What we, from MAS, suggest is that you make a proposal for:
- a stop in Antwerp during the seed voyage
- the summer school
- the second phase of FUTURE ‘City and waste’
place an object/art work in the expo which beholds a performatic action.
For this last option, we could rate a honorarium in cooperation with Air Antwerp and next to that, material costs of 20.000 EUR (incl. BTW)
_______________________________________________________________________
MAS PROPOSAL:
THE FUTURE OF FOOD AND THE CITY February 2015
In FUTURE we show ideas of artists, architects, designers, scientists, et.al. about how cities will feed themselves in the future and how this will transform the shape of a city. Futuristic plans, new ideas, and contemporary art invite visitors to think actively about ‘the future of food and the city’.
- City and Food: May 2016 – August 2017
a futuristic, but realistic (!) idea about how cities will supply themselves with food.
- City and Waste: September 2017 – December 2018
In cooperation with AIR Antwerp (Artist in Residence Antwerp) The theme ‘City and Waste’ offers a challenging case because artists can reflect on the historical waste part of the expo. For this, MAS will invite the artists to visit the varied MAS collection in the depositories.
- City and Farming: January 2019 – end expo-
Who are the city farmers and which role does city farming take up in the food supply of the city where they live in? What's the spatial and social impact of farming on cities?
What we, from MAS, suggest is that you make a proposal for:
- a stop in Antwerp during the seed voyage
- the summer school
- the second phase of FUTURE ‘City and waste’
place an object/art work in the expo which beholds a performatic action.
For this last option, we could rate a honorarium in cooperation with Air Antwerp and next to that, material costs of 20.000 EUR (incl. BTW)
_______________________________________________________________________
MAS PROPOSAL:
THE FUTURE OF FOOD AND THE CITY February 2015
In FUTURE we show ideas of artists, architects, designers, scientists, et.al. about how cities will feed themselves in the future and how this will transform the shape of a city. Futuristic plans, new ideas, and contemporary art invite visitors to think actively about ‘the future of food and the city’.
- City and Food: May 2016 – August 2017
a futuristic, but realistic (!) idea about how cities will supply themselves with food.
- City and Waste: September 2017 – December 2018
In cooperation with AIR Antwerp (Artist in Residence Antwerp) The theme ‘City and Waste’ offers a challenging case because artists can reflect on the historical waste part of the expo. For this, MAS will invite the artists to visit the varied MAS collection in the depositories.
- City and Farming: January 2019 – end expo-
Who are the city farmers and which role does city farming take up in the food supply of the city where they live in? What's the spatial and social impact of farming on cities?
_______________________________________________________________________
PROPOSAL
MAS/Futurefarmers (Amy Franceschini, Marthe Van Dessel, Lode Vranken, Stijn Schiffeleers- core group)
Seed Journey + Seed Theater
The project Futurefarmers would like to realize in collaboration with MAS is connected to their Flatbread Society project rooted in Bjørvika, Oslo, Norway. This durational public art project has extended beyond Oslo into a network of projects and people that uses grain as a prismatic impetus to consider the interrelationship of food production to realms of knowledge sharing, cultural production, socio-political formations and everyday life. For MAS, Futurefarmers will bring their Seed Journey to the museum and will enact Seed Theater for a period of 3 months. This will take the form of
In this case of theater, we will initiate a series of actions and moments that link to a broader theatricality and performance of everyday life in the city as it related to food consumption, production and distribution. Seed Theater is informed by the ethos of fluidity that comes with the Seed Journey, a year-long seafaring journey from Olso, Norway to Amman, Jordan whereby a rotating crew and growing collection of seeds are transported to their centers of origin in the Fertile Crescent. At the base of this particular collection of seeds is the notion of the “commons”. Flatbread Society seeds and the knowledge imbedded in them can be seen as a symbol of resilience in the wake of the privatization of intellectual property as it relates to biological matter and changing climate. Once “weeds” these grains have been domesticated over 10’s of thousands of years by humans, cultivated by hand and exchanged through a complex hand-to-hand network. Seed Journey will trace the history of this movement and link to contemporary actors and sites.
This project form MAS expresses itself as a Journey- an arrival, a period of residency and a departure. The Seed Journey is a conversation that builds over time and space.
In Antwerp the journey will unfold as an arc of activities that share its process and stories thus far and build new ones to carry further...
Organic, natural and social structure
Our presence in journey- this is hibernation for preparing for pollination in spring.
Literal and figurative.
The whole thing is a sort of sowing to make possible this organic natural and social structures that starts growing that leads to a new journey that is same time staying in Antwerp and the same time leaving on the journey which is moving and being moved.
The total project is a trajectory of questions and thoughts.
Connects to the Maritime aspect of museum in terms of tracing food networks
Grains, citites and boats
Oslo Port City- FBS – food commons in city
Futurefarmers will use the support from MAS for the following:
- base station/studio/production to open up the journey to the public to share and welcome knowledge related to the journey and how it relates to the history of food/city.
- the gallery to map and chart the Flatbread Society Seed Journey. A combination of fixed and evolving content will inhabit the gallery. We will connect with local actors to invite input on the Journey.
CULTIVATING CULTURE CULTIS
Journey- Report on Journey Already Oslo> Antwerp
1. Landing- Seed Journey will arrive in Antwerp via the port and doc for a period of 3 months.
2. Reporting the journey- what happened already.
- Grain realities related to what do we eat and gmo
- Cultural grains vs. gmo
3. Enactments: Social Life in Food Production
Share philosophical discussion form the journey already and discussion on tension between food production and social life food and citiness.
Super future hybrid political nature space—interweaving urban farming / getting rid of nature culture dualism. But hybrind nature / culture
Share what we we learned of this already on the journey.
4. Soil and Water / Land Water/ Antwerp as a knot in this network- bringing food and culture over water to the land.
Antwerp as sea and land coming together
5. Report on the anthropology of human polis and farming – Taussig
6. Historical relation of food and city of Antwerp itself.
Bringing questions from the Journey to Antwerp
Seed Theater- Unfolds in Antwerp –built out of several boat parts – counter to the scale model
- public programs
- workshops
- and the development of documentation taken along the way.
This structure can stay after we leave.
Landing of the society (not leaving and beginning )
Landing of new networks, of local knowledge
Inside the Museum
- Map of Journey A participatory map whereby guests can add their knowledge of specific locations, histories etc.
Wall Map: - Drawn onto gallery wall or large scale canvas
Interactive: Overhead projector allowing people to draw on acetate to add content to map. This contributed content will overlay Flatbread Society route.
(self- made overhead projector so that several people can add to map at once)
- Scale model of Colin Archer Rescue boat / Seed Boat
A small-scale model of Seed Journey boat built with local crafts people in Antwerp/MAS museum. This small boat is a metaphor for
- the reverse journey- going back to origins of civilization to understand these origins in order to project a new future.
- leaving and beginning at same time.
This boat can be part of the maritime museum
Boat to be displayed so that viewers can see the seeds inside.
Boat to be designed to come apart in pieces in order to be a teaching tool and to think together how the boat can become a theater.
3. Sculptures/ Props (These will be exhibited and enacted during the residence- Dramturgy through display and experience)
- Rolling Pin Telescope
- Soil Horizons- A collection of glass bottles with soil collected from farms during soil procession 2015. The bottles display the separating process of the various horizons present in soil- also connects to our journey – where the sea meets the land.
Message in bottle - medium.
- Pinhole camera - device and photos from the journey. this is a camera that is embeded in the boat whereby the boat becomes the camera obscura.
Outside the Museum: Flatbread Society Seed Journey + Theater (Public Programs)
Sail boat + 2 crew
Christiania, Colin Archer, 1896
14.12 meters
Owner: Johan J. Peterson
Boat docked at MAS - need water, secured docking, electricity
- Floating Reading Group
- Action- Soil Procession
- Pollen analysis (examine pollen collected upon the boat journey- Ignacio Chapela)
Invited Guests:
Erik Van Hautte
Vivien Sansour, Haifa, Anthropologist, Journalist
Ilya Van Damme, University Antwerp
Peter Scholliers, Brussels
Michael Taussig, New York
Ignacio Chapela, Berkeley, California
Didier Democry, Belgium
Kobe Matthys, Belgium
Isabelle Stengers, Belgium
Elizabeth Thomas, Curator, San Francisco
Gilbert Cardon (fraternité ouvrière, Mouscron, Belgium)
Proposed Partners by resources:
Water: Tom Cox, University of Antwerp: https://www.uantwerpen.be/en/staff/tom-cox/research/
Seeds: Velt http://www.velt.be/
Oven: Leemniscaat : http://www.hetleemniscaat.be/nl/welkom
Bees: Ifang: http://www.ifang.be/bijenwerk/zwerm/
Open hardware: Constant vzw
Lab: Domestic Science Club
Food:
* -De beek: https://www.facebook.com/vzw.debeek
*- Skybox http://skyboxisthelimit.blogspot.be/
*- Otarkino http://otarkproductions.blogspot.be/
Soil/Ceramics: http://www.unfold.be
Network: bolwerK http://www.ooooo.be
Film: http://www.klappei.be/?event-categories=maandelijks-op-maandag
Seed Journey:
The Flatbread Society Seed Journey is a seafaring voyage that moves people, ideas and seeds through time, space and phylogeny. Anchored to Losæter, Bjørvika in Olso, Norway, this voyage—its crew and cargo—are agents that link the commons as they relate to local networks and a more global complex of seed savers and stewards of the land. Seed Journey will transport varieties of ancient grains that have been cultivated in Losæter back to their center of origin, the Fertile Crescent (near the upper reaches of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, in present-day southeastern Turkey-northern Syria.) The Seed Journey route will include various stops between Oslo and Amman, Jordan where the crew will meet leading actors in the food commons movement. At each stop Flatbread Society will collect and exchange seeds, run workshops and document the seminal work of each movement. There will be a rotating crew such that actors from one stop can join the voyage for a time. This will allow for cross-pollination between movements and cultural exchange between the actors—ultimately building a portrait and linking the movements.
This journey to the Middle East can be seen as an awakening of the memory—the long journey the grain itself has taken—through the hands of time.
Seed Journey will sail upon a Colin Archer rescue sailboat. Colin Archer was a renowned ship builder who designed vessels for Redningsselskapet (The Red Cross) and is most known for the design of the first ship to reach the North Pole, Fritjof Nansen’s Fram. The notion of “rescue” in relation to this journey is key. The Colin Archer is not only a “slow” and “safe” vessel, but also much more it connects the ideas of exploration and loss to new ideas of rescue and re-findings. The re-tracing backwards the routes of these seeds and their cultures re-signifies these voyages from the 21st century vantage of having lost our flotation, lost our way; a “reverse Nansen”, “reverse Humboldt”, reverse “Darwin”, Cook, Magellan or whatever traveller you may want to choose.
Schedule
2017
June – Depart Oslo
Late October – Arrive Antwerp
October –March 2018 Seed Journey docked at MAS
- Floating workshops/ Seed Theater
a. Michael Taussig + Vivien Sansour (Briefing us on the Political History +
Currents of Middle East)
b. Kobe Matthys + Tom Nicholson (Animism + Intellectual Property)
- Short Sailing Journey to Gilbert Cardon (fraternité ouvrière, Mouscron, Belgium)
Budget 30,000
Artist Fee/Futurefarmers (1500 x 3) 4500
Journey Support 15,000
Includes fee for crew, port fees, travel
Materials 5000
Scale Model 1500
Map 2000
Overhead Projector 1500
Public Programming (3- 4 months) 10,000
4 events/workshops x 2500 euro
Honorarium for guests, chefs
Honorarium 1000
Vivien Sansour, Palestine, 500
Michael Taussig New York, 500
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Flatbread Society
Flatbread Society is a permanent public art project created in a “common” area amidst the waterfront development of Bjørvika, in Oslo, Norway. In 2012, the international arts collective, Futurefarmers formed Flatbread Society as a proposition for working with local actors to establish an aligned vision for the use of this land. Flatbread Society uses grain as a prismatic impetus to consider the interrelationship of food production to realms of knowledge sharing, cultural production, socio-political formations and everyday life. The groups’ dynamic activation of the site through public programs, a bakehouse and a cultivated grain field has attracted the imagination of farmers, bakers, oven builders, artists, activists, soil scientists, city officials; while simultaneously resulting in the formation of an urban gardening community called Herligheten. Flatbread Society’s activities in Oslo center around facilitating an open framework to collectively develop this site into a permanent stage for art and action, as well as a shared resource revolving around urban food production and the preservation of the commons. In 2015, an official renaming of the site was established. The collectively coined name “Losæter” combines two Norwegian terms for the commons, “Loallmenning” and “sæter”. “Lo” points to the geographic location of the site being near the water and “sæter” refers the right to put animals to pasture and to put up a house for the summer. Losæter captures spirit of the project at large and connects to Norway’s agricultural heritage in a continuum of past to future. As Losæter evolves, the practice and metaphor of cultivation are linked to larger ideas of self-determination and organic processes in the development of land use, social relations, and cultural forms. The openness and fluidity of the projects evolving at Losæter stand in stark contrast to the rational logic of development in the surrounding areas of Bjørvika. Situated amongst the National Opera, the M
unch Museum, Deichmanske Library and the National Stock Exchange, Flatbread Society positions Losæter within the cultural legacy of the city.
Flatbread Society is part of the Slow Space public art program, a curatorial vision conceived by Claire Doherty of Situations. Situations selected artists to create permanent, durational public art works. Slow Space is commissioned and produced by Bjørvika Utvikling in collaboration with the artists.
Futurefarmers
Futurefarmers is a group of diverse practitioners aligned through an interest in making work that is relevant to the time and place surrounding us. Founded in 1995, the design studio serves as a platform to support art projects, an artist in residence program and our research interests. We are artists, researchers, designers, architects, scientists and farmers with a common interest in creating frameworks for exchange that catalyze moments of "not knowing".
While we collaborate with scientists and are interested in scientific inquiry, we want to ask questions more openly. Through participatory projects, we create spaces and experiences where the logic of a situation disappears - encounters occur that broaden, rather than narrow perspectives, i.e. reductionist science.
We use various media to create work that has the potential to destabilize logics of "certainty". We deconstruct systems such as food policies, public transportation and rural farming networks to visualize and understand their intrinsic logics. Through this disassembly new narratives emerge that reconfigure the principles that once dominated these systems. Our work often provides a playful entry point and tools for participants to gain insight into deeper fields of inquiry- not only to imagine, but to participate in and initiate change in the places we live.
Futurefarmers work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New York Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim, MAXXI in Rome, Italy, New York Hall of Sciences and the Walker Art Center.
Backstory
Written by Elizabeth Thomas, Independent Curator, San Francisco
2015
Architect
Philosopher
Pollinator
Artist
Chef
Politician
Researcher
Banker
Writer
Activist
Farmer
Kindergarten Teacher
Sailor
Librarian
Social Worker
Soil Scientist
Instigator
Bureaucrat
Firestarter
Developper?
The Flatbread Society, initiated several years ago by Futurefarmers, unites this seemingly unlikely but completely natural assortment of characters partially detailed above. They convene around a common plot of land, and a common purpose, another special space that both implicates the rest of the world and stands apart from it. Bjørvika has been transitioning for over a decade, from an active Port to a current construction site, to a future community (with overlaps and states of in-between of course), following years of planning and the design and construction of modern high rise buildings, housing residents and businesses and amenities for them all. As with many redeveloped urban areas across the world, it’s a vertically oriented self-contained city—a major section of the development is even called the “Barcode Project.” In a way it’s a visual metaphor for its conceptual, technical, political, and economic genesis, which follows the same vertical logic, from the top layers of governments down to real estate developers down to companies and businesses before we get to the people themselves who might live and work in this place, and who form this future community.
We all know (or maybe we don’t) communities don’t really form vertically, either literally or figuratively. It’s a little like farming or baking, things may grow or rise, but they also spread quite naturally and quite organically (if not contained by other means). This process takes preparation and it takes resources, but more importantly it takes energy and time. And so it makes sense that time is the organizing principle for the art projects that comprise Slow Space (Claire Doherty’s curatorial framework for durational public art in Bjorvika), of which Flatbread Society is one component. And it follows that society is the organizing principle chosen by Futurefarmers for their own project, an attempt to align people not from the top down, but from the bottom up, where everyone sees the lateral connections to each other from their own individual disciplines, and the shared investments of time and intellect and effort, to create a society that doesn’t just belong to the project, but to each other.
Flatbread is the thing that allowed questions to be asked to bring these people together, who live in close proximity without knowledge of their shared interests or resources, or their desires for creating something together. There has to be a reason, and the flatbread is about as elemental as it gets. Flour and water (and sometimes other things of course), hands and time and heat, it crosses the historical traditions of Norway, and the historical traditions brought to Norway by increasing waves of immigrants. It has served as sustenance, but also currency. It is an object of universality and also great specificity, a perfect symbol of human commonality and diversity, since what it is made from and how it is made tell us not just about human rituals but also about land, since the grains that produce them have geographic and cultural specificity. A lot of that specificity has been erased, as we have “progressed”, and as farming has evolved into agricultural enterprise, and the heritage grains that once spoke of place have disappeared from use, living only in seed libraries, or between floorboards of old barns. So the Flatbread Society’s cast comprises people, but it also comprises seeds, which also come together because they are being given the right excuse: Forest Finn Rye, Ardre Emmer, and all the rest, to be grown and also to be eaten in flatbreads baked in the communal ovens.
The visual metaphor here is the flatness, of the bread, of the land, of the society, which means just as much to the project’s form as it does to its desires and possibilities. There’s a way we understand flatness to function physically, and in social organization. But Futurefarmers also want to understand flatness as a metaphor for reframing our view of the world. We know now the world isn’t flat (something we discovered through sailing, incidentally, since it allowed us to see the arcing horizon), and so we think of societies who imagined it as flat to be inferior. They didn’t know the “facts”. But the thing is, the more facts we know, the more certain we are about what the world looks like, the less we’re able to imagine other possibilities for what it might be. Futurefarmers want to ask us to imagine what might be different if we could enable the mindset of flatness again in the world, if we could (on a clear day) stand at the edge of the harbor and see it all in the distance and under our feet clearly, imagine the connection of this land and these seeds to the land and seeds on the horizon.
So its no surprise that Flatbread Society would evolve as it has, in one direction rooted to the land and place, in the form of Losæter and its community gardens, and the Flatbread Society’s own grain field, and bakehouse, and related activities. And in the other direction drifting on the sea, fluidly moving across a plane of water to reverse a journey thousands of years old, to connect a community of grain activists spread across countries, taking seeds on an odyssey both literal and conceptual. Grain availed us to move, to have surplus food, to gain more knowledge and perspective. Sailing was our first human notion of proving the earth was an arc. If we think about this cast of characters (and the cast is much larger than we can name here), then Flatbread Society provides both a stage for action and a score for improvisation on the land in Oslo. But there is also a cast who may never set foot on Losæter, and they function much differently as a constellation of actors in far-flung places—farmers, activists, journalists, bakers, scientists, economists, and seed savers among them, whose own work has informed the research, both practical and conceptual, and will inform the journey that the Futurefarmers will take as they exit Bjørvika, sailing away on the Colin Archer. Constellations are how we navigate the journey, after all.