American artists, Louis and Vincent seek to excite the public about their heritage while letting the world know that they still exist. Language is one of the primal art forms and transfers culture in its cadence, its rich depth of meaning, and its naming of things. The rich plant and animal kingdom of the Ohlone comes alive once again in the kitchens of Café Ohlone, where the menu includes abundant native herbs such as dried rosehip and stinging nettle for teas; local mussels and clams roasted with salty pickleweed and scallions in a gathered, kombu broth; all the complex components of an Ohlone salad, served with blackberry and bay laurel sauce on the side; seasonal umami-heavy chanterelles; bespeckled waxy quail eggs; dried strawberries, delicate California hazelnut and onion biscuits, and buttery Indian potatoes as seasonal components; black oak acorn soup l; decadent Ohlone sweets such as hazelnut milk chia porridge, or Louis’s now-famous hazelnut f lour and Bay salt brownies.23 The chefs partner with local gatherers and fishing people to build the same community and interdependence as in ancient times. We meet for the first time on a park bench near their home in the East Bay of San Francisco.24 The park is remote, more like a restored lake village, and offers an immediate sense of calm and openness in the pandemic era. Like so many places in California, it bears a Spanish name, San Lorenzo. We awkwardly pull down our masks to smile and greet. Per tradition, a gift is given, carried carefully in my backpack across the ocean from Europe for just this moment. The gift is taken graciously. There is an exchange of respect and gratitude that is unspoken. Then Vincent begins to tell us stories about our surroundings, from the heart. This is not just a park; it is his Indigenous land from generations ago. He points to the lake, where tule reeds are now restored, and over there, across that bridge, to salt licks, where his people gathered salt for eons. He still does this, too, for use in their recipes. The afternoon goes on as he points to various topographical locations, now sandwiched between strip malls and freeways, which still offer a physical echo of his ancestors. Mt.

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Diablo, the highest mountain peak in the region, hovers behind us. It was a sacred mountain for all peoples who lived within sight of it generations ago. In his native Chochenyo language, its name means the place of two mountains that existed during the great f loods. This is the Ohlone creation story. And now geological research backs up the Indigenous story. Did we need Western science to tell us that, Vincent asks? I ask about Café Ohlone and their work, which is, of course, not just about food. Vincent and Louis describe their experience with food under Covid. People were no longer able to come to the space that they created, not just to eat the delicacies prepared from the gifts of California’s seas and forests and mountains but to enjoy music, “talk story” (as Native Hawaiians say), and learn. So they created a virtual presentation and a form of sharing, whereby enrolled participants (and devoted students) received a beautifully designed box of foodstuffs on their doorsteps every week or so, lovingly created by the team. Our food is full of power, and our food dispels stereotypes. Our food connects us to those we love, and to our land, which we also love. By eating, cherishing, and respecting these old foods and fully embracing our Ohlone culture, we honor our identities and the people we come from. This is mak-huššištak, “our vision.”25

Figure 11.2b Vincent Medina (left) and Louis Trevino (right), Café Ohlone, Berkeley, California, 2019. Photo: Dierdre Greene.

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Material Culture and Food At the time of European contact with the “New World,” there were approximately 50–60 million people already on the continents of North and South America. In contrast, Europe had about 70–88 million people on a fraction of the land mass of the Americas. Colonization came fairly late to North America’s western shores, in 1796, when the expedition of Don Gaspar de Portolá arrived from Mexico to what today is called California. Although many local arts were lost during the ensuing invasion and the colonization, the tribes of California, particularly those in the high mountains leading up to the majestic Sierra Range, fortunately maintained traditional arts such as basket weaving, dance, song, and agriculture. These traditions, which have been called “crafts,” are tied to what the ethnologist Marcel Mauss termed “habitus” or the acquired knowledge of motion and intellect that allows the passing down of information about techniques of design, pattern, willow gathering, and aspects of cultural activities such as basket weaving.26 Baskets are an integral medium for cooking and food preparation in traditional cultures and thus demonstrate the intrinsic connection of art and food, especially when practiced by a living master artist such as Denise Davis of the Mountain Maidu tribe. Davis’s artwork ties intention to form in a way that carries the spirit of her ancestral heritage. Her wide range of artistic expression show not only the ancient traditions of basket weaving, dancing, and ceremony, but also Western inf luences of collage, painting, printmaking, and design. She is an artist of the twenty-first century, who brings her 9,000-year-old Indigenous tribal knowledge together with her grandfather’s Northern European traditions to beautiful fruition in outstanding visions of Mother Earth and all that is sacred. She is in a direct line of Maidu basket weavers that goes back eons. In collages such as Nature Weaving (2020) and Mountain Weaver (2020), a seated female figure engages in weaving moving lines, winding patterns, and spiraling images that echo basket designs as well as Maidu dances. Davis is also a traditional dancer and credits this practice with informing her other art forms. Dance offers a means of redefining a distinct ethnic identity in contrast to the majority society by creating a shared body of knowledge that is sustained through performance and a multi-generational experience of teaching and learning.27 The rhythm of the ceremonial dances is transcendent. As dancers move in a steady cadence, accompanied by elderberry clapper sticks and the clicking abalone shells and pine nuts on their dresses, they are led into a collective space that celebrates and honors the Earth and her creatures. This integration of humans, four-legged animals, and the plant kingdom represents a traditional worldview that Davis recreates in each of her artworks.

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The artist has spoken of her connection to water, that deep f lowing force that sustains all life. The Sacramento River Basin and the mountains that feed its rivers are the ancestral home of the Maidu tribe. Here, along the winding riverbanks, they gathered willows, roots, and tule reed for weaving and building shelters. In the painted collage Abalone Dreams (2020), Davis portrays the abalone shell, rich in pearlescent ref lection and colors and a symbol of trade and subsistence. The shells, which provide a home to the food inside, hang from willow bark strips that are unused portion of her basket-making material. Abalone shells are used in traditional Maidu dance regalia. They represent the importance of the Sacramento River Basin as the place that the inland First Peoples of North and Central California met with the First Peoples of the coastal regions for exchange, both cultural and economic, at a time that the different tribal groups recognized that mutual subsistence depended upon coexistence and interdependence. The exchange was based on equitable stewardship of the land and waters, which gave life to the two-legged and four-legged animals and fish in the rivers. The tule reeds on the riverbanks, which hugged the clean rivers, supplied the baskets that stored the food that fed the people who danced at tribal gatherings and wove stories with the women. As a dancer, Davis is privy to the ancient rhythms of song and music that have been passed down for eons in the Maidu way. To non-natives, the ceremonial practices can perhaps best be described as gatherings that celebrate the seasons. They are called “Big Times.” Whatever terminology we use, the process and practice of ceremony is a connection to Something Greater, to whom we humans show respect and gratitude for life itself. Davis’s art is not only about object-making but also about connecting to the Earth herself, and to Spirit. The patterns and waves of design in the collages echo the ridges and triangles of Maidu baskets, which in turn echo the ripples of water on springtime rivers and the ridges on centipedes and earthworms under the green forest beds. This is a representation of the cosmos, which is created in a space and a time connected to place. Thus in their acts of re-representing the practices of her Maidu traditions, Davis’s images of women weavers are also a declaration of life, survival, and healing. Denise Davis is one of the most respected weavers in the Americas, with a long list of exhibitions, collectors, and public presentations and a resumé spanning nearly three decades. In Native American communities, however, she is perhaps most respected as a teacher, a soon-to-be-elder who is passing on ancient knowledge to members of the younger generation who are dedicated enough to endure the years-long process of learning and collecting the stories that make the baskets sing. Her two newest students, Jacky Calanchini and Melissa Tayaba, are members of the Shingle Springs Band of Miwok Indian tribe working to preserve their land and heritage. Davis’s instruction to these two young women, who will become strong carriers of tradition, is a way to connect past and future. Habits, in short, are not embodied; rather the body—in its habitation of a world—is ensounded.28 There are many First Nation artists today who continue to bridge that gap.

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Like the exquisite baskets woven by widows for their deceased husbands and then burned in the loved one’s funeral pyre, the Maidu cultural heritage is transitory and transient. Perhaps this is the reason that dance has somehow survived as a non-material artistic genre. Davis’ paintings and collages are visual representations of acts of love: making, weaving, producing, and creating things in the world. But like destroyed funerary baskets, her work points us toward a larger realization: that it is in the act of making that the intention is made. And the form that follows is simply a manifestation of what the heart wants, and needs, to sing. The artist’s Celtic and Native Californian cultures celebrate the nonphysical world in similar ways and have more similarities than differences in their means of production. When Davis speaks of her inspiration, she mentions that it is always tied to place, wherever she is. The natural world is an abundant source of both material and design, whether it is the Sierra Mountains in California or the Šumava Mountains in Bohemia. In her collage-embossed work New Beginning (2020), two hummingbirds are silhouetted in a framed arbor-spiraled circle that points to a distant mountain range. This, the artist says, is the Sutter Buttes, known as the Middle Mountains, Histum Yani, the sacred place of the Valley Maidu in the Sacramento Valley. Hummingbirds are often described as spirit guides, messengers, or healers pointing the way when we seem lost. They are fortuitous symbols, and some Maidu say that they brought the Old People fire. As a teacher, artist, and carrier of the traditional ways, Davis embodies the geography of her homeland, the Sacramento Valley. The area has been a crossroads forever, its ecology a rich meeting place of subsistence and creativity at the rivers’ shores and later, not coincidentally, home to the capital of the state of California. Artists like Davis are testaments to new beginnings, standard bearers of a First Peoples’ culture that respects all life that the Creator brings forth. As we navigate the new waters of shared existence on a planet ravaged by the greed of the two-legged creatures, this generous sharing of knowledge, songs, and ways to walk on the earth with respect is desperately needed. In the tradition of process and non-material art (exemplified by artists such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Daniel Spoerri), the Tate in London recently purchased the rights of “custodianship” of a work by Mayan artist Edgar Calel. The Echo of an Ancient Form of Knowledge (Ru k’ ox k’ob’el jun ojer etemab’el) (2021) consists of various food items placed strategically on whitish rocks scattered on the f loor. The fruits and vegetables of the artist’s native Guatemala are imbued with ritual and ceremony, which the artist says are part of the knowledge that his people have allowed him to share with the world at large. The installation is not performed but needs either the artist or a member of his tribe to privately prepare it before it is reenacted in a new space outside the current gallery. The Tate made an agreement to respect this condition for 13 years, and it is seemingly committed to entertaining another path toward understanding and appreciating Indigenous cosmology. “It sits

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in a very particular place in between artwork and altar,” says the gallerist at Proyectos Ultravioleta who “sold” the work at the Frieze London in 2021. It’s just a fact that it’s very easy for these works to lose a lot of their meaning if they’re just a subject through Western thinking, or canon, or institutions. So it’s all about finding the right way to kind of preserve the artistic, conceptual, and spiritual integrity of the work.29 In this way, many Indigenous artists are working with what has been called “embodied habit” or the knowledge that allows them to pass on traditions and songs like most professional craftspeople. However, the difference, as Tim Ingold notes, is that they have a profound connection to the environment and tools in a way that is more than just practiced skill. The body stands not alone in the world but is enlivened and “ensounded” by the breezes sifting through trees and the patterns of waves at the shoreline. Like the movements of Maidu dance or the twisting of willow branches into the diamond shapes of a basket, handed down through haptic gestures and sounds, these habits can create artworks. When we buy a plastic bowl off of a supermarket shelf for eating our cereal out of a box, the experience is nothing like, say, making corn bread in a basket woven for specifically such a task. The food experience is not just about eating but becomes an act of gratitude that goes back to ancestors, a shared community of hard work and celebration, and perhaps a ritual of healing past traumas around a fire that warms the bones. The beauty of the actual object, the basket, the pot, the stories told during dinner, the hope of a tomato growing next summer when only fear is on the asphalt, and the planting of a community garden in food desert can then be called acts of art: these processes are happening in neighborhoods and forests around the world. They are acts of defiance and faith based on the hope of healthy food and the right to eat it.

Notes 1 See Nathalie Blanc and Barbara Benish, Form, Art, and the Environment (New York: Routledge, 2016). 2 Winona LaDuke, “Recovering the Sacred,” quoted in Chia Café Collective, Cooking the Native Way (Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 2018), 19. 3 Francie Diep, “Why Obesity and Heart Disease Hit Harder in Indian Country,” Pacific Standard, July 17, 2015, updated June 14, 2017, https://psmag.com/ social-justice/the-american-indian-food-desert. 4 See in Blanc and Benish, Form, Art, and the Environment, 189. 5 R.F. Heizer and M.A. Whipple, The California Indians: A Sourcebook (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 77–79. 6 Marie Fazio, “Northwest’s Salmon Population May Be Running Out of Time,” New York Times, January 20, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/20/climate/ washington-salmon-extinction-climate-change.html?searchResultPosition=1. 7 Persistent organic pollutants (POPS) are chemicals that bio-accumulate to dangerous levels in the fatty cells of animals, including humans. See Doug O’Harra, “Study of Alaska Natives Confirms Salmon-Rich Diet Prevents Diabetes, Heart

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8

9 10 11 12

13 14

15 16 17 18

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26

233

Disease,” Anchorage Daily News, March 29, 2011, updated September 30, 2016, https://www.adn.com/alaska-news/article/study-alaska-natives-conf irmssalmon-rich-diet-prevents-diabetes-heart-disease/2011/03/30/. Bruce Coriell, “Elwha River: Sanctified by Salmon,” Indigenous Religious Traditions (webpage of a course taught in the Religion Department at Colorado College), https://sites.coloradocollege.edu/indigenoustraditions/sacred-lands/ elwha-river-sanctified-by-salmon/. Jay Miller, “Salmon, the Lifegiving Gift,” University Libraries, University of Washington (webpage), https://content.lib.washington.edu/aipnw/miller2.html. Coriell, “Elwha River: Sanctified by Salmon.” Christine Simonian Bean, “Sticky Performances: Affective Circulation and Material Strategy in the ‘Chocolate’ Smearing of Karen Finley,” Theatre Survey 57, no. 1 ( January 2016): 91. See “Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women,” Native Women’s Wilderness (webpage), https://www.nativewomenswilderness.org/mmiw. It has been documented that a majority of these women go missing near the so-called “man camps” or settlements set up by oil companies at the worksites for drilling new pipelines. Native women have long faced violence and sexual predation from the colonial settlers who invaded their land and their bodies, and the connection of extractive practices and sexual assault is a long one: “A culture of resource extraction at any cost is a comprehensive culture of use and abuse; of disposability” (“What do Pipelines Have to Do with Sexual Violence?,” Tech Safety, April 22, 2021, https://vsdvalliance.org/press_release/ what-do-pipelines-have-to-do-with-sexual-violence/). G.E. Patterson, “George Floyd and A Community of Care,” Places Journal ( January 2021), https://placesjournal.org/article/george-f loyd-and-a-community/ ?cn-reloaded=1. “Create the Community Meal,” Americans for the Arts, May 15, 2019, https:// blog.americansforthearts.org/by-program/networks-and-councils/publicart-network/public-art-year-in-review-database/create-the-communitymeal. “Create the Community Meal.” “About,” The Sioux Chef (website), https://sioux-chef.com/about/ “About the Pine Ridge Reservation,” Re-member (website), https://www. re-member.org/pine-ridge-reservation. “Ohlone” is a twentieth-century term for many different tribes that lived in the area of the Monterey Bay on the Central Coast of California. These peoples, which included more than 50 villages and tribes, were sometimes also called the Costanoan people. Benjamin Madley, An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016). Vincent Medina and Louis Trevino, in discussion with Barbara Benish and Enrique Martinez Leal, May 11, 2021, San Lorenzo Park, Oakland, California. The café was closed during the pandemic in 2020. In 2022, keys were handed over to the Cafe Ohlone’s founders to open a new cultural restaurant on the grounds of the University of California, Berkeley. “Mak-huššištak—Our Vision,” Cafe Ohlone, https://www.makamham.com/ valuesandvision. “Menu,” Cafe Ohlone, https://www.makamham.com/hiitiy-makamham-menu. Medina and Trevino, in discussion. Medina and Trevino, discussion. See Tim Ingold, “Of Work and Words: Craft as a Way of Telling,” European Journal of Creative Practices in Cities and Landscapes 2, no. 2 (2019): 2.

234 Decolonizing Land and Body 27 Barbara Benish, “The Songs and Dances of Denise Davis, Mountain Maidu Artist,” Crocker Art Museum, February 8, 2021, https://www.crockerart.org/oculus/ the-songs-and-dances-of-denise-davis-mountain-maidu-artist. 28 Ingold, “Of Work and Words Craft as a Way of Telling,” 4. 29 Amah-Rose Abrams, “Tate Has Brokered Its First-Ever Deal to Acquire ‘Custodianship’ of an Artwork in a Novel Agreement With a Mayan Artist and His People,” Artnet News, October 22, 2021, https://news.artnet.com/art-world/ tate-first-custodianship-mayan-2023933.

Bibliography Abrams, Amah-Rose. “Tate Has Brokered Its First-Ever Deal to Acquire ‘Custodianship’ of an Artwork in a Novel Agreement with a Mayan Artist and His People,” Artnet News, October 22, 2021. Bean, Christine Simonian. “Sticky Performances: Affective Circulation and Material Strategy in the ‘Chocolate’ Smearing of Karen Finley,” Theatre Survey 57, no. 1 ( January 2016). Benish, Barbara. “The Songs and Dances of Denise Davis, Mountain Maidu Artist,” Crocker Art Museum, February 8, 2021. Blanc, Nathalie, and Barbara Benish. Form, Art, and the Environment. New York: Routledge, 2016. Diep, Francie. “Why Obesity and Heart Disease Hit Harder in Indian Country,” Pacific Standard, July 17, 2015, updated June 14, 2017. Fazio, Marie. “Northwest’s Salmon Population May Be Running Out of Time,” New York Times, January 20, 2021. Heizer, R.F., and M.A. Whipple. The California Indians: A Sourcebook. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. Ingold, Tim. “Of Work and Words: Craft as a Way of Telling,” European Journal of Creative Practices in Cities and Landscapes 2, no. 2 (2019): 2. LaDuke, Winona. “Recovering the Sacred,” quoted in Chia Café Collective, Cooking the Native Way. Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 2018. O’Harra, Doug. “Study of Alaska Natives Confirms Salmon-Rich Diet Prevents Diabetes, Heart Disease,” Anchorage Daily News, March 29, 2011, updated September 30, 2016. Madley, Benjamin. An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016. Patterson, G.E. “George Floyd and a Community of Care,” Places Journal ( January 2021).

12 The Food of Life

Food is a metaphor for our connection with the environment. The act of eating is a practical act amounting to a reconnection with the earth and community. The beauty of food, the pleasure of a recipe, plays a central role in everything that sustains human life. For example, what symbolic power does bread have? Why has it become the main food for a great part of humanity? Why, today, is it rejected because of gluten in wheat? What is wheat if not a nutrient transformed by thousands of years of agriculture and the product of skilled hands? The love of bread is about so many things at once. Among them is the beauty of the bread, the hilly nature of the crust, with its fantastic relief worthy of a mountain landscape. Bread seems literally to be the very foundation of existence, as the Talmud emphasizes. 13 attributes were said about Pat Shacharit (Morning Bread): it heals you from chama (diseases of heat), from tzina (diseases of cold), protects you from zikim, protects from mezikim (harmful agents), machkimat petti (makes you smart), zoche b’din, helps you to study Torah, helps you to teach Torah, people will listen to your teachings, you won’t forget your learning, you won’t get fat, its good for libido, kills worms/parasites in the intestines, and some people say it removes jealousy and increases love (Rashi explains: when your body feels good then you won’t be as angry or irritable, therefore, it increases love).1 In short, if we think that artistic communities anchored on food and its production are central, it is because they rearticulate the material and symbolic dimensions of our existence. Of course, the great story of human civilization and agriculture recounted in the first chapters of this book is only one story among many, and today, it is important to again weave the link between productive territories and societies. It is also important to emphasize the extent to which not all agricultures are equal from an ecological and political point of view. While some agricultural societies were historically extremely hierarchical, others were able to maintain more egalitarian lifestyles and divide their supply sources between hunting and gathering and agriculture.

DOI: 10.4324/9780367433710-13

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Today, the situation is different: even if the world’s population manages to stabilize demographically, food production must be able to feed nearly 10 billion people in 2050 in the context of a changing climate. Which agricultural models are best suited to meet this demand? What are the forms of social organization, the socio-ecological creativities necessary to meet this challenge in a fair manner, in both the North and the South as well as each country, each region, each locality? The ultimate question of human history . . . is not our equal access to material resources (land, calories, means of production), much though these things are obviously important, but our equal capacity to contribute to decisions about how to live together.2

The Seeds of New Communities In this book, we have looked at communities and alliances—hybrids of nature and culture, artists, researchers, land, and food—that sketch out alternative ways of being while suggesting the possibility of realizing shared projections and habitable futures. To what extent do these different projects respond to social and environmental crises? We need to escape the generalized habits of interpretation in the framework of what is commonly called the Anthropocene era, which tends to reduce any future to several large concepts, such as climate change, the extinction of biodiversity, or growing inequalities. Certainly, there are many initiatives that quantifiably measure what needs to be done, given these foreseeable futures. But the general feeling is that we have collectively failed to respond to present and future challenges. How do these groups of artists and researchers offer another way of making community and sketching the outlines of habitable spaces? In contrast to the practices of individual artists, we see in the art farms, NGOs, and utopian ideas that we have examined an urge to renew the sense of community and engagement over a longer time span. Experiments such as ArtMill in the Czech Republic, Mhotte Farm and Saint Denis Farm in France, Campo Adentro in Spain, Navdanya in India, Land Foundation in Thailand, African Research and Exchange Academy in northern Cameroon, PAV in Italy, and the collaborations of Ohlone Café with the University of California and Pie Ranch with the Amah Mutsun tribe in Northern California extend the reach of knowledge and creativity to a movement that is greater than the sum of the parts. Across every continent, we find communities forming around artistic practices based on food and agriculture. 3 Most of our work in the United States and Europe led to further examples in other countries and cultures, which supported our thesis that these art-farm hybrids indeed contribute not only to new research on sustainable food practices but also to the de-semination of information and more excitement on the part of the larger public than is usually seen in the gallery-based art world.

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Like seeds planted for the following season, these community-based organizations, NGOs, and farm-galleries provide land-based places that command long-term commitments. The very nature of agriculture means that the fruits of labor are not immediately visible or understood. The artist-farmer catalysts understand that culture is built on plants and people, on places, memories, and visions of the future. This is a far cry from the Western art world, which capitulates individual artists into the spotlight in a way that often serves only to promote the next marketable object for financial speculation and private ownership. While at first glance it may seem that the projects and food artworks discussed in this book are not financially viable, the opposite is actually true. For work rooted in territories of mutual understanding brings new capital that will be increasingly valuable given the climate crisis looming in our futures: namely, food and water. Social equity, particularly for women, people of color, and other outlying social groups, will be paramount in the decades ahead as loss of habitat, resources, and access instigates ever more conf lict in precarious zones around the world. Mass migrations are already happening in landscapes compromised by drought, f looding, or both, which have been brought on by humanity’s constant burning of fossil fuels. Greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions drop when the globalized food economy, which based on international trade and transportation, is exchanged for locally grown food. The environmental benefits of this new vision driven by artist-based innovations are mind-boggling. It moves us out of a sustainable mindset to a pre-industrial (and, may we say, Indigenous) regenerative connection to our natural world that can realize a planet that not only feeds our own generation, but the next as well. The proposals set forth by artists from around the world in fact question the very definition of what a farm is, what it could be, and perhaps if it should be at all. As we have discussed in these pages, the industrial agricultural “revolution” has not only failed to feed us but, under the control of corporate interests, has actually been poisoning us. Food, like art, has become a product that merely feeds the body, supplying the necessary number of calories to keep the body working and producing. At some point, we have forgotten about the need to also feed the soul. As “makers,” we humans have overmade our civilization to the point of collapse. What if we were to abandon the idea of farm and farming all together? What if we reinvented kitchen gardens and exchange markets? The word “farm,” from Old French ferme and, earlier, Latin firmare (“to fix,” “settle,” or “contract for”), already implies servitude and capitalistic systems of profit. When did food become monetarized and part of a business contract? According to Ojibwa scholar David Treuer, we can trace political and social intertribal warfare in pre-contact North America to agricultural practices: Improvements in hunting technology may have caused a collapse in animal populations. Agriculture itself may have been a culprit: as of 900 CE, maize and beans were well established throughout the region, and

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the rise of agriculture could have generated a shift in social organization. Much later, the Mississippian period, from 1100 to 1541 CE, saw the advent of the bow, small projectile points, pottery, and a shift from gathering to intensive agriculture. Large villages replaced small seasonal camps.4 Did the agricultural practices that developed with seasonal crops bring unpredictable political and social chaos along with increased calories? Was this the end of the gathering tribes in Southeastern Europe, which for eons, prior to dawn of agriculture, had been matriarchal and peaceful?5 With our opposable thumbs to build tools for plowing fields, did we master the universe or quicken the release of carbon into the atmosphere? Did the tractors and combines and laboratory pesticides that our brilliant opposable thumbs have built create a more equitable world, well fed and peaceful? We know that the human brain is similar to those of other primates and cetaceans. Dolphins, those beloved creatures living in pods, depend on their immense brains, which have 40 percent more cerebral cortex than human brains, for deep-sea communication as well as hunting. They have highly developed skills for foraging and eating without “technology” or

Figure 12.1 Harvesting groundnuts (peanuts) at the African Research Exchange Academy, Cameroon, 2020. Photo: Babara Suinyui.

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opposable thumbs. Their emotional intelligence puts them at the top of the food chain, so to speak, for “development.” Dolphins are empathetic, creative, playful, and smart in a way that we thumbed cousins cannot seem to duplicate. But the works we discuss in this book share some of dolphins’ best qualities— empathy and creativity—in a way that can bring our relationship to food to a new place grounded in terre and not just ferme. We have explored alternate modes of food production by artists and culture makers who engage in practices that reject the supermarket model of fast food. The slow-food movement, born in Italy in the 1980s but already present in rural places from Denmark to California, is a new name for an old system. The experimentation of artist-farmers with seed exchanges, bread decoration, urban beehives, and sustainable fish harvests harks back to a more holistic culture of food that is not separate from art. As Robert Irwin said about the Central Garden at the Getty Museum, ten years after its creation: If you start doing things in the public domain, it has to live with change. It’s inevitable. It’s going to happen, so it has to be strong enough to have enough character, enough backbone in a way, that you stick a piece of sculpture in it, it didn’t kill the garden. . . . And then if it really has that kind of authority, then people begin to chaperon it and take responsibility for it. Then it lasts into another era, and then it becomes both really enrichment and a problem. So people start using it as a precedent—and everything is a precedent, you know?6 Strong gardens, lasting seeds, future farmers, and food forests make our vision of existence concern thriving community as well as survival. On both the local and global levels, artists and poets and organized farmers are producing something that is not only meant to be eaten but is also a nutritional alternative to a depleted artistic paradigm. These are the precedents that set the trajectory for future generations to bake exotic breads decorated with dreams and plant mussels in the estuaries of our world’s river systems to connect us all. These are the art forms that have authority, as Irwin describes it, to present new problems that need new solutions. Our territories then become less about farms and landscape and more about the tables we sit at and the people we sit with. The artists and collectives presented here give us a glimpse of a future based on the new tools that our shared imaginations envision.

Notes 1 As quoted by M.P. Geulah, “The 83 Health Benefits of Eating Bread in the Morning,” Joseph’s Organic Bakery (website), Jun 21, 2018, https:// www.organicbaker ymiami.com/single-post/2018/06/21/the-83-healthbenefits-of-eating-bread-in-the-morning. 2 David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), 8.

240 The Food of Life 3 Regretfully, the COVID-19 pandemic during our research for this book prevented us from visiting every continent for in-person interviews. We think that otherwise our research would have led to a broader view of these initiatives in the book. 4 David Treuer, The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present (New York: Riverhead Books, 2019), 44. 5 Graeber and Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything, 8. 6 Paula Panich, “Robert Irwin Still Marvels at Getty Gardens 10 Years Later,” Los Angeles Times, July 24, 2008. Irwin refers to the 1950s Leger sculpture that was placed on the plaza after the garden was completed, which, he said, “was inappropriate and invasive,” adding, “but the garden is strong.”

Bibliography Geulah, M.P. “The 83 Health Benefits of Eating Bread in the Morning,” Joseph’s Organic Bakery (website), Jun 21, 2018, https://www.organicbakerymiami.com/ single-post/2018/06/21/the-83-health-benefits-of-eating-bread-in-the-morning. Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021. Panich, Paula. “Robert Irwin Still Marvels at Getty Gardens 10 Years Later,” Los Angeles Times, July 24, 2008. Treuer, David. The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present. New York: Riverhead Books, 2019.

Index

Note: Italic page numbers refer to figures and page numbers followed by “n” refer to end notes. 11 Los Angeles Artists exhibition 34 66 Scenes from America (Leth) 60 1,000 Ecologies (Barreto and Buggillo) 191 1987 Agricultural Credit Act 58 2016 Local Urbanization Plan 165 2016 São Paulo Art Biennial 190 Abalone Dreams (Davis) 230 Abstract Expressionism 30 abstract utopia 70 A Budding Gourmet (Rosler) 50 academic artistic research 75 Academy of the Living Environment 170 acorn collection basket 154 action-based situation, confrontation with 92 adaptive reuse 107 addictions 59 ad hoc structures 75 advertisements 30, 57 Aesthetica (Baumgarten) 71 aesthetic(s) 40, 71, 74, 79, 81–82, 87; aesthetic primitivism 36; experience 68–69, 72, 79–80; of familiar 71; intermediaries 67–68, 70; order of modernity 17; practices question 74; relational 31, 35 African diaspora 141 African Research and Exchange Academy 236 agar 206 agency, theory of 18 agricultural: inputs 18, 19; modernization 19; periphery 160; practices 2, 11n11, 15, 18, 145, 190, 237–238; production

2, 5, 23, 88, 198, 207; systems 6, 16, 17; workers 16, 28, 31, 160 Agricultural Landscapes in Transformation exhibition 36 agriculture 2, 5, 10–11, 18–20, 24, 28, 35–36, 39, 42, 44, 89–90, 103, 133, 135, 161–162, 166–167, 169–170, 178, 183–184, 190, 192, 194–195, 202, 229, 235–238; artists’ resistance to 23; biodynamic 38; conglomerates, struggles against 148; cooperation between human beings 14; Green Revolution 15–16; impact on smallsized farms 16; industrial 14, 19, 50, 59, 61, 102; invention of 13; metropolis and 161, 169; productivity gains 16; progression pattern 14; social evolution 14; transition to farming 14–15; vocabulary of 189 agro: -chemistry 198, 204, -craft 156–160; -ecology 11n11, 18, 179, 183; -forestry 18; -thropologists, artists as 182–184 agrochemicals, diseases resulting from 19 Alaska Natives 216 Albers, Annie 111, 112 Albers, Josef 111 Albrecht, Glenn 67 alchemical paintings 56 Aliens in Green 203–204, 213n10, 214n10 Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa 109 “also-spaces” 28 amazement 95 Amazon forests 121 American culture myths 219

242 Index American fast-food phenomena 200–201 American Pop artists 30 American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals 34 ancestral knowledge 205–206 ancient Egyptian wall tomb paintings 192 animal contact with hyperactive children, effects of 117 animal-human entanglements 118 animal suffering 34 Anthropocene 70, 195, 210, 236 anthropological ecology of art 195 Antin, Eleanor 50 anxiety about risks 24 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Burke) 71 Aranguren, Amelie 188 architectural collectives 152–153 architecture 55, 79, 81, 112, 154, 195 Arcimboldo, Giuseppe 29, 56 Aristotle 142 Arnold, Ann 30 Arnold, Graham 30 arsenic-poisoned paper and paint, danger of 205 art and food, relationship of 27 art and science 3, 67, 70, 74, 91, 105, 205 Art as Experience (Dewey) 68, 125 ArtDialog 100, 104, 114, 127–128, 127–129 Artemis 133 Arte Povera movement 30–31 art farms 23, 37, 170, 236 artificial sweetener 57 artisanal lifestyles, degradation of 15 artistic: agricultural utopias 3; creation process 75; expression 30–31, 40, 229; farming practices 3, 5, 7–8, 10, 18–19, 37, 42, 74, 76–78, 84, 151, 236; food spaces 28; gestures, in food production 15; “makers” 5; performance 4, 59–60, 171; project 42, 135, 168, 182, 206 artist-in-residence programs 100, 182 artist residency program 180, 187 artist-run restaurant 7 artists: adaptability of 2; as agrothropologists 182–184; definition of 5 Artists’ ways of “living” 35 ArtMill Center for Sustainable Creativity 10, 101, 101, 107, 119–123, 125, 127–129, 143–144, 153–154, 191–193, 236; abundance of animals at 117;

architect of 115; building 115; cellars at 123–124; curriculum of 111–112; daily activities of small farm surrounding 112–113; “exchange” collaboration with artists 121–122; focus on food and gardens 110; fostering craft and art 111–112; foundation of 100; gardens 113–114; growth of 100; as hub for knowledge transfer 123; learning about potatoes at 111; mission of 100, 107, 114–115, 123, 125; as platform for collaborations 105; progressive policies of 127–128; public interactions 114; Red Mill 103–106, 115, 120; region surrounding 100; teaching strategy 126; weaving and wrapping at 112; workshops 105, 112, 115–116 ArtMill Farm Research Collective 114 art, nonhierarchical practice in 4–5 Art Park: Spoils’ Piles Reclamation 34 art places: FOOD 60–62; Monsanto House 57 art-science-school research 89–91 art space 153, 191 “art washing” 76 artworks 5, 9, 33, 106, 116, 133, 154, 203, 229 Assu, Sonny 216–217 Astarte 133 Athena Alliance 75 Atlas of Agendas 92, 98n6 audience 30, 32, 55–56, 59, 61, 107, 183, 189, 192, 194, 204, 223 Auer, R.M. 72 Automation House 51 “autonomous food spaces” 19 auto-photosynthetic plants 36 a-utopianism 207 Aztec mythology and maize 145–146 Ball, Lucille 59, 60, 219 “Bannock Pops” 216 Barad, Karen 17, 97 Barreto, Jorgge Menna 55–56, 190–192, 194 Barton, Scott Alves 141, 143 Basel, Stockholm and Rotterdam conventions 105, 117, 119, 127, 198, 212n1 basket weaving 229 Bassano, Jacopo 28 Battery Park landfill 35 Bauhaus 111

Index  243 Baumgarten, Alexander 70 Bavaria 38 Bayer 57 Bean, Christine 221 beans 109–110, 113, 237 Beasley, Myron M. 141 beauty 23, 71–72, 95, 142, 180, 189, 191, 235 Beecroft,Vanessa 32 beehives 167–168 beekeeping 168 Behbahani, Bahar 121; Bread series of 144; “Damascus Rose” installation 122 Bellastock 153 benchmark aesthetic 69 Benish, Barbara 6, 8, 80–81, 100, 111–112, 115, 121, 200 Bergado, Bene 184–185, 187 Berleant, Arnold 71 Beuys, Joseph 37, 115, 139 Bignall, Simone 77 Bija Vidyapeeth 24 Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation 109 bioaccumulation 105 biodiversity 9, 54–55, 57, 84, 109, 114, 142, 166, 169, 185, 187, 236; educations 127; and food insecurity 195; loss of 5–6, 140; metaphor for 191; in metropolis 161; sugar cultivation impact on 54–55 biodynamics 38 bioengineered seeds, consequences of 57 Biosentinel project 137–138, 138 Biot, Coline 162 Black Lives Matter protests 222 Black Mountain College 111–112 Blais, Caroline 35 Blake, Peter 30 Blanc, Nathalie 3, 5–6, 11, 45, 47, 78–80, 95, 98, 129, 174–176, 196, 232 Blazy, Michel 33 Blesing, Rebekah 205 blight 112 Bloch, Ernst 207 Blosne district of Rennes 152 Blot, Coline 27, 36, 40, 42 body as agricultural tools 3 “body burden”: chemical 199; definition of 198; as emerging theme 200 Bohemia 101, 103, 106, 231 Bohm, David 114 Boisvert, Raymond D. 142 Boning 120

“Bonne vie” 29 Borlaug, Norman 15 Boston Museum of Fine Arts 34 bottom-up strategy for change 108–109 Boutonnier, Thierry 90 Brady, Emily 72 brain 50, 115–116, 127, 210, 238 Brandon, Robert 97 Braouzec, Patrick 164 bread 9–10, 32–33, 50, 88, 106–107, 133, 153, 219; ancient traditions involving 135; basic food staples of 139; companionship and civic-ness for 140; decorations for 133, 134; “diasporic qualities” of 135; “embryo dolls” series out of 140–141; importance in famine 140; kneading of 143; loaf placed on floor 140; love of 235; making 137, 140; ornamented with clay stamps 133; personal memories of 143; reverse swastika 133; role in Mediterranean 136; universality of 133 Bread Alphabet (Penone) 31 “Bread City” 140 Bread project 136–137 Breakfast Series 216, 217 Breughel, Jan the Elder 104 Brisbane, Albert 37 British Arts Council 34 “brotherhood” 30 Brown, Adam 205 Bruegel, Pieter 28 Brundtland, Gro Harlem 108 Buckholtz, Elaine 121 Buggilla, Joélson 55–56, 190–191 Bureau d’Études 18–19, 92, 98n6 Burke, Edmund 70 Buttes, Sutter 231 Cabrit i cabrida see Goat and Goat (Barcelo) Cadaverina 15 (Barcelo) 33 CAE see Critical Art Ensemble Café Ohlone 226–228 Calanchini, Jacky 230 Calel, Edgar 231 California 8, 54, 57, 63n10, 107, 111, 117, 139, 142, 217, 219, 223–224, 226–229, 231, 236, 239 California hazelnut 227 California Institute of the Arts in Valencia 57 California State University Gallery 33

244 Index “campo” 189 Campo Adentro 9, 155–156, 178–182, 188, 236 cancers 19, 54, 59, 119, 209 capital 1, 195 capitalist: consumption 59; society 74; systems of agribusiness 19 Carasso Foundation 183 Caretto, Andreo 157, 159 Carlson, Allan 71 carp 103–104 Carras, Maria-Thalia 134 carrots 6, 171, 189 Carson, Rachel 36 Casa de Campo, urban project at 179 Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art 32 catfish 34 Cattelan, Maurizio 32 cave paintings 104 Centeotl 145 Central America 13, 145–146 Central California 230 Central Europe 100–101, 139–140 Centro de Acercamiento a lo Rural (CAR) house 189 ceremonial dances 229–231 Cervenka, Mark 199 Channing, William Henry 37 Charles IV 103–104 cheese 4, 87, 102, 112, 154, 178, 180, 182, 187–188 Cheese Design 180 chemicals in food 9, 18, 38, 57–58, 88, 91, 105, 118, 163, 166, 184, 198, 216 chestnut trees, blight affecting 112 Chez Panisse restaurant 142 chicken–human lives 118 chickens 112, 118, 120, 171, 203 Chicomecóatl 145 China 103–104, 117, 127, 182 Chin, Mel 28, 34 chlorophobia 204–205 Chochenyo language, revival of 227–228 chocolate 59, 148 chronic diseases: causes of 209; deaths caused by 209; reinforcing elsewhere of body 210; techniques for detecting 209–210; and utopian spaces 210–211 circular economy 169 cities 13, 17–18, 30, 35–37, 44, 79, 82, 104, 109, 116, 118–119, 134, 154, 161–164, 166, 168, 179, 182, 200, 211,

222; and country, difference between 21–23, 160; foundations of 21; history of 21; as “least beneficial” place 20–21; as place of freedom 21; rural areas surrounding 160; shift in views of 20–21 Civic Women exchange 121–123, 144 civil disobedience of research institutions 92 civilization 13–14, 18, 133, 235, 237 civil society 100, 102, 126; activists 101 climate aesthetics 72–73 climate change 2, 5–7, 11n11, 70, 83–84, 108, 112, 123, 127, 135, 161, 178, 236; aesthetic of 72–73; imagination of 73 climate crisis 109, 237 clouds 70, 72 COAL organization 10 Coca-Cola factory 106 Cockrell, Susan 121 co-contributive research 70 Codex Borgia 145–146, 146 Coe, Sue 30 Cole, Thomas 71 collaborations 42, 84, 93, 105, 167, 178, 183, 189, 206, 236 Collectif Etc 152–153 collective capabilities, idea of 70 collective fictions 152 collective subsistence 2 colonial capitalism 77 colonialism 29, 71, 146, 194, 215, 222 colonization 2, 17, 88, 142, 215, 229 Columbus, Christopher 54, 110 combine harvester 20 Comenius, Jan Amos 125 commodification of food 119 common research space 96 community: art 35; building 103, 104; engagement 141–142, 236; farms 8, 163 “Concrete Honey” 167 conservatism 18 Constable, John 72 consumer culture 57, 148; society 30 consumerism 4 contemporary art 27, 30, 32–33, 35–36, 38, 97 contemporary urban planning 23 Convivium 142 Cookbook of Gestures,The (Khan) 144 cooking 1, 2, 9, 50, 84–86, 119, 139, 144, 168, 221, 229

Index  245 Coomaraswamy, Ananda 5 cooperation 14, 57, 96, 102, 127, 204 Cooper, Bernard 57 Cooper, Donald 199 coral forests, mass dying-off of 202 corn 13, 109–110, 113, 145–146, 171, 206, 219 corporate: food organizations 185; food practices 61; propaganda machine 57 corporatization of global food economy 118–119 corruption 108 cosmopolitism 7 COST see European Cooperation in Science and Technology country and city, difference between 21–23 Courbet, Gustave 28–29 Covid-19 pandemic 116, 137, 140 cows 121 craft 111–112, 137–138, 144, 156, 178, 180, 229; craftsmanship 31, 37; philosophy of 187–188 Create: the Community Meal (Patterson) 222–223 creative: act 30; experimentation 5; force of knowledge 95–97; research, environmental aesthetics in 27; sustainability 5 Creative Europe program 10 creativity 5, 31, 55, 61, 76, 81, 100, 107, 114–115, 128, 137, 164, 231, 236, 239 Critical Art Ensemble 206 critical thinking 141 Critique of Judgement,The (Kant) 70 crops 14, 16–17, 35, 42, 54, 104, 169, 180, 185, 195 crossbreeding 187 cross-cultural exchanges 114, 144 cuisines 1, 50, 85 culinary: academy 168–169; experiments 8, 49, 159; innovation 85 cultivation 17, 39, 55, 133, 187, 191; history of 187; under West African conditions 17 cultural capital 50 cultural perception 70 culture 3, 5, 7–9, 21, 23, 27, 29, 37, 51, 55, 57, 68–69, 70, 73, 81–83, 85, 87–89, 100, 106–107, 121, 123, 127–128, 133, 138–139, 142–145, 154, 164, 170, 178, 180, 185, 188–189, 191–192, 215, 223–225, 236–237

cyanotypes 191 Czech Republic 6–7, 10, 51, 100, 102, 104, 113, 115, 118, 121, 143, 153, 193, 236; Czechoslovakia 101–102, 105–106, 153; recipes 154 Dadaists 60 Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL), demonstrations against 223–224 “Damascus Rose” 122 Damdimopoulou, Pauliina 199 Damisch, Hubert 72 Dana, Charles 37 dances 218, 226 Darné, Olivier 3, 167–169 Darwin, Charles 35 da Vinci, Leonardo 219 Davis, Denise 105, 112, 154, 229–230, 229–231 debating forum 96 defense of food 142 deforestation 19 deindustrialization 163–164 democracies 37, 44, 125, 134, 206 Democracy and Education (Dewey) 125 democratization 83 Denes, Agnes 28, 35 Déplaude de Tartaras 91 depression 116, 128, 138 Descartes, René 72 Détour de France 152 Dewey, John 5, 68, 77, 98n7, 125, 126 Dialogue: Prague/Los Angeles exhibition 139 “Diatrabos Plásticos” 147, 147–148 Didactica Magna (Comenius) 125 Discourse on Method (Descartes) 72 Dissanayake, Ellen 5 domesticity 2 Ducasse, Alain 168 Duchamp, Marcel 29–30 Duchêne, Anthony 91 Duke, Winona La 215 Du Shi 103 Dylan, Bob 58 dystopic systems 6 Earth, Air, Fire,Water: Elements of Art exhibition 34 earth’s resources, extraction of 195 earthworms 19, 35, 91, 188, 230 Easterby, Jony 152 “Easter” cuisines 50

246 Index “Eat: an Environment” 31–32 Eat-Art-Gallery 31 Eat Art, meaning of 32 eating 60–62, 87, 94, 114, 188, 190, 194, 221, 223, 228, 238; act of 235; experiences 5–6; habits 54; as teaching 142 eco-art: centers 111; home 51; residency program 183 ecological: artists 27, 28; art movement 151; crisis 18–19, 37; living conditions, troubling deterioration of 24; sentiment 67, 68; transition 36 ecologization: of artistic practices 151; of food production 18 ecology 2, 8, 13–26, 28, 34, 37, 39–40, 43, 73, 80, 82, 91, 97, 110, 134, 159, 178, 180, 194, 231 eco-ontology 159 “eco-space” 84 ecosystems 10, 36, 68, 107, 123, 135, 160, 167, 184, 198, 202, 215 eco-trauma 128 education 54, 58, 74, 100, 108, 110, 157, 169, 171, 185, 207; educational systems 107, 125–126; formal 125–126; informal 126; and job creation 125; non-formal 126; socio-cultural 44; for sustainable development 127; see also environmental education educational theory 125 eels 182 egalitarian 14 Elwha River 218 emancipation 55 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 37, 71 emotional lack 87 emotions 44, 59, 67, 73, 96, 142–143 “encounter value,” nonhuman farm animals 117 endocrine-disrupting chemicals: debate about 204; exposure to 199 Endocrine Society and International Pollutants Elimination Network (IPEN) report 199 endosulfan 57 engagement 3, 69, 141–142, 236 environmental activism 28 environmental aesthetics 27, 33, 67, 79–80, 88; aesthetic of nature 71; “aesthetic practices” question 74; aim of 74; applied dimension of 73–74; climate change 72–73; experimental,

framework of 69, 71; local experimental approaches 70; maieutic approach to 74–75; meteorology 72; natural environments 72; posthumanist reflection 71; reinforcement of elements 69; research indicators 71; research in France 73; sky 72; see also research-creation “environmental art” movement 4 environmental/environmentalism 71, 195; commitment 71; crisis 36; culture 5, 68; devastation and land use 195; education 9, 40, 125, 127, 128; engagement 73; forms 67, 68, 69, 70, 73–74, 76, 88; humanities 36; justice 89; models, aesthetic perception of 69; problems 151, 198, 206; quality 69; sculpture 190; sensations 67; studies 1 enzyme 121, 190, 192 epistemological: orientation 97; values 96 Esculenta collective project 158–159 Espace 365 170 Esparza, Gilberto 36 esthetic theory 5, 68 Etablissement Public Territorial de Plaine Commune 164 “Eurocentric modernism” 77 European Cooperation in Science and Technology 5 European invasion of Americas, genocidal history of 223 European palate 54 European Renaissance 156 exhibitions 4, 33–36, 38, 51–52, 135, 138–139, 144, 154, 157, 167–168, 178, 184, 199–200, 205, 230 existential trajectories 92 experiential: art 2, 105; learning 125 experimental: electronic media 51; utopia 70, 207 experimentation space 50–51 extermination 118 extractivism 37 factory farming 50, 118 fake foods 57 famine 2 Farm 432 206 Farm Aid 58 farming 7, 185, 194, 224; bio-culture 183; collective 40; factory 118; formal 169; organic 135, 165; standardization of 15, 16; transition to 14–15; urban 135

Index  247 farm life: life-and-death rituals of 120–121; vitality of 115 farms as art places 35–45; Brook Farm 37; importance of 35, 37; participants in 35 fast-food 30, 60–61, 107, 166, 184, 225, 239; chains 118; companies 216; phenomena 200–201 fat 30, 139, 216, 235 Federico García Lorca Foundation 188–189 female form, sexualization of 221 female life force, figurines to 140–141 feminist: art 74; critiques of gender roles 49–50; revolution and food practices 141 fermentation 8, 49, 121, 137, 153 fertility 133; tourism 203 fertilizers 15, 18, 34, 110 Ficino, Marsilio 126 field, taking care of 14 fieldwork 97 figurative art evoking food 30 Fine, Aubrey H. 117 Finley, Karen 59, 220 First Peoples 218, 226, 230–231 fish 86, 105, 184, 200–202, 217–218, 226, 230; consumption 34; farm enterprise 104; figure of 105; harvesting 34, 104; images in art 104; markets 104 fishermen’s guilds 103–104 flat breads 148 Flat Pastures 33 Flesh Dress for an Albino Anorexic (Sterbak) 33 Floyd, George 222 Fluxus community and FOOD restaurant 61–62 Fluxus movement 31, 74 Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme 75 Fonds de Recherche du Québec-Société et Culture 75 food 19; actions on Malaga Island 141, 142; acts, sensuality of 221; celebration 191; chain 33, 58, 105, 184, 194, 200, 239; choices 6, 190; commodification 50; connection to Indigenous culture 143; crops 155; culture 9, 19, 24, 201, 215; deserts 107, 216; donations 222; equality 8; equity 4; foodstuffs 54, 141, 145, 163, 184, 188, 192, 228; forests 6, 114, 239; growing 103, 111, 123,

153, 187–188, 216, 221; hub 106, 169; insecurity 59, 195, 215; intake yielded by field 14; justice 102, 218, 223; lifestyles 27; local 88, 144, 166, 194; as metaphor 235; place in European history 141; portraits 29, 90; practices 9, 61, 90, 141, 236; products 1; ritual 105; scarcity 139; security 4, 18, 104, 107; self-sufficiency 2; substitutes 57; sustainability 8; systems 6, 58, 102, 105, 109, 184, 204; territories 35; traditional 139, 218–219, 224, 227 FOOD (restaurant): ancestry of 60–61; “Matta Bones” dinner menu at 62; as site of communal activity 61 Food and Agriculture Organization 156 Food, Inc.: A Participant Guide: How Industrial Food Is Making Us Sicker, Fatter and Poorer (Weber) 119 food producers, artists as 7 food production 2–3, 7–8, 15–16, 18–20, 19, 24, 30–31, 33, 49, 50, 55, 59, 67–68, 83, 113, 125, 142, 161, 162–163, 169, 185, 188, 236, 239; artistic endeavors linked to 23; and community 125; and consumption 162, 185; critique of 59; differentiation of 19; ecologization of 18; egalitarian 9; framework of 18; history of 15; model 156; organic 100, 102; in reclaimed urban spaces 2; in relation to local communities 7; spiritual experience of 142; sustainable 154, 179; for world’s population 236 food resource, production of 18 food sovereignty 185, 187, 218; definition of 185; focus of 223; and kitchen gardens 187 food still life, “frozen moment” function of 139 food stories 28–33; agricultural workers 28–29; consumer society 30; ecological and food issues 33–34; food as model 29; Full Farm 33–34; organic decomposition 33; Revival Field 34–35; rural world 30–31; Thai meals 33; urban perspective 31–33; wheat field 35 foreign luxury foods 118 Forensic Architecture 154 formal education 125 Form, Art and the Environment (Blanc and Benish) 4, 129, 131, 196, 197, 232, 234 Foucault, Michel 207–208, 210

248 Index Fourier, Charles 74 Franceschini, Amy 124 Franck Ponthier 170 French painting 28 French workers’ allotments 160–161 Friedrich, Caspar David 72 “Frosted Treaty Flakes” 216 FRQSC see Fonds de Recherche du Québec-Société et Culture frugality 29 fruits 6, 9, 28–29, 33–34, 52, 86, 162–163, 169, 171, 231, 237 Fujita, Den 201–202 Fuller, Margaret 37 Full Farm 33–34 “functionalism” 57 funding: for education system 126; participation in collective process 92 “Fungi Mutarium” incubator 206 Füsser-Novy, Bea 55 Futurefarmers 124–125 Futurism, artists of 29 fuzzy biological sabotage, concept of 206

Graeber, David 13, 14 grain-based staples 133 grains 133 gratin dauphinois 87 Greater Paris region 164 Great Fish Market (Breughel) 104 Great Pacific Garbage Patch 2 Great Tortilla Conspiracy 148 Greece 8, 10, 134–138, 135, 153, 156 Green Heart 151 Greenhouse Britain (Harrison and Harrison) 34, 151 greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions 2, 11n11, 19, 121, 135, 237 Green Revisited: Encountering Emerging Naturecultures (GREEN) project 204 Green Revolution 15–16 Gropius, Walter 111 gross national happiness index 108 Guadarrama 179 “guerilla gardeners” 135 gut bacteria 116

Galeruche exhibition 167 Gally Farm 84, 166–167, 169–172 García-Dory, Fernando 112, 180 garden city 23 Gasiorowski, Gérard 27, 31 Gauthier, Lou 85 gender identity in America 50 gender-segregated labor 49–50 genetically modified plants 57 Gennevilliers, development of 163 Geometries exhibition 135–136 George Floyd memorial 222 Germond, Lauranne 10 Giard, Luce 31 Giegerich, Jill 107, 110, 124 Gilardi, Piero 157 Girouard, Tina 7 global commons 74, 93, 98n6 global food economy, corporatization of 118–119 globalization 1, 17 global-local project 7 Global People’s Summit on Food Systems 109 Goat and Goat (Barcelo) 33 Goetheanum 111 golem myth 133, 141 Gooden, Carol 7 gourmet 50

Haacke, Hans 28 habitats 2, 184–185 hacking: generalized degradation in 92 Hangzhou Declaration 108, 127 Hapsburg Empire 101, 125 Haraway, Donna 113, 117, 195, 203 Harrison, Helen Mayer 8, 28, 33–34, 51–52, 53, 54, 151 Harrison, Newton 8, 28, 33–34, 51, 151 Hatzidaki, Olga 134 Hauser, Jens 204 Hawai’i 223 Hawaiian Commercial and Sugar Company 63n10 Hawthorne, Nathaniel 37 Hayden, Ferdinand 71 hay, making 124 hazardous chemicals, challenge of 212n1 Hazelwood, Art 148 healing trauma with food 222–223 health crisis, statistics of 58–59 health-food movement 54 heart disease 216 Hegland, Jean 67 Heirloom Potatoes project 186, 187 Heldke, Lisa 142 Hempton, Gordon 94 Henderson, Susan 55 Henri Barbusse Secondary School 90

Index  249 Hepburn, Ronald 71 Hewitt, Corin 62 High Diversity project 187 higher education, structures of 125 higher learning, institutions of 127 Hill, Georgina 182–184 Hillman, James 126–127 Hirshberg, Gary 119 Histum Yani 231 Hitler, Adolf 111 Hog Pasture,The 33 Hokusai, Katsushika 201 Holmgren, David 109 Holmwood, Sigrid 35 home-baked breads, transmogrification of 142–143 Home Michaël 159 Home Run (Orozco) 32 Homo Aestheticus:Where Art Comes From and Why (Dissanayake) 5 honey bank 168 Horažd’ovice 101 horizontality 87 horticulture 40, 169 Hot Dog performance 32 Hottois, Gilbert 207 Hottois, Gilles 14 household chemicals 116 Houston Museum of Contemporary Art 33 Howard, Ebenezer 23 Howard, Luke 72 Hrůza, Tomáš 119, 154 humanism 71 humanities 13, 68, 72, 75–76, 79, 81, 119, 142, 235 hunter-gatherers 13, 16 hunting-gathering, transition from 14–15 hybrid deep-water life forms 2 hybridization 75, 83, 151 hygienism of living environment 73 Hypercomf collective 137, 153 Iberian Peninsula, urban-rural demographic imbalance of 178 iconography 29, 104 “iGeneration” 128 Ikegawa, Shiro 105 Île-de-France Chamber of Agriculture 162 Illicit Gin Institute Assemblies,The (SaroWiwa) 195 illness 209–210

I Love Lucy (television show) 59, 60 imagination 67 imaginative reasoning 95 immune-related disorders, in children 116 immune system and SBOs, link between 116 Imperative of Responsibility,The 207 impromptu memorial, transformation of 222 indeterminism 67 indigeneity, contemporary influences of 37 Indigenous culture 109, 145, 154, 219, 223 Indigenous Kitchen (Chef) 224–225 Indigenous peoples 2, 6, 8, 36, 109, 141–143, 145–146, 148, 215, 218–219; circular worldview of 225–226; colonization of 215; decline in population of 226; demonstrations against DAPL 223–224; material culture of 215; struggle to protect sacred food sources 218 Indigenous tribal knowledge 229 individuality 21 industrial agriculture 19, 59, 61, 102 industrial chemicals 198 industrial growth, extractive process of 52 industrialization 55, 58, 103, 163, 192; Green Revolution 15–16; impact on small-sized farms 16; impact on urban market gardens 161; productivity gains 16 industrialized buildings 106–107 industrialized food industry, critique of 30 industrialized societies, artificial and hybrid bodies of 205 Industrial Revolution 160 informal education 126 Ingold, Tim 187–188 INLAND-Campo Adentro 154–156, 155 INLAND Europe 178–179 INLAND project 100, 112, 178, 182, 184, 188; building 188; Cheese Design 180; circular economy behind 181; connections to local growers 188; Federico García Lorca Foundation 188–189; first phase of 178; programming and predictions 189; shepherding course 179–180; shepherd school 179–180; training programs 178

250 Index INLAND Village 179 “innovation” agreement 162 Inshaw, David 30 institutionalized initiatives, pirating 92 Institut National des Sciences Appliquées de Strasbourg 152 integrated learning 125 intellectual movement 31 intellectual work of city 22 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2 International Art Show for the End of World Hunger,The (exhibition) 35 International Monetary Fund 130n35 intestinal track 215 Into the Forest (Hegland) 68 inventive relationships with territories 85–87 Investigating Cultural Sustainability 5 IPCC see Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Iron Curtain, privation and struggles behind 139 Irreversible exhibition 184 irrigated agriculture 14 Italy 10, 39, 43, 143, 153, 158, 236, 239 Jackson, William Henry 71 J’aime les keftédès (Spoerri) 31 Jan van Eyck Academie 192 Japan 40, 86, 182, 200–201 Joas, Hans 68 jobs 135 Joel, Billy 58 Jonas, Hans 207 Jones, Seitu 223 Joshua Tree 110 Juthier, Camille 205 Kalný, Petr 115 Kant, Immanuel 70, 72 Kaprow, Allan 31 Kedzie, Robert 205 Kelley, Mike 50 kelp, mass dying-off of 202 Kersanté farm 166 Kersantés 165, 166 Khan, Sarah K. 123 King, B.B. 58 Kingsolver, Barbara 67 kitchen 6–8, 30, 50–51, 63n4, 137, 141, 144, 189, 220, 227; American critique of 51; concept of 51; as creative

fermentation place 49; gardens 187; as performative place 50; as place of liberating technology 55; as place of power 55–56; as stage, interior of 50; tools, deconstruction of 49 kneading 134, 138, 143–144 “Kneading Memories” 143 “knife” 49 knowledge 6, 28, 36, 69–71, 75–76, 83, 93, 95–97, 104, 121, 123, 126, 137–138, 154, 159, 179, 185, 229, 236; accumulation 186; ancestral 205–206; creative force of 95–97; and creativity 236; cultural 113, 227; production 154, 195; sharing 188; transfer 123 koláče exchange 143–144; symbolism 144–145 Kot’átková, Eva 111 Koulouri, Elissavet 136–137 Kropotkin, Peter 1 Kunisada, Utagawa 201 labor 14, 22, 54, 55, 57, 117, 121, 126, 161, 179, 203, 220, 237 Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers 76 labor productivity, ratio of 16 Labuda, Radim 121 La fin des paysans (Mendras) 18 La Fragua (The Forge) 183–184 Lai, Maria 137–138 Lakota Sioux 224 La Mhotte farm 159–160 Land Art model 27 Land Foundation 236 Land of Cockaigne (Bruegel) 28 landscapes 18, 21, 37–38, 68–69, 71–73, 76–77, 79, 81, 91, 94, 111, 114, 116, 121, 145, 152, 159, 160, 180, 190, 199, 237, 239 land use 2, 179, 195 language 43, 91, 94, 97, 109, 124, 136–137, 145, 192, 194, 209, 227 La Plaine 163, 166 large-scale agro-farming 117 Last Supper, The (Bassano) 28 Last Supper,The (da Vinci) 219 Last Thanks (Red Star) 219 La Table et le Territoire 3, 3, 10, 11n4; see also La Table et le Territoire La Tour, Georges 28 Laxness, Stefan 154–155 learning 6, 41, 70, 85, 112, 116, 134, 167, 170, 179, 229–230, 235; experiential

Index  251 125; historical progression of 125; informal and nonformal 126–127; process-oriented 127 Le Bruit du Frigo 153 Leclercq, Jessica 3, 10 Lefebvre, Henri 22, 70, 207–208 Legrand, Marine 75, 79, 81, 95 Le Nain, Antoine 28 Le Nain, Louis 28 Le Nain, Mathieu 28 Lennon, John 58 lentils 13 Ler Devagar 106 Les Dessous de la terre (Duchêne) 91 Les Vertus 163 Leth, Jørgen 60 life cycles 112, 192 life forces 6, 138, 187; female 140; human 145 life forms 2, 87, 105, 202 lifestyles 3, 6–7, 15, 21–22, 27, 68, 73, 92, 180; alternative 179; cross-cultural 201; egalitarian 235; generalized degradation in 92; modernist 57; sustainable 108 Lindeman, Eduard 126 linear production 106–107 livability 68 living environment 73, 83, 116, 164, 168, 170, 206 living performative food event 141 living systems 37 Livin Studio 206 lobbyists 198, 203 local culture 42, 138, 153, 156 local environment 2, 69, 74, 96, 104, 154, 156, 160; coproduction of 73–74; maieutic approach to 74 local farm foods, preservation of 102 Local Futures 108 local people 153–154, 166, 171 Locus Athens (arts organization) 134; on community 137; Geometries exhibition 135–136; programs of 135 Locus Collective 135 Long, Richard 31 Lorca, Federico García 188–189 Lorrain, Claude Le 28 Los Angeles 51–52, 106, 139, 148, 195, 200, 219 Lovelock, James 36 low-calorie meat 120 Lower Elwha Klallam Nation 218

Lower Rhine region, landscapes of 37 Lucas, Jean-Philip 171 “Lucky Beads” 216 Lykourioti, Iris 137 Lynn, Loretta 58 Lyon 89–90, 206 Maastricht Treaty 127 Macedonian cooking practices 142–143 Madrid 9, 154–155, 178–181, 184, 188 Madrid City Council 156 Maidu cultural heritage 230–231 Maidu tribe 229–232 Maine 141 maize 15, 148, 237; in Aztec mythology 145–146; domestication of 13, 145; markings resembling colors of 145; in Mesoamerican culture 145 majestic trees, human-induced end of life cycle of 105 “Mak-huššištak—Our Vision” 225, 228 Making Earth (Harrison and Harrison) 151 Malaga Island, Maine 141 Mangeri, Gaby 183–184 Manifesto of Futurist Cooking 29 Manning, Erin 75 Mansfield, Mari 222 Maps to Anywhere (Cooper) 57 Marchand, Trevor 188 Marguerite Network 90 Margulis, Lynn 36 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso Emilio 29 market gardening 84, 163, 166–167, 171–172 Marx, Karl 117 mass migrations 237 mass production 55, 111, 117, 121 Mastani, Meeta 122, 123 material culture and food 104, 106, 215, 229; basket weaving 229; ceremonial dances 229–231; Maidu cultural heritage 231; process and non-material art 231 materiality 17–18, 27, 30, 37, 69, 154, 210–211, 222; feminine reclaiming of 49; shift toward 36 Matson, Karl 138–140 Matta-Clark, Gordon 7, 60–62 Matthews, Lydia 121, 144 Mauss, Marcel 229 Mazoyer, Marcel 13, 15, 16 McCarthy, Paul 32, 50, 62

252 Index McDonald’s 118, 121 McDonald’s hamburgers 201–202 McDonald’s Hamburgers Invading Japan 201 meals 28, 33, 60–62, 86, 136, 142, 148, 168, 170–172, 192, 223–224; homecooked 119; organic 141; as sensorial experience 141; shared 31, 219; solitude of 59; table 90; Thanksgiving 219 meat 88, 102, 120; and egg, mass production of 117; grinder 191, 193; grinding 191–193, 193 mechanization 15, 36, 49 media 50, 57, 95, 108, 111, 219 mediations 23 Medina,Vincent 226–228 Mediterranean Basin 13, 135 Meeting the Universe Halfway (Barad) 97 Mellencamp, John 58 Mendras, Henri 18 merguez sausages 88 Merio Furi district of Turin 157 Merz, Mario 31 Mesa-Lingua 191 Mesoamerican culture, maize importance in 145 Meso-American memory 148 metaphysical approach 38 meteorological phenomena 72 meteorology 72 Mexico 54, 90, 145–146, 146–148, 200, 229 Mhotte eco-space 93 Mhotte Farm 84, 92–94, 159–160, 236; art of inquiry at 93; biodynamic farmers 93; intentions of 92–93; sound event and landscape 94 Miami 109 micro-plastics 105, 200–201 micro-political issues 96 “Miel Béton” 167 milk production 180 Miller, Pamela 199 Miller’s Wife (2004–07), The (Benish) 106 millet 13, 29 Millet, Jean-François 29 mill technology 103 mind, creation of 67 “miniature music” 121 Minnesota Museum of Art 35 miracle workers 37 Mládek, Jan Victor 130n35

Mládek, Meda 130n35 Mlynek 191–193 modern agriculture: agricultural inputs 18; alienating nature of 15; invention of 15; link with destruction of natural habitats 15; living things 19; promise of 19; scalability 16–17; specificity of 17; standardization of farming 16 modernism 55 modernization 19, 44, 55 Molecular Invasion 206 Mollison, Bill 109 monetary value 69, 76 monoculture 111, 185; eucalyptus 155; field of wheat 20, 20 Monsanto 57, 119 Monsanto House 57 Monsanto soybean, reversing resistance of 206 Monsanto Years,The 57–58 Montreal Protocol, Multilateral Fund of 116 moral commitment 92 Moran, Thomas 71 Moravia 103 More, Thomas 3, 207 morpho-dynamic environment 69 Mound-building 109 Mounds 110 mountain farmers 16 Mountain Weaver (Davis) 229 Mugar, Carolyn 58 Muhammad, Khalil Gibran 54 Multilateral Fund 116 multiple-wheeled mills: history of 103 Munchies 224 municipal communism 163 museums 32–33, 44, 68, 142, 152, 154, 159, 185 mushrooms 112, 147, 206 mutual aid 1, 19 Mycobacterium vaccae 116 mycorrhiza fungi 196 Nalžovský Brewery 103 naming, feminine reclaiming of 49 National Endowment for the Arts, interarts program of 34 Native Americans 9, 112, 219, 227, 230; cuisine, revitalizing 224–225; decline in population of 226; diets, staples of 109–110; food justice issues 218; genocide of 215; heart disease and

Index  253 obesity among 215–216; Lakota Sioux 224–225; myth of shared celebration and 219 native foods 224, 226 natural environments 43, 72, 79, 81, 152, 198, 211 natural habitats 15 naturalism 77, 126, 221 natural world 22, 38, 77, 107, 152, 231, 237 nature 3, 6–7, 14–15, 27, 36, 38–39, 43, 69, 71, 73, 79–82, 85, 90–91, 97, 108, 112, 114–115, 123–124, 128, 152, 156–159, 168, 170, 182–183, 205–209, 211, 236–237; attraction to 21; as healer 115; meaning to living from 22; in provinces 20–21; represented by country 22–23; Rousseau’s views on 20–21; science and art, links between 205; struggle with 21; uncultivated 21 Nature (Emerson) 71 Nature Weaving (Davis) 229 Navdanya 24, 236 Navrátilová, Marie 106 Navrátil, Pan 106 Neolithic societies 13, 14 New Beginning (Davis) 231 New Materialisms movement 36–37, 202–207 Next Five Minutes 3 festival 203 Niger Delta 194–195 N’importe quelle chose glisse, routine végétale (Any Thing Slips:Vegetable Routine) 205–206 nomadic plants 201 “non-formal education” 126 nonhuman animals 117 non-human plant world 145 nonhumans 69, 93, 96, 115 nonmarket exchanges 19 non-segmentation of tastes by culture 87 Norberg-Hodge, Helena 108–109 Northwest Coast Indians 216, 218 nutrition 6 nutritional triad 109–110 obesity 54, 59, 119, 202, 215–216, 218 oceans 58, 93, 200, 202, 218, 227 Ogoni people 194 Ohlone Café 236 Ohlone heritage, revitalizing 226–227 Oldenburg, Claes 30 olive trees, domestication of 13

Omnivore’s Dilemma and in Defense of Food,The (Pollan) 120 onions 123–124, 171, 189 Oostkamp, urban hub of 106 Orange Bar (fruit installation) 33 Orange County, loss of orchards and farms of 33 Orbison, Roy 58 ordinary environmentalization 73 “ordinary,” notion of 1–2 organic: decomposition 33; farming 38, 117, 135, 165; foods 10, 58, 100, 102, 119, 190; production 58, 162 Orozco, Gabriel 32 Orwell’s Animal Farm series (Coe) 30 Othello (Shakespeare) 110 OUVERT: Phytophilia—Chlorophobia— Situated Knowledge 205 Ovenden, Annie 30 Ovenden, Graham 30 over-sanitized living environment 116 oversized city, solving problem of 23 Overstory, The (Powers) 67 Owen, Robert 207 Pages, Bernard 27 Paillard, Pierre 37 Palatine Meteorological Society 72 Pane Quotidiano (Lai) 138 Papua New Guinea 55 paradigm shift for change 4 Parc de la Villette 167 Parco Arte Vivante 43, 156–158, 236 Paris basin 162 Parisculteurs competition 161 “Paris green” 205 Parisian Halles 163 parisian urban periphery, transformation of 160–162 Paris Pompidou Center 167 parodic cooking 62n1 participative action research 96 “participative research” 93 participatory engagement 30 pastoralism 3, 178 Pastry Case I (Oldenburg) 30 Patmos 138 pattern recognition 110 Patterson, G.E. 123, 222–223 PAV see Parco Arte Vivante Paysage à boire (Landscape to Drink) publishing project 91 PCBs see polychlorinated biphenyls

254 Index Peace with the Earth:Tracing Agricultural Memory, Refiguring Practice (Sonjasdotter) 187 peas 13 “peasant soul” 18 peasant values 18 pedogenesis 157 Penone, Giuseppe 27, 31 perception 17, 50, 61, 71, 72–73, 94, 162, 182 performative food project 190 performative massage 143 “performative repast” 141–143 peripheral market garden 160 PER.KA 135 permaculture 107, 167, 170–171; balance in 110; design 110; farming practices 108; gardens 3, 109, 113, 165, 165 Perse, St John 57 persistent organic pollutants 105 personal artistic reinvention 37 Péru, Jean Jacques 163 Perullo, Nicola 141 pesticides 19, 55 petrochemical toxins 2 Petty, Tom 58 philosophical heritage 72–73 philosophy 22, 31, 38, 42, 49, 76, 112, 125 Pie Ranch 236 Pierce, Charles Sanders 95 Pilgrim settlers 219 Pine Ridge Reservation 224 pirate ecology laboratory 84, 92–94 Pissarro, Camille 29 Plaine Commune 163–165, 164, 165, 166–167 Plaine des Vertus (Plain of Virtues) 162 Plaine Renaissance 164 Plaine-Saint-Denis 162 “Plantationocene” 195 plant breeding 187 planting 5, 35, 39, 42, 110, 145 plant production, extractive process of 52 plastic pollution 200; lecture at ArtMill 112; tackling issue of 4; talk on 105 plastic production 199 plastics 57, 105, 199, 206, 216, 219 Plata Cordoba 183 Plazza Athénée 172 Pleyel 163 Poetic Party 84, 172–173; activities of 170–171; bid for urban farm 168–169;

creation of 167–168; culinary academy 168; financing sensitive zone 172; founder of 167; honey bank of 168; objectives of 169–170; participation in artistic residencies 168; queen bank of 168; research space of 168; selected for running Saint-Denis Urban Farm 166–167; structure of 169; teaming up with Gally Farm 169 poisoning 119, 184, 237 poisonous trap 184 poisons 9, 54, 198–214 police massacre 148 political: commitment 92; ecology 23, 28, 37, 40, 92, 97; environmentalism 71; question 74 politics 7, 50, 74, 80, 82, 203–204 Pollan, Michael 120, 142 pollution 7, 35, 70, 83, 104, 151, 165, 202, 209 polycentric aesthetic subjectivities 71 polychlorinated biphenyls 105 polycropping 17 Ponthier, Franck 170 POPs see persistent organic pollutants popular art 30 Portable Fish Farm,The 33 Portable Orchard, The 33–34 portrait of Emperor Rudolf II 28 posthumanism 77, 80–81 Pošumava 100 potatoes 6, 13, 31, 110–111, 148, 187, 189, 202 Potato Farm 33 Powers, Richard 67 Prague 101 prairies 34 praxeology 96 predation arrangements, generalized 92 pre-industrial farming practices 185–187 preservation techniques 6 primitivism 36 probiotic elixir 121 process-oriented learning 127 production traditions, renewal of 2 productive agriculture 28 productive territories 27 professionalization of housewife 55 Project Fermentation Revisited 121 project-funded research 92 project prescriptive demands 92 Promise of the Real 58

Index  255 prospective utopia vs. experimental utopia 70 protest: art 148; against use of chemicals 18 Proudhon, Joseph 207 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 1 Průchová-Hrůza, Andrea 119, 154 psychology 127 public gardens 187 public space 56, 70, 79, 82, 84, 135, 151, 158, 203 Quetzalcóatl 145 Quiroz, Ana 147, 147, 148 rabbits 117, 120, 132, 171 racist land-grabbing incident 141 Rain, Steam and Speed—The Great Western Railway (Turner) 72 Rancière, Jacques 74, 77 Ranguin, Cécile 166 Rare Breeds Survival Trust 117–118 RBST see Rare Breeds Survival Trust reasoning 97 recipe-narratives 84–89; aim of 85; changes in cooking 88–89; constituents of 85; curdled milk 87–88; everyday cooking practices 87–88; gratin dauphinois 87; inventive relationships with territories 85–87; memories of cooking 85–87; rejection of recipes 88; sumbara 87; tiep cooking 86–87 recovery of people 215 Red Mill (Červený Mlyn) 103–104; electricity installed throughout 106; lake near 104; menagerie at 120; modernization of 105–106; Navrátil family at 106; raising rabbits at 120; restoration of 115; sales contract of 103; turbine 106 Red Pond 103 Red Star, Wendy 139, 218–221 regeneration 54, 157, 218, 225 regenerative ecosystem 110 regenerative land-use practices 100 Reiss, Roland 111 relational aesthetics 35 relationships 2–3, 5–6, 13–14, 18–19, 21–22, 27, 34–36, 39, 43, 67, 70, 74, 77, 83, 85, 88, 91, 95, 111, 116–117, 152, 156–157, 159, 192, 194, 239; environmental 76, 84; intimate 207; special 9, 86; subject-object 153; symbiotic 104, 115, 121

relay cropping 17 religion 79, 81, 120 Remnant Ecologies (Easterby) 152 Rendez-vous sous les abeilles (Let’s Meet under the Bees) project 167 René Block Gallerie 32 “repast” 141 representations 3, 18, 20, 22–23, 28–29, 31, 35, 42, 68–69, 72–73, 83, 90, 95, 205, 230; cultural 145; mental 69, 91; and practices 42, 68, 73; theatrical 220; visual 192, 231 reproduction 13, 22, 27, 92, 133, 203 research-action 96 research-creation experiments 6, 76, 92 research-creation process 3, 9, 68–69, 71, 74, 76, 80–81, 83, 84, 89–90, 93, 95–96, 95–97, 96, 97, 98n7, 151, 153, 156, 204; ad hoc structures for 75–76; cognitive and aesthetic aspect of 83; cross-epistemic perspective of 76; definitions of 75, 95; environmental forms for 76–77; factors in themes 84; fieldwork as experience 78; general reflection on 74; at Mhotte Farm 84, 92–94; objectives of 76, 97; quest for inquiry into 77; re-separating art and science 77; Saint-Denis Urban Farm 84–85, 89; for social transformation 77; Table and the Territory program 84, 89–90, 153; theoretical foundation for 74; understanding of 98 resource production 28 restaurants 7, 30, 166, 189–190, 226 Restaurant Spoerri 31 Restauro (Restoration) project 190, 190 restoration and replenishment, ideas of 195–196 reverse swastika 133 Revival Field 34–35 Revol, Claire 207 revolution 15–16, 237 rhizomes 146 Rhode Island School of Design 106 Ribay, Michel 166 rice 13, 15–16, 30, 33, 85–87, 202 Ricoeur, Paul 153 Rigney, Daryle 77 Ripley, George 37 Ripley, Sophia 37 Ritvo, Harriet 115 rivers 85–86, 101, 103, 115, 162, 188, 200, 217–218, 230–231

256 Index Rodado, Aniara 204 Romania 156 root vegetables 16 Rosler, Martha 49–50, 220 Roudart, Laurence 13, 15, 16 Roundup brand 57 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 20–21 Rude Pravda (newspaper) 139 Rumsen language, revival of 226–227 rural: artist residency programs 128; depopulation 23; eco-art centers 100; life, celebration of 179; rurality 22–23, 31, 162, 178, 182; socialism 36; spaces 35; and urban societies, difference between 21; worlds 27 Ruskin, John 180 rusticity 29 Saccharum officinarum 54 Sacramento River Basin 230 Safe Planet campaign 198–200, 200, 212n1 Saint-Denis City Council 168 Saint-Denis Council 169 Saint-Denis local council 165 Saint-Denis, territory of 9–10, 18, 84, 162–168, 164, 170–173 Saint-Denis Town Hall 167 Saint-Denis Urban Farm 9, 18, 89, 169, 173, 236; acquisition of 84; administrative structures of 166; construction ban on 165; land acquisition 165; objectives of 84–85, 89; permaculture market 84; soil contamination 165–166 Saint-Ouen 164 Saint-Simon, Claude-Henri de 74 Saito,Yuriko 71 Salat 32 Salish linguistic group 216 salmon: health benefits of 218; loss of habitat of 217; sacredness of 218 “Salmon Crisps” 217 “Salmon Loops” 217 Sances, Jos 148 Sardinian women, watercolor drawings of 138 Saro-Wiwa, Zina 194–195 sauerkraut 121, 123 SBOs see soil-based organisms “scalability” 16, 17 Schaeffer, Murray 94 “Scheele’s green” 205

“School of the Seed” see Bija Vidyapeeth school structures 125 Schütte-Lihotzky, Margarete 55 science and art, links between 205 scientific “phytoremediation” technology 34 Scott, James C. 13–14, 16 Sculpture-morte (Duchamp) 29, 30 sculptures 29–30, 34, 37, 91, 110, 116, 139, 184, 190, 222, 239 SDGs see Sustainable Development Goals sea 2, 21, 72, 202, 217 sedentary fixed-field agriculture 14 seeds 35, 111, 114, 125, 145, 153, 184, 188, 236–237, 239 Seine-Saint-Denis 84, 164–165, 167–168, 170–171 selfood 90 self-sufficiency 18 Sellars, Wilfrid 97 semiotics 49, 56, 184 Semiotics of the Kitchen (film) 49, 62n1 Sense Lab 76 senses, hierarchy of 141 sensitive experience 70, 74 sensitive zone 167–168, 170–172 sensorial pleasure of touch 143 sewage networks 36 Sex and Gender in the Biotech Century project 202–203 sexualization 221 Shadows from the Walls of Death (Kedzie) 205 Shakespeare, William 110 shared experience 61, 87, 126, 143 shared gardens 68, 70, 161 shared meals, myths of 31, 219 sheep 155, 171, 179–180 shepherding course 179–180, 187–188 Sherman, Cindy 220 Sherman, Sean 224 Shingle Springs Band 230 Shiva,Vandana 24, 121, 146, 195 shore-line life forms 2 Shrimp Farm,The 33 sick bodies 198, 208; conditioned by poisons 207; modifying feeling of oneself 210 Silent Spring (Carson) 36 Simmel, Georg 21, 162 Sioux Chef collective 224–225 skin 94, 123, 189–190, 202 sky 72

Index  257 slash-and-burn cultivation 16 slave trade to Americas 54 Slavic diets, staple of 121 slow-food movement 142 small farm 23, 51, 112, 185, 187 small farmers 16, 58, 117–118, 148, 154, 187 small household gardens 187 Smutná, Zdenka 102–104, 107 “snare picture” 31 sociability 19 social: aid, concept of 1; capital 102, 102, 104, 107; change, agent of 4; convention 61; division of labor 22; emancipation 70; equity 237; evolution 14; experiments 55, 115, 159; justice 89; organization 15; practice 10, 29, 35, 60, 112, 141, 143–145; relationships 14; science research process 96; sciences 71, 75–76, 83–84, 96–97 Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council 75 society 7, 10, 14, 23, 38, 74, 76, 82, 84, 108, 114, 160, 208, 229, 235 socio-ecological transformation 74, 93 socio-economic complex 16 soil 21, 34–35, 52, 55, 91, 110, 114, 157–158, 165, 171–172, 195; -based organisms 116; erosion 55; pollution 165–166; sealing 161 Solastalgia (Albrecht) 68 solitary consumption 59, 61; production 112 Sonjasdotter, Åsa 185–187, 186 sound 49, 94–95, 104–105, 123 soup cans 217 Soup of Biodiversity (Barreto and Buggillo) 191 soups 33, 191 sourdough bread 136 space, feminine reclaiming of 49 Spagna, Raffaella 157, 159 Spain 8, 10, 100, 105, 118, 148, 153–155, 178, 182, 184, 236 spatiotemporal experiment 77 Spengler, Oswald 21–22 Spoerri, Daniel 31 squash 13, 31, 109–110, 113 SSHRC see Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council standardization of farming 15–17 Standing Rock Indian Reservation 223–224

Stanley-Jones, Michael 105, 198–199 Steiner, Rudolf 37–38, 159 Stephan, Ranwa 3 Sterbak, Jana 33 Stonyfield Farm 119 storytelling 85 strawberry jam: making of 52, 52, 53, 54; performance of 55 Stuhl mit Fett (“Chair with Fat”) 139 subRosa 202–203 Substantialis Corporis Mixti (Substantial Form of the Blended Body) exhibition 199, 213n1 “suburban famers” 135 sugar 30, 42, 206, 216, 224; addiction 91; art-sciences-school-territory research of 90–91; consumption 90; diseases caused by 54; extraction of 52; and fat 216; history of 54; impact on biodiversity 54–55; as labor-intensive plants 54 sugarcane industry, extractive process of 54 sugar-eliminating experiments 54 sugar islands of West Indies 54 Sugar Killer project 89 sumbara 87 summer squash 56 supermarket foods: in Czech Republic 118; Table and The Territory project for 153–154 supermarkets 4, 56, 59, 118, 153–154, 182, 216 sustainability 8, 79–81, 100, 103, 108, 127, 140, 190 sustainable approach to agriculture 5 Sustainable Culture Lab 84, 85 sustainable development 70, 73, 107, 115, 127, 161, 166–167, 178 Sustainable Development Goals 107–108 sustainable fishing practices 202 sustainable food 6, 84, 154 sustenance 5, 135, 138, 140 Sutton, David 142–143 sweet breads 122–123, 143 sweet rolls, as social practice 143–145 symbiotic plantings of foods 109 symbiotic relationship 121 synthetic foods 59 Table and the Territory program 84, 89–90, 114, 135, 153, 156, 191; aim of 89; analysis of food practices 90–91;

258 Index decentralized approach of 89; food portraits 90; sugar addiction 90–91; working assumption of 90 “Table Langue” 56, 56 Table Manners 194 tables as metaphor 189–194 tactical theater 204 Tartars 139 Taurus Mountains of Turkey 134 Tavros Art Space 134–135 Tavros territory 133, 153; artistic work on 136; bread decorations for people of 133, 134; communities 136 Tayaba, Melissa 230 “technogeny” 14 technology 5, 14, 203, 206–207, 238 television cooking shows 49–50 Teraoka, Masami 200–201 Terres Franches Endowment Fund 159 territorialization 9, 151 territorial marketing approach 27 territorial stakeholders 92 terroir 18, 84, 156, 182, 187 Tesco 118 Thai meals 33 Thanksgiving myth of generosity and sharing 219 Theresa, Marie 125 “Third Places” 70, 78n10 Thoreau, Henry David 21, 71, 128 thought experiments 77 Three Sisters, genius of 109–110 tiep cooking 86–87 Tiravanija, Rirkrit 33, 62 Titlová, Margita 140 tomato sauce 85–86 tomb of Menna, burial chamber of 192 Tomorrow: a Peaceful Path to Social Reform (Howard) 23 Tortillas 148 touch 56, 137, 141–143 tourism 84, 114–115, 151 town and country, relationship between 20–24 toxins 199 traditional meals, antipathy of 59 transcendentalist movement 21 Transhumanism 207 Transmuter of Organic Matter 157 trees 6, 34, 39–40, 94, 114, 189, 192 Trevino, Louis 226–228 Trump, Donald 222 Tsing, Anna 16–17, 195

Tuning of the World and The Soundscape, The (Schaeffer) 94 tunnel greenhouse 158 Turner, William 72 Turtle Island 226 U-GEN-A-CHIX or Why Women are like Chickens, and Chickens are like Women 203 Uhlig, Günther 55 Underbelly of the Earth, The see Les Dessous de la terre under-utilized brownfield sites 161 UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization 108, 125, 127 unemployment 164 UN Environment Programme 108, 117, 119, 198–200, 200, 213n1 UNEP see UN Environment Programme UNESCO see UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization UN Food and Agriculture Organization 202 UN Food Systems Summit 109 United Agricultural Cooperative 102 United Nations 108; Brundtland Commission 127; diverse powers in 108 United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification 156 United States 6, 8, 21, 40, 54, 57–58, 71, 81, 105–107, 111, 113, 116–119, 139, 141, 185, 201, 206, 216–217, 222, 226, 236 Untitled Film Still #84 (Red Star) 220 Upright Pastures 33 urban: agriculture 40, 84, 135, 160–161, 166; farming 135; morphology 21; pollinator 167; spaces 2, 21, 23, 31, 35, 85, 152; sprawl 161; Urban Farms 44, 84–85, 168, 187; urbanization 20, 161; worlds 27 USA stamp 60 utilitarian relations 118 utopia 7, 57, 207–208, 210–211; artistic 3, 15; experimental 70, 207; medical 207; territorialized 76; three-dimensional 3 Utopia 207 utopian: body 160, 208; ideas 236; spaces 207, 210–211; writings 207–208 Valcový Mlýn (Cylinder Mill) 105–106 valley farmers 16

Index  259 value systems 69 Vancouver 216 van Gogh,Vincent 29 Vanhoe, Reinaart 28 Vanmalle, Estelle 3 Varela, Maria 89, 133, 134 Vasulka Kitchen 63n4 Vasulka Kitchen Brno 51 Vasulka, Steina 50–51 Vasulka, Woody 50–51 Vaulx-en-Velin 89–90 vegetable garden 43, 158, 169, 171 Vegetable Garden Ark 157, 158 vegetables 9, 28–29, 31, 40, 162, 169, 171, 222, 231; open field 162; root 16, 123 vegetation 39, 153, 157, 204–205 Vélez, Javier Orcaray 183–184 Velvet Revolution 101, 139 Venezia 109 Venice Biennale of 2001 32 Vertumnus 28 video art 51 Vision for the Green Heart of Holland (Harrison and Harrison) 151 visual artists 50 vital energy 124 Vitruvius 103 Vlassopoulou, Paky 136, 136–137, 143 Vlčová, Pani 121, 123 vocational education 126 Vöstell, Wolf 32 Vrba, Petr 121 Wages for Housework campaign 55 Wagman, Shawna 120 Walden Performing Arts Collective 152 Waldorf schools 38 Walt Disney 57 Wampanoag Indians 219 Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (Friedrich) 72 Warhol, Andy 60, 61 water 4, 23, 34, 54, 103, 105–106, 110, 112, 124, 142, 145, 162, 179, 183, 189, 198, 209, 217–218, 230, 237; waterways, system of 103; water wheels 103, 106 Water and Wine (Orcaray and Mangeri) 183–184 Waterlanders 152 Waters, Alice 142 weather 72, 123, 179 weaving 27, 112, 227, 229–231

Weber, Karl 119 weeds 191 Wengrow, David 13, 14 West African conditions, cultivation under 17 Western art, transitions of 29 western European countries, rural populations in 156 wheat 6, 13, 15, 20, 28, 35, 235 Wheat Sifters,The (Courbet) 28–29 “white gold” see sugar White Squaw #14 (Red Star) 221 Whitman, Walt 21 Whole Art of Learning, The see Didactica Magna (Comenius) wild: fish 202, 217; grains, domestication of 133; nature 21 Wilma the pig 34 Wilson, Amanda DiVito 19 women 2, 8, 32, 49, 54–55, 59, 96, 123, 141, 144–145, 203, 224, 230, 237; as generative tissue producers 203; objectification of bodies of 220–221; as preservers of family life 141; role in cooking 1; rural 109, 121 Women Making Bread (Lai) 138 Women’s Building 51–52, 52 women’s movement 55 workers 16, 28–29, 31, 126, 168, 185 workshops 8, 10, 43, 88, 93, 95, 107, 112, 123, 135, 144, 155, 157, 169, 178–180 World Alliance of Mobile Indigenous Pastoralists 156 Worm Farm 33 writing workshops 88 xenophobia 114 xeno-solidarity 204 X-Tinct Species (Quiroz) 147 Yañez, René 148 Yañez, Rio 148 Young, La Monte 51 Young, Neil 57–58 youth 38, 109, 114, 125, 128, 224 Yusoff, Katryna 73 Zea mays see maize Zet, Martin 105, 154, 191–193, 193 Zone Sensible 3, 89, 165 Zone Sensible team 3 zucchini, recipes for 123