Imagine Farm

Imagine Farm

Århus kunstbygning.
Imagine farm – ground for cultivating thoughts
exhibition concept for summer exhibition at Århus Kunstbygning by Kultivator
Much of today’s focus is laying on what kind of future we don’t want, or are afraid of… On what we must not do, or must not have. The critical analysis of what is destructive, non sustainable systems occupies great space in relation to the creative imagination of the sustainable, pleasant and wanted ones. The desired future must be imagined in order to be possible.
To meet this need, Kultivator and Århus kunstbygning will settle the Imagine farm, for and by children. A farm is an area designated to growth and cultivation, in this case of imaginations of future systems to live.
In the basement of Århus Kunstbyggning, Kultivator will build up the Imagine farm. It will serve as a working space where desired future systems for food production, social work, energy production, waste management, housing, etc. are visualized and tested. The material for this is imagined and described by children, and represented in objects and animated film sequences by the artists and farmers of Kultivator. This translation of the children´s imagination into objects and films constitutes the first step in the settling of Imagine farm.
Step Two is the use of the farm, when visiting children (and parents) are asked to interact with the systems and rearrange them, try other ways, and document their imagined scenarios. The Imagine farm will thus be in constant change, and photos and texts of arrangements made along the way will be a growing collection of imagined futures. Here we will try to use a technology to let visitors file their photos and written comments into small animations, so that new, other films appear. Alternatively, the photos and text will be printed and made accessible to visitors in the exhibition. Or both.
Since all objects can and will be moved around, and to stress the representative character of the objects, the material we use will be papier mache´. This is a low cost, bio degradable material that is light to handle and fairly easily breaks. It is also a material and technique that is well – known for most children. No new objects will be made within the exhibition, but we will set up a repair workshop, where repairs and small adjustments can be made to the objects that are already there. To repair broken objects is another, meaningful way to interact in Imagine farm.
One event/workshop will be held, where the Imagine farm receives grown up users; preferably local politicians, or other groups that should be particularly interested in the view and interests of children for future society. The invited grown ups can take part of the information collected, and self use the farm to visualize and test thoughts.

What is now proved was once only imagined.

Crosscultural Nomadic Cheese nr 2

Crosscultural Nomadic Cheese nr 2

Supermarket artfair 2011, Kulturhuset, Stockholm
A Cross cultural Nomadic Cheese in our boot at Supermarket. 10 litre of milk will be brought from Kultivators farm om Öland, and during the art fair it will be processed into à cheese. This cheese is the second one in à series of cheese made in cultural institutions. Micro cultures in the non- pasteurised milk from the farm will react and developed together with the collective cultures from artist – run gallery’s and the great culture of Stockholms Kulturhuset, for à cheese with strong and complex taste.

Processing manifest

Processing manifest

An opinionresearch.
This installation examines the popularity of statements from the manifest of the European Arts and Agriculture network, agri-culture.eu. This network was established in connection to Kultivators “Wedding between Art and Agriculture” in July 2010, and officially launched at he international conference “Campo Adentro”, in Madrid later the same year.
Places of research:
Supermarket artfair , Kulturhuset, Stockholm
Himmelsberga, Öland
Statements:
We shall consider feast functional and work-out decadent.
We shall make art like farmers and farm like artist.
We shall disregard national borders, and refuse advantages given to us by historical crime
We shall recognize traditional rural knowledge an open tool for radical change.
We shall upgrade our pets to become our co – workers.
We shall be producers and political beings before consumers and voters.

Crosscultural Nomadic Cheese nr 1

Crosscultural Nomadic Cheese nr 1

Kultivator residency in Rum 46 Århus, Denmark
18th of October until 31st of October 2010

Most authorities consider that cheese was first made in the Middle East. The earliest type was a form of sour milk which came into being when it was discovered that domesticated animals could be milked. A legendary story has it that cheese was ‘discovered’ by an unknown Arab nomad. He is said to have filled a saddlebag with milk to sustain him on a journey across the desert by horse. After several hours riding he stopped to quench his thirst, only to find that the milk had separated into a pale watery liquid and solid white lumps. Because the saddlebag, which was made from the stomach of a young animal, contained a coagulating enzyme known as rennin, the milk had been effectively separated into curds and whey by the combination of the rennin, the hot sun and the galloping motions of the horse. The nomad, unconcerned with technical details, found the whey drinkable and the curds edible.
Widcome, Richard. The Cheese Book. Seacaucus: Chartwell Books, 1978.
Making a Crosscultural Nomadic Cheese with Swedish/Danish culture, ripening into the meeting with our friends from the middle east.

Plan:
Kultivator will travel to Århus with milk from the farm.
15 – 18 October 2010
The milk comes from Kultivators farm and straight from the cows with no pasteurizing, which means that the culture of the farms surrounding is still in this milk. This bacteria micro culture and the conditions of the travel (heat from car engine, time (estimated 7 hours) and shaking from driving) will start the transformation of the milk into cheese. In the gallery Rum 46 in Denmark the cheese mass will be infused with danish culture, creating the Crosscultural Nomadic Cheese.
Kultivator arrives 15 of October, and will work on salting, pressing and shaping the CNC in the galleryspace until the 18:th of October. A workshop/Drawing session will be held in connection with this. The CNC will ripe in the gallery until end October, and then be be tasted. Parts of it would then be preserved until next year June, when Camp project starts, and possibly parts of this cheese could infuse milk brought from the middle east.
Workshop: Visualize your nomadic life (appr. 2 hours, Saturday or Sunday)
Drawing session with public. Drawings will be left exhibited in gallery during the ripening period of the Crosscultural Nomadic Cheese.
Suggestion for duration of exhibition is two – three weeks, after which the cheese should be ready for consuming. After this an event could be for public to taste the Crosscultural Nomadic Cheese in the end of October/begin November?
A building on further connecting over to the Camp in 2011, would be the traveling of milk from the middle east, via the gallery in Århus to the farm of Kultivator?

Ditch it

Ditch it

The International Gallery18 September – 2 October
Liverpool Biennial 2010
Curated by James Brady and Janette Porter (http://www.hightideuk.org/)
Ditch it
Environmental activism by play, art, and small and large animals, coordinated by Swedish art and agriculture initiative Kultivator.
Kultivator is located on a flat limestone island that lacks natural rivers. Instead, there are man made ditches, that already since century’s are leading water away from the island to the sea, to create more ground for cultivation and pastures. This has resulted in more land for people to feed on, but is also causing serious problems in the Baltic sea. The ditches carry the water quickly out, bringing with it nutrients leaking out from fertilized fields. This overfeeding of the sea results in an overproduction of algae, and dying seabeds due to lack of oxygen.
Already since years, commercial fishing outside the coast of the island has ceased, and the beaches clog of rotting or poisonous algae, making it hard to play in the shallow water. In the inland the plants and animals living in small freshwater pools and swamps has less and less space to live and breed. The process is a matter of both time and space. If the fresh water is contained and stays on the island longer, microorganisms and larger animals and plants can process the nutrients in the water. If a little bit of land/space is given back to the wetlands, more can eventually be used in the sea. This is a well known fact, but due to slow bureaucratic procedures and land owner issues little happens on a large scale. Time and nutrients passes…

In May 2010, Kultivator dug a pool next to one of these ditches. The water from the ditch was led into the pool and kept there. Water, plants and animals from natural pools was added to it, and a solar powered pump installed to give oxygen. In a small pool like this, it is beneficial if the water is sometimes stirred, what ducks and larger animals normally would do. Unfortunately, no wild ducks introduced themselves, so the village kids, with their remote control boat, some plastic toys and their dog would do that work during the summer. Meanwhile, under the surface, more and more microorganisms established themselves. Dragon flies appeared over the pool. Five freshwater mussels was put in, and to make it possible for them to reproduce, three goldfish were introduced. After a few weeks, shoals of small fish appeared. Probably the offspring of the goldfish. As a result of a project from a visiting artist the Asian water ferm Azolla was added, that can double its biomass in two days, under ideal conditions. It did. The Azolla was harvested to be used as green fertilizer on the raised beds of Kultivator, and fed to chickens and pigs. The pool is now containing salamanders, goldfish, frogs, bugs, worms, barbie dolls, some sunken ship and mussels and all these other little things we don’t know the name of. It also contained and processed nutrients that all this lived from during the five months it existed. The sea never even knew.