Futurfarmers, Piero Gilardi, Inland-Campo Adentro, Myvillages
Grow It Yourself
13 June–18 October 2015
Opening: Friday 12 June, 6pm
PAV
Via Giordano Bruno 31
10134 Turin
Italy
Hours: Friday 3–5pm,
Saturday–Sunday noon–7pm
T +39 011 3182235
Curated by Marco Scotini
After the success of the Vegetation as a political agent project, whose aim was to trace a political history of the botanical world, the second group exhibition curated by Marco Scotini, as part of the 2015 artistic programme of Turin’s PAV, Grow It Yourself focuses on some recent international experiences of cooperative forms of social and communal production. From collective farming practices, to community organisations, from farm systems to the expanding movement of urban community gardens, the exhibition brings together a series of experiments in which agricultural production, the self-management of natural resources and its effect on food policies, unfold a constituent relationship between the artistic practices and social skills.
Is it possible to resist subordination to neo-liberal production relationships and avoid control by monetary and market economics, in a moment of crisis of life systems such as we are currently experiencing? In other words, is a non-capitalistic use of natural resources still possible in order to oppose the expropriating and extracting model of development that has been imposed at every latitude of the globe? How should we react, for example, when faced with the recent approval of the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP), between the United States and the European Union? Can the Commons experience be considered as the basis of a new production method?
The social experiences collected in the Grow It Yourself exhibition, with their manifold articulations and micro-political capacity, always on the verge between artistic practices and rural arts, strongly affirm that agriculture today can become that terrain of resistance, starting from where one may still affect the collective subjectivities.
The exhibition includes works by the Myvillages collective (an initiative of international inspiration created by Kathrin Böhm, Wapke Feenstra and Antje Schiffers in 2003) presenting the results of an authentic collective effort for sustainable future. Futurefarmers (Amy Franceschini, Anya Kamenskaya, Stijn Schiffeleers, Michael Swaine and Lode Vranken) show a set of video documentation of their recent in situ collaborations. Fernando Garcia-Dory elaborates on Inland – Campo Adentro project, showing collaborations since 2010 with artists Mario Garcia Torres, Susana Velasco, etc., and new development of this “para-institution.” Piero Gilardi has created especially for this occasion Ecoagorà, a small, octagonal amphitheatre in wood, the place for discussion and debate, with symbolic objects of ecological reconversion (tools for organic farming, food and creative objects) and backdrop of the emblematic images of an ecological disaster. During the summer season, PAV will host intellectuals, artists (Christian Marazzi, Silvia Federici, etc.) and individuals from the rural world for a reflection on subjects tackled by the exhibition.
These interdisciplinary projects presented, voluntarily, set themselves up as alternatives to the dominant model of capitalism and to the apparatus of a large scale distribution and the devastating effects it leaves on society and the environment, both physical and social, in order to affirm the food sovereignty during the process of re-acquaintance with the soil and rural urbanisation.
In effect, Grow it Yourself aims to investigate agro-food politics and the dynamics of production, together with the power relationships that regulate current methods and forms in which production from the earth can become food. The do it yourself ethics and practices, question the monopolistic dynamics of large-scale agricultural distribution, favouring self-production as an inevitable method in order to regain control of food production, regenerate the environment and provide for subsistence.
The exhibition has been realised with the support of the Compagnia di San Paolo.
