The exhibition Potential Agrarianisms set out to rethink the human and non-human histories, social and environmental relations, and ecological prospects of the terrains of the countryside, the rural, agriculture, and the land. The diverse associations, entwinements and urgencies of these intersecting terminologies come together in the expansive notion of agrarianisms. In this presentation we will discuss the multiplicity of aesthetic, geographical, and political positions from which the art practices brought together in the show engaged with and activated the ecological potentialities of the physical and conceptual fields of the agrarian. How might the uncovering of other social and environmental, but also legal and political histories of the land contribute to debates over the need to diversify, detoxify, and de-intensify agriculture? What can be salvaged from the chronicles of peasant rebellions and the legacy of agrarianism as a mid-century political project for today’s struggles against corporate power and populism in the countryside? To what extent do non-western, traditional and alternative rural cultures provide models and knowledges for the restoration of caring and reciprocal relationships with the natural world?

Dr Maja Fowkes and Dr Reuben Fowkes are founders of the Translocal Institute for Contemporary Art and co-directors of the Postsocialist Art Centre (PACT) at the Institute of Advanced Studies, University College London. They will be joined in conversation by Santiago del Hierro and Ursula Biemann.

Sakiya is a progressive academy, a field for experimental knowledge production and sharing in Ein Qiniya; a village 7 kilometres west of Ramallah, Palestine. By grafting local agrarian traditions of self-sufficiency with contemporary arts and ecological practices, we seek to create a new narrative around our relationship to land, knowledge, and the commons. Within the framework of a cross disciplinary residency program, marginalised cultural actors, such as farmers and crafts/small industry initiatives, assume a prominent role alongside artists and scholars, challenging the demographic divide that characterises cultural production and consumption. Through self-sufficient practices, agriculture connects with contemporary arts and sciences for a more sustainable and resilient future. These practices are not new but are continuously and increasingly threatened by the forces of colonisation and neoliberal modes of production. Liberation, we believe, comes from a connection and re-framing of an ancient relationship to the land.

The Seasons of Quincy (2016) is the result of a five-year project by Tilda Swinton, Colin MacCabe and the film director, artist and television producer Christopher Roth, to produce a portrait of the intellectual and storyteller John Berger. In 1973, Berger abandoned the metropolis to live in the tiny Alpine village of Quincy. He realised that subsistence peasant farming, which had sustained humanity for millennia, was drawing to an historical close. He was determined to spend the rest of his life bearing witness to this vanishing existence, not least by participating in it. The four-part film examines different aspects of his life in this remote village while also combining ideas and motifs from the writer's own work. Each film was created as an individual work of art but they combine to make this feature film. Christopher Roth is the director of Spring, a film essay contextualising Berger’s seminal writing on animals in the local farming culture.

The film will be shown in the presence of Christopher Roth, followed by a discussion.

The event is organised in collaboration with More than Human. Cinema by the LUS “Mittlebau”.

From the early days of European intervention and colonial settlement in Palestine - cutting across the late Ottoman, British, and Israeli rules - travellers, state officials, and settlers expected the land to be plentiful, a “land flowing with milk and honey.” By way of fulfilling such expectations, the configuration of the environment and more-than-human bodies was intertwined with political governance. Focusing on the 1920s-1960s, the talk scrutinises the problem of infertility, which threatened the existence of the entire settlement project. It focuses on a group of Jewish settler gynaecologists and veterinarians and their collaboration with farmers, and examines their attempt to deal with the reproductive limitations of the human and animal body and their efforts to realize plenty.

Tamar Novick is trained as a historian of science, and writes about agriculture, technology, animals, bodily waste, and fertility research in Palestine-Israel. She holds a PhD from the History and Sociology of Science Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Novick is the author of Milk & Honey: Technologies of Plenty in the Making of a Holy Land (MIT Press: forthcoming). She is currently a Senior Research Scholar at Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, where she leads a working-group on animals and knowledge construction titled “Out of Place, Out of Time.”

What nature-positive alternatives to large-scale industrial cropping systems can we imagine'? Do they work, according to production and sustainability targets? Are they acceptable, attractive, and feasible for the farmers who will implement them? And what kinds of technological support might farmers and farm workers need to make these alternatives viable? We'll look together at examples of both currently implementable and future-oriented imaginations for how industrial cropping systems may be redesigned, and explore the agro-ecological and socio-technological opportunities, challenges, and questions that each imagination brings up.

Lenora Ditzler is an agricultural systems scientist working on a PhD in the Farming Systems Ecology group at Wageningen University in The Netherlands. She is trained in agroecology, whole-farm modelling, systems analysis, and visual arts. Her research explores current entry points and design frontiers for the transition towards more diverse and nature-positive open-field crop production systems in intensive and industrialised farming contexts.

This discussion is part of the current exhibition at Zentrum Architektur Zürich, Urban Räume, 4 Perspektiven. Postcolonial urbanism has become a major strand in critical urban research in recent years, producing new knowledge, addressing new problematics, and fundamentally changing the understanding of urban development. Scholars from different regional contexts have argued for the need to analyse the very different trajectories of urban spaces that do not conform to the hitherto dominant Western models of development.
New tools and methods of analysis have been developed, including comparative approaches for a better understanding of the diverse and complex contemporary urban world. Postcolonial approaches play an important role not only in the analysis of urbanisation in former colonies and other contexts beyond the west, but also in Western metropolises by showing how Europe itself was shaped by colonialism and imperialism. The goal of this public event is to discuss different positions and practices in postcolonial urban research with a wider audience.

The countryside is a term that deserves to be troubled. By using the tools of world-ecology, it is possible to understand non-urban land as profoundly implicated in multiple urban projects and spatial fixes. Examining Yanomami territory in what is currently northern Brazil and southern Venezuela demonstrates the complex politics of late capitalism that make and unmake this frontier as countryside.

Raj Patel, Research Professor in the Lyndon B Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin, will discuss the Yanomami territory and expound the concept of countryside, followed by a discussion with Christian Schmid and Debjani Bhattacharyya.