A New Georgics

Throughout 2026, artistic programming at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart has developed within the all-ecompassing atmosphere of what we have called A New Georgics, drawing its inspiration from Virgil’s seminal poem on agrarian life and farming practice, written over two millennia ago, but whose emphasis on care for the earth, and whose poetic conceit—often reading like a manual for permaculture written in hexameter—remain astoundingly contemporary. Virgil understands the practice of farming as the exemplary art binding humans and landscape, particularly in the wake of devastating civil war that had left the land barren and populations decimated; but farming was also a metaphor for dwelling poetically, perceiving life, landscape, “earthbeing,” not from without as something to be contended with, but from within, from the perspective of the usership and stewardship of landscapes we, like all the other plants, stones and living things, both shape and are shaped by—the very essence of ecological thinking. The poem is full of practical advice on the best time to plow, sow and rotate crops, on fertilizing the soil, and endless lists of farming tools. There are chapters on soil care, cultivating grapes and winemaking, tending animals, the habits of pollinators, all interspersed with commentary on the function of art and poetry from what today we might call a planetary-systems perspective, as a kind of social metabolization of planetary agency: the spring rain is Aether, the atmosphere’s embrace of their lover, the earth.

Guided by this cosmovision, A New Georgics is made up of a series of atmospheres by different artist collectives.

Beginning in January, the first declension was the soil-based atmosphere developed by the Stuttgart-based art and design collective anima ona (Freia Achenbach & June Fàbregas), Terra Alchimia—Landscape in the Making, showcasing their experiments with “earthbeing” over their three-year tenure as studio-holders at the Künstlerhaus—dealing with the transmutation of soil and rock, vegetation in urban space, and the innovative use of agricultural by-products—shaping a spatial narrative about material cycles, growth, and transience.

Simultaneously, artist-winemakers, Hannah Liya and Sophia Sadžakov, in an atmosphere entitled Care on the Tip of the Tongue, brought to the gallery space something of their experience of working terraced vineyards on the steep limestone slopes along the Neckar River near Stuttgart since 2021, producing small-batch, spontaneously fermented wines from the century-old vines. They understand the wines as bearing silent, gustatory witness to these landscapes and their stewardship, their taste and smell essential tools for the care of the soil.

Opening on May 21, Shepherdology—proposed by the collective INLAND Campo Adentro and the Shepherds’ School operated under its auspices by artists and shepherds Nel Cañedo and Fernando Garcia-Dory and others—showcases artefacts and documentation from the Shepherd’s School into the gallery space, and with them—through a daily connection with classes at the school in the mountains of northern Spain—a dialogue around the politics and futures of pastoralism today.

Of course, Virgil's was also a printed work, and A New Georgics seeks to foreground, rather than overlook, that medium itself, as a key component of the creative ecosystem of modernity as it unfolded over the past 250 years. Developed by Grizedale Arts & Adam Sutherland, ( )Print( ) is a live print project, an open invitation to print new works using old technology, within a graphically rich atmosphere of polemical posters predominantly from rural settings, collectively offering insights into the complex politics of rurality in a way largely at odds with conventional representations. At the core of the atmosphere is the Print Shack, a partially deconstructed shed containing a printing press and the kind of ephemera found in print workshops since the invention of print, offering an “exploded view” of a printer’s atelier with light emanating from between the boards—a 1:1 scale instantiation of the romantic portrayal of printing as the light source of enlightened public space.

Curated by Tamarind Rossetti + Stephen Wright.