[-empyre-] catching up

[Renate Terese Ferro]

Hello Amanda and all, 
I am catching up after being a bit under the weather and a crazy week at work.  I have been following all of your posts and thought I would respond to multiple threads to catch up after the week. 
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RENATE WROTE: " In light of my own post yesterday I was thinking about my own strategy of drawing into the newly rototiller earth to demarcate and map the crop rows.  Sometimes vertical long rows, other times short horizontal rows but always trying to figure out where the sun, wind, and rain will best suit the harvest.”  

 I look at my drawing in the earth more as a demarcating or mapping strategy than an aesthetic action, though the scale and resistance of the stick in the earth is certainly a poetic gesture. Thanks for the link to Urban Plough Lots Rotations projects http://urbanplougharts.com/portfolio/rotations-moore-estates/  which reminded me of a local farmer  who during the summer etched a gigantic peace sign on his hill side hay field.  He kept it mowed down through the season into the fall but the colors changed as the season waned.  It was quite spectacular beautiful surprise to see it so differentiated from the typical rectangular plots of other crops surrounding it but every time I drove past  I also thought of the military aircraft that would potentially fly over it. 
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Hernani's reformthecity project is a vast international venture. If you are still online Hernani I am curious about the question that Amanda raised. Hermani as an eco-designer I am wondering if you could talk about the impacts and effects that design and marketing have had on the evolution of this project.  http://www.refarmthecity.org/blog/author/hernani/  In looking more deeply into the the website the strategies of photography,blogging, poster design, flicker photo distribution, and html/css web have worked along side of community organizing, sustainable farming design, irrigation design, and diy physical computing solutions.  

Funny Amanda that you apologize for the gestural move away from new media in the recent exhibition “food nostalgia” at radiator gallery.   -empyre in fact is all about networked culture and I find at the heart of “food nostalgia” all of the factors of the networks of food as it relates not only to large American agribusiness, distribution, marketing as well as memory and affect.  What your curatorial project does is critically deconstruct this network.  How powerful and complex this  relationship is.  It is difficult for me to go to our large grocery store these days.  At the entrance of our local Wegman’s Grocery store are shelves of “organic” corn based and soy based oils, flours, and pasta products in family sized colossal  packages all branded with the Wegman family name.  Sugar is of course the other culprit in big business food production.

You wrote: " I've been living and working in the US for 10 and a half years now. The urgency of the completely broken food production system here has meant that I think a lot about the topic, and increasingly, I'm also undertaking curatorial work exploring this area. Doing this research in the middle of America was, well..., eye-opening to say the least. I do recall tweeting, as I drove from Omaha to Kansas City one day "I can confirm we grow both crops out here: corn AND soy". And that's what we find in the supermarkets here. 85% of produce in American supermarkets contain corn product! ....85%! Its a [heavily subsidised] commodity crop, not an investment in food!!

Congratulations on the exhibition.  But getting back to the interesting juxta-postion between the networks of Hernani, Stefani and Marina’s urban mapping networks with the large agri-business of the mid-west.  The interesting question you pose Amanda about where art fits into this I think might be worth spending some time discussing.  I am thinking here of Ricardo Dominguez’ reminder that our job in these projects and interventions is to insert “resistance.”  Yes this work is wonderfully poetic, sensory and sensual, beautiful, and healthful while at the same time it provides real solutions for real problems.  Simultaneously  these projects provide a platform for thinking through a “resistance” to the politics of agri-business as well as our own relationship to food  and food production. 

Onward to more this week.  Looking forward to hearing from the rest of you. 
Renate


Renate Ferro
Visiting Associate Professor
College of Architecture, Art and Planning
Department of Art
Tjaden Hall 306
rferro at cornell.edu