Composing in Lapland, where the landscape becomes a verb

Tue, 15 Oct 2024 09:00:49 +0000

In July 2024, Johanna Ruotsalainen went to Sápmi* for an art residency. With the support of Projekt Atol and the Rewilding Cultures Mobility Conversation grant, she travelled through Finland, Sweden and Norway, encountering the landscape and its musicality.

Johanna Ruotsalainen

Text and photos by Johanna Ruotsalainen

*Sápmi is the cultural region traditionally inhabited by the Sámi people, stretching across the national borders of Norway, Sweden, Finland and Russia. This area has also been referred to in English as Lapland.

Johanna Ruotsalainen (she/her) is a Finnish composer and visual artist, currently working as a dissertation researcher in University of Lapland. In recent years, Ruotsalainen has collaborated with some of the most acclaimed international contemporary performers, ensembles and festivals, such as Orchestre national du Capitole de Toulouse (FR), Ligeti Quartet (UK), Mise-en Ensemble (NY) and Gewandhaus Orchestra (GE), and she is the holder of the prestigious Hanns Eisler composition Scholar of 2020. Coming from the Arctic area, Ruotsalainen is working to increase the inclusion of marginal voices to the globalized, Western-centered and historically colonialized definition of high-arts: Culture is used to perpetuate differences by giving visibility and experience of belonging only to certain stories. Criteria for artistic quality are not traditionally verbalized in detail but are hidden behind peer and expert evaluations. The artistic quality presented and perceived as universal can obscure the mechanisms that maintain inequality, which produces exclusion based on for example place of origin.

In July 2024 I travelled from Northern Finland to Northern Sweden and Northern Norway with my family of four by driving our camper van, biking and walking. I wanted to write a series of musical compositions in meaningful and relevant locations, thus letting my surroundings leak into my composition work as perceptions, experiences, influences and interactions. Some of the sites were already familiar to me, others I discovered after wandering around aimlessly in Finnish, Swedish and Norwegian Sápmi.

Through travelling I pursue to experience place as a geographical, social, subjective and spatial entity. Bodily place-making is both method and content in my art practice. The idea of composing on site is based on a traditional Arctic concept of landscape, where place is understood as an interaction. Curator, writer and researcher Jan-Erik Lundström has described Arctic local’s unique relationship with land aptly: “Landscape is not a noun, an object or a thing, but always a verb, an activity, an event.” Art practices featuring walking and walk-related methods have been widely used in contemporary art mediums, for example in environmental art, performance art, sculpture, conceptual art, and land art; My immersion into Arctic landscape as artistic practice is about understanding the character of place through the movement of the body – about collecting and transforming spatial knowledge into artistic interpretation of a place. I describe this method of researching place as ‘spatial place-making’: The conception of the world is embedded in the lived body, as spatiality helps understanding landscape in relation to time, place, space and movement. Spatial place-making has an association also to composing, as music is an art medium happening in space and in time, as a movement of musical material.

The spatial interaction between composer and space when walking and composing in Sápmi in July produced a series of musical interactions, that are place-specific: The compositions as sovereign artworks, detached from this interaction, are for me irrelevant and without a context. The nature of the work changes significantly if compositions are brought into the performance conventions of institutional art, such as the concert setting. The project I implemented as part of the Rewilding Cultures -program is the first phase of a long-term research, where the goal is to develop a navigation map application, via which user can experience site-specific works when physically being on site. I work towards widening the definition of art to include different performance and exhibition practices alongside with those traditionally recognized as acceptable platforms for artistic expression and sharing. Next phase in project is planned to happen in Spring 2026, when I’m planning to travel again driving, walking and skiing to compose on site in Finnish, Swedish and Norwegian Sápmi in winter conditions; How does the perceptions and interactions with those same sites change, when my immersion in the landscape happens during the polar night?

Johanna Ruotsalainen is the recipient of a mobility grant awarded as part of the Rewilding Cultures cooperation project co-financed by the European Union’s Creative Europe program.

Feral Circuits: Rewilding electro-cultures at HomeMade 2024

Sat, 12 Oct 2024 11:33:39 +0000

Reflections on a journey to the Swiss Mechatronic Art Society’s Homemade summer camp from July 27 to August 4, 2024 by Miranda Moss, laureate of the Rewilding Cultures Mobility Conversation grant.

Miranda Moss

A rainbow arched across the mountains as Gandalf led us up the valley toward the wooden mountain house. Birds of prey soared above us, circling the steep Alpine fields as mist swirled around their wings, cowbells tinkling in the distance. Upon arriving at the house, we were greeted by fellow campers, already engrossed in their “laser geeking,” hunched over a high-powered laser beaming into the mist. They joked that they had formulated the rainbow especially for our arrival—a fitting welcome to a place where fairytale-like landscapes mingled with technical witchcraft and wizardry.

This magical yet very real setting was the 2024 Swiss Mechatronic Art Society’s (SGMK) annual summer camp, “HomeMade.” Set in a different mountain house each year, the camp takes advantage of Switzerland’s culture of mountain and hiking communities, and turns these spaces into weird and wonderful places for experimentation. Electronics enthusiasts, artists, families, musicians, engineers, nature-lovers  and curious minds of all kinds come together for a week to live, work, cook and create together, with the goal of exchanging ideas, sharing knowledge, and collaborating on projects. While most participants are based in Switzerland with long ties to the SGMK, many also travel from across Europe to join, and there are always several who travelled from further afield; this year, for example, there were friends joining from India, Lebanon, Cameroon, Brazil and Indonesia. Many of these are already on a longer residency in Switzerland, and so such a camp becomes quite an amazing intersection of practitioners on this residency-within-a-residency meetup. We joined this talented crew with the specific interest of continuing research and cultivating workshops and documentation, along with the community, on human scale, creative and sustainable energy systems with feminist values.

When I say “we,” I’m referring to myself, an artist, designer and educator working across engineering and biology and largely preoccupied with electronics and energy systems, and Urs Gaudenz, a creative microengineer, self-taught biologist, and founder of GaudiLabs. Urs describes GaudiLabs as a “third space for third culture,” a meeting point for art, science, and technology, based in Lucerne, Switzerland. Here, he runs an open source business, developing cutting edge scientific equipment and electronic musical instruments, allowing high-tech processes to be more accessible. It has been such an honour to have been able to collaborate with him over the last year, and so I made sure that after my long, but smooth, train ride from Sweden to Switzerland, to factor in some time where we could work together in GaudiLabs before the summercamp. Here, we totally indulged in blue sky ideas, including developing self-powered artificial finger nails with LEDs embedded, and researching the possibility of gleaning iron from menstrual blood to make compostable, mining-free circuit boards. We also reactivated our interest in nanomaterials science by buying a bag of clay, and experimenting with all its amazing properties, including for the fabrication of the above-mentioned circuit boards, passive cooling systems, pump-free watering systems for agriculture, membranes for microbial fuel cells, and of course, some gorgeous pottery companions for the home. We couldn’t wait to get to the summer camp to forage for wild clay and to continue these experiments.

This year, the camp took place in the Jura region of Switzerland, which has a fascinating history where, at the turn of the last century, saw the words ‘watchmaker’ and ‘anarchist’ becoming synonymous. Resisting industrialisation and the exploitation of workers, these watchmakers were formative in the development of worker’s rights across Europe, and the region still hosts the largest global anarchist meetup in the world. One person who came from this region (his uncle was one of these watchmakers), is legendary SGMK member Michel Pauli, a peace activist and technology enthusiast who has been keeping an open source digital school, solar training centre, and community maker space running in Limbe, Cameroon, alongside his wife, Chanceline Ngainku. Coming from a practice of using DIY communications technologies as revolutionary tools in various conflict regions in the world to defend human rights, in the past 15 years he has “settled down“ in the conflict zone in the english-speaking part of Cameroon where he set up the ‘Association Linux Friends’. I spent the majority of HomeMade working closely with Michel and Urs, to develop ideas and prototypes that could be used within the context of the school and community space in Cameroon, where they hope to expand their activities and grow greater confidence in working with electronics.

We started with fabricating a small scale gravity battery (chemical batteries are so 1800), which inspired Lina Lopez and Fadri Pestalozzi to synchronously work on a small scale vortex water turbine, which is similar in principle. We moved on to developing power conditioning and charge control circuitry for a small solar charger with Maximum Power Point Tracking, with a lot of extra special care for lithium cells (which we scavenged from the trash in old laptop batteries). This itself was a continuation of where we left off in the research project Regenerative Energy Communities, which had just come to an official end, after developing the project ‘windternet’.

Having a background in traditional arts, my electronics knowledge is entirely curiosity-fuelled and community supported, and community learning environments such as HomeMade have been instrumental in my knowledge-building process. Through the community, I have recently learnt how to reflow solder Surface Mount Devices (more on this later), and at the last HomeMade I attended, I was treated to a workshop on how to design circuits using open source software. The first circuit board I etched was also with the guidance of the SGMK. It was really special to see all of these skills coming together this summer.

Through learning all this techy geeky stuff, I hope to bring artistic and creative approaches to electronics and energy to more diverse, non-technical demographics. To me, it seems a convenient problematic of the medium, to seem difficult, inaccessible, dangerous, unintervenable. If we want to get anywhere with a Just energy transition, these practices need to be opened to more than engineers. We need more poets writing about copper, cobalt and full wave bridge rectifiers. We need grandmothers with knowledge of fermentation and crochet to be involved in the design of agrivoltaic systems. We need musicians to circuit bend hydroelectric dams and offshore wind farms. We need Hollywood, Bollywood and Nollywood films glorifying train drivers and making biogas bus operators sexy, instead of pilots and space capitalists. We need to drastically change the cultures underlying the technologies we use, design, and pollute with

We also need those who have historically been excluded from – and often bear the socio-ecological burden of – the development of electrical technologies, to rethink electrical technologies. Flashing back to working on the Cameroon project, we were thinking of not just how to keep up with trends in electronics manufacture, but also imagining how these processes can be made more sustainable and accessible. We don’t just want to keep up, we want to do it better than the toxic capitalist, colonial industry. And, of course, we only want to bring the freshest, most advanced technologies to Africa, while they are still bare and able to be built upon and hacked. #Africaisthefuture!

A significant challenge we face as DIY practitioners is the shrinking size of electronic components. Surface Mount Devices (SMDs) are becoming the norm, replacing the ‘through-hole’ components of the past few decades. While this miniaturization is great from a material sustainability perspective (let’s take a moment to celebrate how much less copper we use now with the ubiquity of transistors instead of the older, wire-wound transformers!), it’s difficult for independent tinkerers to work with these components without expensive tools and a factory full of robots. DIY frustration grows as online stores stop selling through-hole components. How can we, as DIY practitioners, repairists, actual custodians of our own electronic devices, as artists redefining what is possible with these technologies, continue striving to be active agents in this system already so intent on locking (or literally glueing) us out? And, to go even further, how can we do so in a way that is radically sustainable, even regenerative? I’m not going to pretend that the materials and processes we are using here are without negative externalities, but we push back where we can.

One of our major breakthroughs at the camp was to design a way of reflow soldering without an energy-hungry electric oven, but rather using the passive power of the sun. We used a fresnel lens to concentrate the sunlight on our freshly etched and assembled circuit boards, which to our surprise worked far better than we could have anticipated. Our aim was to make and assemble the solar charger we were working on entirely without electricity.

After the week of successful prototyping, Urs and I solidified our commitment to visit the school in Limbe, with the aim of a longer-term collaboration, and excitedly booked flights and visas to Cameroon.

Tech philosophising aside, the week wasn’t without its bumps. I fell ill midway through the camp and spent much of my time in bed, as well as being pretty much in a perpetual state of horror about the state of the world. But I was once again reminded of the importance of community and care, and that rest and recovery are, after all, critical parts of any energy work.

As this report comes out of receiving the Rewilding Cultures Mobility Conversation grant, for which I want to thank Schmiede Hallen for selecting me and allowing me to join HomeMade, I might end off with a few notes on the train ride back to Sweden, which was less smooth than the journey there. It ended up taking three days (instead of 23 hours) due to track works and disruptions, and spontaneous cancellation of the night train. However, this allowed for a stop over with friends in Mannheim, where we also visited a phage therapy startup and could continue thinking about phages as piezoelectric nanogenerators. The slower trip through the days also helped reveal more clearly how energy, transportation systems, agriculture are intertwined and embedded within landscapes and cultural attitudes in Europe. And all this fancy futuristic research we had seen over the summer made me think, can we not just first fix the trains y’all?

To get a stronger picture of the HomeMade summer camp, check out the video made by Krautfilms:

And, if this looks interesting to you, join the summercamp in the first week of August 2025! Reach out to homemade@sgmk-ssam.ch for more info, or follow the SGMK wiki for updates.

Check out Association Linux Friends Limbe! Donate to this amazing project tackling sustainability, education and the future of technology on the ground! Linux Friends.com A few Euros go a long way towards paying the incredible teachers, engineers and researchers who hold this project together.

Find out more about Rewilding Cultures, a program co-funded by the European Union.

“It takes the whole region to make the city”: territories, ecosystems and populations by Patrick Geddes

Fri, 04 Oct 2024 13:31:44 +0000

Ewen Chardronnet

This spring, Makery co-produced issue 6 of the occasional newspaper The Laboratory Planet. This issue imagines a peasant and neo-peasant future, invented by global peasants, organised in diverse territories, cultivating biotopes that are more heterogeneous, more democratic and therefore more habitable. The central section is devoted to the recent Soil Assembly initiative, and develops some of the experiences, reflections and surveys gathered within this emerging network. This text explores the thought and work of Patrick Geddes (1854-1932), a biologist, sociologist and urban planner who was a pioneer in many fields, thinking about the relationship between town and country at the turn of the 20th century, and revolutionizing modern urban planning.

As battles for water converge (the Soulèvements de la Terre ecological resistance network[1], indigenous uprisings against the appropriation of water for lithium extraction in the region of South American salars[2]), as rivers obtain the status of “legal person” (Whanganui River in New Zealand and Rio Atrato in Colombia in 2017, Magpie in Quebec in 2021), and as official bodies associated with watersheds have since been established (Loire Parliament[3], Diplomatic Watershed Council in Geneva[4]), calls to create new spaces for bioregional knowledge are increasing. In this respect, biologist and urbanist Patrick Geddes has attracted new interest as a precursor in educating about the relationships between regions, ecosystems and human societies. He tackles it from a historical perspective that differs from the more recent American school of bioregionalism, which is often criticized for its essentialist misanthropy[5].

Geddes is also cited in the Dictionnaire de la pensée écologique by Dominique Bourg and Alain Papaux, who describe him as one of the pioneers of regional planning and, along with Elisée Reclus and Piotr Kroptokine, someone who has consistently promoted reintroducing the countryside in the heart of cities (through outdoor and indoor gardens)[6]. Geddes’s most famous contribution to the city-countryside conflict is the simple diagram of the Valley Section, presented for the first time in 1905 at a meeting of the London Sociological Society[7]. The diagram unites city and countryside through the idea of a “regional valley”. The Valley Section is a longitudinal section that follows a river from its source in the mountains to where it flows into the sea. For Bourg & Paillot, it’s “an intellectual tool for regional studies, which should take into account the concept of river basins, from the viewpoint of the relationship between environmental and human history, as well as the relationship between the city and its surrounding region”[8]. In his first study, Geddes writes: “By descending from source to sea we follow the development of civilisation from its simple origins to its complex resultants; nor can any element of this be omitted. (…) In short, then, it takes the whole region to make the city. As the river carries down contributions from its whole course, so each complex community, as we descend, is modified by its predecessors. The converse is no doubt true also, but commonly in less degree.”[9] The version of the Valley Section published in 1909 combines physical conditions, represented in the drawing by plants, with so-called natural or basic occupations, represented by tools, and social organizations represented by the silhouettes of cities, villages and individual houses. Moreover, in reality the “regional valley” includes several valleys and an agricultural plain that extends from the base of the mountains to the coast. The Valley Section shows how the physical conditions of the environment influence plant life and determine human occupations and their societal organization. It helps us understand “how far nature can be shown to have determined man” and “how far the given type of man has reacted, or may yet react, upon his environment.”[10].

Thinking Machines

Geddes’s diagram was part of his series of “thinking machines”, a visual method of presenting and correlating facts and ideas in order to facilitate reflection and teaching. In conceiving and deploying the Valley Section, he took inspiration from great researchers in biogeography, such as Alexander von Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland. But he was also inspired, perhaps more specifically, by the methodology he learned from Thomas Huxley – under whom he studied biology in the late 1870s – and by the phytogeography research on the relationships between plant species done by his friend Charles Flahault – whom he met during his studies and a residency at the Biological Station in Roscoff, France.

Nicknamed Darwin’s bulldog, Huxley had little appreciation for Darwinism applied to human societies, as promoted by Herbert Spencer, who used it to justify the social exploitation and oppression of marginalized classes. He emphasized the importance of science to elucidate social issues, but he opposed using biology to justify inequitable social policies. He therefore taught lucidity to counter excessive simplifications in describing the relationships between organisms and their environment, between biology and physiography, and in revealing the complex factors leading to natural evolution. Two of his most famous manuals, Elementary Instruction in Practical Biology (1875) and Physiography: an Introduction to the Study of Nature (1877) were published during the time that Geddes was his student. In Physiography, he introduces the book by studying a particular region, the Thames watershed. And in the republications near the end of his life, he expanded the theme of watershed beyond the Thames to any river.

Since the years when Geddes and Flahault studied in Roscoff, Flahault had founded the Botanical Institute in Montpellier[11] and was studying phytosociology, or plant associations that were cooperative and mutually beneficial, in a way the premises for permaculture[12]. By crossing phytogeography and Flahault’s phytosociology using Huxley’s strict methodology, Geddes’s Valley Section also falls in line with the hydrographic basin model as developed by Elisée Reclus in his History of a Stream[13]. Reclus systematically used the hydrographic basin as a criterion for regional division, most notably in his Nouvelle Géographie Universelle. He was one of the first to recognize the intrinsic link between the geographical characteristics of a region and the lifestyles of its inhabitants.

Summer Meetings of Art and Science

Geddes had read extensively and developed a friendship with Elisée Reclus, 25 years his senior. He had hosted him twice in Edinburgh during the Summer Meetings of Art and Science, which he organized with his wife Anna from 1883 to 1899. This summer school, inspired by the Arts & Crafts movement and John Ruskin, combined educational programs in natural sciences, botanical or vegetable gardening, observing biodiversity, arts and crafts, biology, geography, economics and politics, based on Geddes’s own “thinking machines”: “Starting from the familiar idea of working from the concrete to the abstract, from the senses toward the intellect, it is attempted in each subject of study (1) to freshen the student’s mind by a wealth of impressions; (2) to introduce him to the advancing literature of the subject; (3) to supply him with the means of summarizing, arranging and more clearly thinking out these accumulations of observation and reading. Hence (1) the insistence on demonstrations, experiment and field excursions; (2) the introduction in several subjects of the seminar, which, with its guidance to the world of books and activity in using them, is so marked a strength of the German university; (3) the extended use of graphic methods.”[14] Geddes sought to mobilize “hand, heart and head”. He was also behind the slogans “learning by doing” and “think global, act local”. Many students, artists, as well as famous theorists and researchers from various countries participated in the Summer Meetings, from the biologist Ernst Haeckel to Piotr Kropotkine.

Reclus came to the Summer Meetings in 1893 and in 1895. It was in this context that he published “The Evolution of Cities” in The Contemporary Review[15]. The article advocated reconciling constantly expanding cities, which were “engulfing year by year fresh colonies of immigrants, and running out their suckers, like giant octopuses, into the surrounding country”, with the countrymen, which could come to cities to amuse and educate themselves. He concludes: “Thus this type of the ancient town, sharply outlined by walls and fosses, tends more and more to disappear. While the countryman becomes more and more a citizen in thought and mode of life, the citizen turns his face to the country and aspires to be a countryman. By virtue of its very growth, the modern town loses its isolated existence and tends to merge itself with other towns, and to recover the original relation that united the rising market-place with the country from which it sprang. Man must have the double advantage of access to the delights of the town, with its solidarity of thought and interest, its opportunities of study and the pursuit of art, and, with this, the liberty that lives in the liberty of nature and finds scope in the range of her ample horizon.”

For Geddes, every “town arises and renews itself from country; and this not only in blood and in temperament but in tendencies, aptitudes, activities, in qualities and defects; in short in character, individual and social.”[16] Thus, he defines the idea that both conurbation and the constantly expanding city emerge from the countryside and return to it as the highest expression of the country’s inherent possibilities. He gives a lot of importance to artisanal occupations, inspired in particular by the notion of mutual aid advanced by Kropotkine, who saw medieval Europe as the best example of human cooperative society, culminating in the medieval city structured around occupational guilds. Geddes had hosted Kropotkine in Edinburgh in 1886, just after he was released from three years of prison in Lyon. In Fields, Factories and Workshops published in London in 1898, Kropotkine imagined the future city-countryside relationship made up of decentralized units – either in “the factory in the middle of the fields” or in industrial villages. He projected that new, small power plants could make his decentralized, self-determined mode of production possible, even in existing large industrial cities.

Bioregional Learning Centers

In conclusion, we are reminded that in order to study the “city region”, it was necessary for Geddes to begin with an associated Regional Survey; hence, establishing stable and permanent learning centers was essential. Such was his intention in founding his Outlook Tower museum-school in Edinburgh, as well as his Collège des Ecossais in Montpellier: “Hence Education, if real, begins with a Regional Survey, as action with a regional usefulness. Hence such a regional type-museum and school of reference has to be not only geographic, but geotechnical. In the very difficulties of coping with the vast and perplexing division of labour, alike in science and in practical life, it finds its necessity and its justification as at least an attempted clearing-house of education, in which all specialists may again meet.”[17]

These same ideas can be found in the principle of Bioregional Learning Centers proposed in 1982 by Donella Meadows, principal author of The Limits to Growth for the Club de Rome in 1972, which were later developed: “Out of that combination came a vision of a number of centers where information and models about resources and the environment are housed. There would need to be many of these centers, all over the world, each one responsible for a discrete bioregion. They would contain people with excellent minds and tools, but they would not be walled off, as scientific centers so often are, either from the lives of ordinary people or from the realities of political processes. The people in these centers would be at home with farmers, miners, planners, and heads of state and they would be able both to listen to and talk to all of them. The job of these centers is basically to enhance that capacity… to solve problems in ways that are consistent with the culture and the environment. The centers collect, make sense of, and disseminate information about the resources of their bioregions, and about the welfare of the people and of the ecosystems. They are partly data repositories, partly publishing and broadcasting and teaching centers, partly experiment stations and extension agents. They know about the latest technologies, and the traditional ones, and about which ones work best under what conditions. They are able, insofar as the state of knowledge permits, to see things whole, to look at long-term consequences, and to tell the truth. They are also able to perceive and admit freely where the boundaries of the state of knowledge are and what is not known.”[18]

Notes

(1) https://lessoulevementsdelaterre.org
(2) Alfarcito Gathering, January 14-15, 2023, in San Francisco del Alfarcito, Jujuy, Argentina: https://aerocene.org/salinas-grandes-eng
(3) https://www.parlementdeloire.org
(4) David gé Bartoli, Sophie Gosselin, Marin Schaffner and Stefan Kristensen, “Pour un Conseil Diplomatique des Bassins Versants”, on Terrestres.org, April 12, 2024.
(5) Antoine Dubiau, “Faire l’histoire intellectuelle du biorégionalisme”, 28 février 2022, métropolitiques.eu. Antoine Dubiau is the author of Écofascismes published by Grevis (2023).
(6) Lewis Mumford referenced and further extended the research initiated by Patrick Geddes in La Cité à travers l’Histoire (1961).
(7) P.Geddes (1905), “Civics: as applied sociology”, Part I, Sociological papers, (ed.) V.V.Branford London: Macmillan, pp. 105-6.
(8) Dominique Bourg and Alain Papaux, under “Patrick Geddes (1854-1932)” in Dictionnaire de la pensée écologique, PUF, 2015, pp. 462-464.
(9) Ibid. note 7.
(10) Patrick Geddes, “The Influence of Geographical Conditions on Social Development”, Geographical Journal 12 (1898), p. 581. Cited in Volker M. Welter, Biopolis, MIT Press, 2002, p.62.
(11) Geddes settled in Montpellier in 1924, where he founded the Collège des Écossais and lived the rest of his life.
(12) The notion of “permanent agriculture” appears around the same time, in 1910, in Cyril G. Hopkins’s Soil Fertility and Permanent Agriculture.
(13) Elisée Reclus, Histoire d’une montagne. Histoire d’un ruisseau, Libertalia, 2023.
(14) Cited in Helen Meller, Patrick Geddes, Social Evolutionist and City Planner, Routledge, 1990, p.67.
(15) Elisée Reclus, “The Evolution of Cities”, The Contemporary Review, v. 67, January-June 1895, Isbister and Company Ltd.
(16) Patrick Geddes, City Surveys for Town Planning (Edinburgh and Chelsea: Geddes and Colleagues, 1911). Cited in Biopolis, p. 75
(17) Ibid. note 10.`
(18) Bioregional Essays: Bioregional Centres – Donella Meadows’ Vision for Deep Local Change. Statement to the Belaton Group, 1982.

Humuspunk: How Does Soil Prototype?

Fri, 20 Sep 2024 12:54:07 +0000

Regenerative Energy Communities

This spring, Makery co-produced issue 6 of the occasional newspaper The Laboratory Planet. This issue imagines a peasant and neo-peasant future, invented by global peasants, organised in diverse territories, cultivating biotopes that are more heterogeneous, more democratic and therefore more habitable. The central section is devoted to the recent Soil Assembly initiative, and develops some of the experiences, reflections and surveys gathered within this emerging network. In this text Regenerative Energy Communities imagine infrastructures otherwise and design practices that can flip paradigms, embrace grimy creativity and ferment revolt.

Notes from the Regenerative Energy Communities artistic research project in Växjö, Sweden

“Earth is not created by human hands—but human hands have forced themselves into the earth. And yet the earth does not allow itself to be owned” (Elin Wägner and Elisabeth Tamm 2021 [1940], authors’ own translation).

What can centering soil health entail for different fields and communities? What does it mean to ground (practically, critically, ecologically) creative engagements and experimentations, whatever these might be, within propositions aimed at not merely sustaining, but actively reviving and enhancing the health and resilience of local soil-supported ecosystems and their interdependent communities of materials, beings and relations? What commitments and closures would doing so entail? What are the pressures and possibilities of soil-centred thinking and practice?

We share initial responses to these questions as they have arisen during the work in our Regenerative Energy Communities research project[1], where we have prototyped small-scale forms of sustainable energy provision inspired by the practices of local experimental farming communities in Växjö, Sweden. A core aim of the project has been to explore what possibilities lie in practices that aim to be regenerative. Inspired by both recent and longer-standing traditions around regenerative agriculture and agroecology more generally, the project situates its research across the overlapping fields of energy and agriculture, with a view to reimagining current approaches to the climate crisis, renewables and the so-called green transition.

Engaging as artists, designers, growers and technology geeks with energy and agriculture issues has involved implicit challenges. Among them is the ongoing question of how to collectively build regenerative imaginaries that support ties across soils and damage narratives of the smooth continuity of energy. To date, this has involved developing and experimenting with a range of different regenerative prototypes together with others. Looking back on various moments from the workshops, exhibitions and experiments during the project’s three-year span, we found it helpful to reflect on the question: “How does soil prototype …?” For us, this prompt has a cascading quality in how it unearths challenging follow-up questions. Questions such as: How does soil prototype communities? How does soil prototype (regenerative) imaginaries? Critiques of technology? Creative and sustainable uses of technology? Stories of damage, (overwhelming) refusal and unknowing? In the question’s ability to loiter and remake itself, it has a quality similar to how the anthropologist Kristina M. Lyons, writing in 2020 on human-soil relations in rural farming communities in Columbia, describes the ability of decomposing layers of composting piles (hojarasca) to “force thought” via the many different and vital “propositional life-making processes” that gather around and emerge out of them.

Prototyping with regenerative commitments

The project began from wanting to support a local university-adjacent farm site with a sustainable energy infrastructure during a time of increasing fossil fuel use, critical mineral extraction and the largely limited imaginaries of the current “energy crisis”. The project is situated around a small-scale experimental communal farm. On this site, farming collectives such as the Feminist Farmers and The Dirt (themselves artists and designers), as well as local individuals and families, experiment with growing methods inspired by regenerative farming, permaculture and other forms of creative soil-based practices for sustainable and community-minded approaches through hands-on/feet-in contact with the earth.

Our proposal to work in ways that nurture soil-supported ecosystems draws on regenerative farming’s central commitment of actively improving soil health. This proposal gives not only a concrete and practical directive for ways of working, but also carries within it an implicit critique of approaches aimed merely at sustaining things as they are. This feels particularly necessary at a time of multiple destructive overlaps within practices of energy and agriculture, with their modes of extraction, capitalist expansion over land and ongoing depletion of ecological health. With such interlinked questions in mind, our project explores how current energy metabolisms and paradigms can be challenged by regenerative agriculture and longer-standing practices of agroecology, with their central aim of not only maintaining, but reviving and enhancing the health, resilience and adaptability of local ecosystems and their interdependent communities of beings and materials.

Throughout the project, we seriously considered what it might mean to take principles and commitments for soil and ecosystem health as a model for exploring what alternative forms of energy research and prototyping could emerge. We found regeneration to be a rich and also complicated concept to work with –ne that, in addition to its merits, is in need of critical attention for the ways in which it can be appropriated and/or shed of its community and political commitments[2].

An important moment early on in our collaboration with the Brände Udde farming site was receiving the leasing agreement from the VXO Farm Lab stewards of the plot. The text opened with “Welcome Future Urban Farmer!” and a description of how the farm was intended as a space for “Exploring, applying and sharing ideas for regeneration, sustainability and methods of resilient community development”. The agreement was both a contract and a vision statement. One particular item in the “A few more things to consider” section grabbed our attention: “Only Biodegradables: We aim to abolish all use of petrochemicals at our sites. That means: no use of plastics or synthetic materials (if reasonably possible). If it can’t become food to your plants it shouldn’t be at the site!”

Following the commitments of the farm community led us to rule out off-the-shelf energy systems such as solar and wind, given the damaging practices around mineral extraction in the making of panels, and the environmentally hazardous end-of-life issues for these technologies. Our soil-centered commitments deposited us in new and unexpected directions with our prototyping and infrastructuring work. They oriented us toward cultivating regenerative materials and biodiverse relations that we could prototype with. They informed ways of working that opened up to intermittency, seasonality and slow engineering. They grounded, for example, our prototyping work on a mycelium-based wind turbine that aims to sustain and support collective growing cultures across energy, agriculture and soil health. This prototype explores processes such as the mycoremediation of heavy metals and other soil contaminants from the farm’s adjacent highway. It centers our work on the stimulation of mycorrhizal networks for plant health via topsoil nutrient highways (further excluding the need for synthetic fertilizers), diverse communities of microorganisms and biotic life, and micro energy experimentations within techno-ecological limits. These commitments also led to us make charge controllers from scavenged electronic waste that can regenerate depleted lithium batteries, in an effort to interrupt local waste streams whose contamination is outsourced to Majority World soils.

Humuspunk

Modes of prototyping that center soil health might be characterized by what we have dubbed as humuspunk[3]. Humuspunk acknowledges its rootedness in the soil and stands in contrast to more clear and systematized (“smart”) ecomodernist futures, embracing instead fermented and grimy modes of creativity and making, as they can emerge in a plurality of forms and spaces. As artist and researcher Filipa César notes when writing in 2016 about the revolutionary agronomist Amílcar Cabral, “Soil tells narratives of both the wretchedness and the liberatory potency of its humus.” And regenerative prototypes ground any imagined futures in the living, breathing, drinking, eating, farting, composting matter we call soil (humus: Latin for earth, ground).

Staying close to regenerative propositions and their attachments has had an important effect on our work, especially in the context of energy communities, which have most commonly been focused on renewables, modes of individual and collective ownership and forms of measurement and efficiency. Starting instead from a position of soil and ecosystem health has brought to the fore different solidarities and sets of reciprocal, regenerative relations as openings for discussion and experimentation. Soil has prototyped ways for us to shift how we imagine energy (but also art and design) communities based on soil and ecosystem health rather than on modes of control and monitoring energy use. The principles and propositions of these soil-centered local farming communities help us to feel out and explore different paradigms around energy, breaking through standard or normative technoscience approaches to energy and renewables. They make space for other types of transition, doing so through what have ended up being generative acts of closure (e.g., no plastics, nothing the plants can’t eat) and commitments that keep other awakenings alive and guide these collective explorations in unexpected and regenerative directions.

In Regenerative Energy Communities we have found that principles and commitments for supporting soil communities can act as grounding[4] points for accountable collective action and decision-making. In their capacity to frame and address both urgent and longer-term issues of solidarity and transformational ecological practices, they can serve as practical guidelines, vision statements and/or open-ended invocations for other ways of being and making together. Soil prototypes practices to promote soil health, biodiversity and technological pluralities. Our prototypes and workshops interweave soil and ecosystem health with technology, art, design and citizen science – soiling each of these fields along the way, while carefully considering what kind of relations we want to sustain and support in such prototyping.

In the same way that the “more-than-human” answer and paradigm has stimulated many areas of practice over the last decade, we would encourage further explorations on how crucial issues such as farming, soil and community-centered ecosystem health could inspire regenerative modes of operating within a range of practices, including technology and sustainable energy provision, but also further afield. Crossing knowledge and experiences toward a collective focus on soil, carbon, biodiversity and living in the ruins of big tech fossil capitalism together. How do we regenerate soil contaminated by polluting fossil fuel capitalism? How do we think through regeneration for rich, full flourishing lives? What are the governance and community foundations needed for these spaces? To regenerate with micro ecosystems of deep-time bacteria, nematode crushes and collective tendings to soil and its generative modes of prototyping?

Notes

(1)  https://regenerative-energy-communities.org
(2)  For instance, see the recent IPES-Food report “Smoke & Mirrors” for an overview of some such risks (http://www.ipes-food.org/pages/smokeandmirrors), and also Tittonell et al.’s 2022 piece “Regenerative agriculture—agroecology without politics?”
(3)  https://regenerative-energy-communities.org/lingo/humuspunk
(4)  See the the jointly written (with Cassandra Troyan and Fred Carter) call for the Groundings conference for more on how we understand acts of collective grounding: https://regenerative-energy-communities.org/groundings

References

Altieri, M. (ed.). 2019. Agroecology: The Science of Sustainable Agriculture. 2nd edn, Rugby, UK: Practical Action Publishing.
Common Ecologies. 2023. “Transforming Agriculture & Beyond: Infrastructures, tools and tactics for agroecological struggles and their allies”. Common Ecologies. http://commonecologies.net/texts/transforming-agriculture-book/
García-Antón, Katya, Harald Gaski and Gunvor Guttorm. 2020. Let the River Flow: an indigenous uprising and its legacy in art, Ecology and Politics. Valiz. 
Isager Ahl, Sofie. 2023. Regeneration: Gesindigt Helende Praksisser i en Ny Jordbrugsbevægelse. Laboratoriet for Æstetik og Økologi.
IPES-Food. 2022. “Smoke & Mirrors: Examining competing framings of food system sustainability: agroecology, regenerative agriculture, and nature-based solutions”. http://www.ipes-food.org/pages/smokeandmirrors
Justice, Daniel Heath, and Jean M. O’Brien. 2022. Allotment Stories: Indigenous Land Relations Under Settler Siege. University of Minnesota Press.
Lyons, Kristina M. 2020. Vital Decomposition: Soil Practitioners + Life Politics. Duke University Press.
Montenegro de Wit, Maywa. 2021. “What grows from a pandemic? Toward an abolitionist agroecology”. The Journal of Peasant Studies 48(1): 99-136.
Penniman, Leah. 2018. Farming While Black: Soul Fire Farm’s Practical Guide to Liberation on the Land. Chelsea Green Publishing.
Pritchard, Helen, Eric Snodgrass, Miranda Moss and Daniel Gustafsson. 2023. “Tending to 2030m3: How to regenerate regeneration? How to unasphalt asphalt?” In: Jane Prophet and Helen Pritchard (eds.), Plants by Numbers: Art, Computation, and Queer Feminist Technoscience. Bloomsbury Publishing.
Rodney, Walter. 2019 [1969]. The Groundings with My Brothers. Verso.
Sánchez Contreras, Josefa et al.. 2023. “Energy Colonialism: A Category to Analyse the Corporate Energy Transition in the Global South and North”. Land 12(6).
Sands et al.. 2023. “Moving towards an anti-colonial definition for regenerative agriculture”. Agriculture and Human Values 40:1697–1716.
Smil, Vaclav. 2017. Energy and Civilization: a History. The MIT Press.
et al.. 2023. “Pluralizing energy justice: Incorporating feminist, anti-racist, Indigenous, and postcolonial perspectives”. Energy Research & Social Science 97.
Stock, Ryan and Trevor Birkenholtz. 2021. “The Sun and the Scythe: Energy Dispossessions and the Agrarian Question of Labor in Solar Parks”. The Journal of Peasant Studies 48(5): 984–1007.
Tittonell, Pablo et al.. 2022. “Regenerative agriculture—agroecology without politics?”. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems 6.
Wittman, Hannah. 2009. “Reworking the metabolic rift: La Vía Campesina, agrarian citizenship, and food sovereignty”. Journal of Peasant Studies 36: 805–826.
Wägner, Elin and Elisabeth Tamm. 2021 [1940]. Peace with the Earth. Trans. Katarina Trodden. Archive Books.

Planetary Peasants, Werkleitz festival celebrates the 500th anniversary of the German Peasants’ War

Thu, 12 Sep 2024 15:57:34 +0000

This spring, Makery co-produced issue 6 of the occasional newspaper The Laboratory Planet. This issue imagines a peasant and neo-peasant future, invented by global peasants, organised in diverse territories, cultivating biotopes that are more heterogeneous, more democratic and therefore more habitable. The central section is devoted to the recent Soil Assembly initiative, and develops some of the experiences, reflections and surveys gathered within this emerging network. This text is an overworked and extended version of the initial concept for the Werkleitz festival 2025 exhibition Planetary Peasants by Daniel Herrmann, artistic director of Werkleitz, and Alexander Klose at Kunstmuseum Moritzburg, Halle.

Alexander Klose

Spring 2025 marks the 500th anniversary of the German Peasants’ War. According to Marxist historiography it was the first revolution on German soil, the “climax of the early bourgeois revolution, [and] one of the greatest class battles in the age of feudalism”[1]. Consequently, this event played an important role in the political memory of the German Democratic Republic (GDR). The East German 5 Mark banknote showed a posthumous portrait of Thomas Müntzer (1489-1525)[2], the reformist preacher and militant antipode to Martin Luther, whose sermons, writings and deeds are closely identified with the Peasants’ War. Other types of revolutions have reshaped the world since, though, namely socio-technological ones. In industrialized regions, both the peasantry and their agricultural labours have dramatically declined in importance, both in terms of the numbers of people involved and in terms of their political representation. Scholars from Marx/Engels onward have predicted the death of peasantry. The categorical distinction between city and countryside, each sphere traditionally with its own rights and ways of being, has been eaten up by the dynamics of planetary urbanization. Yet, the primary materials for food are still produced on agricultural sites, and the planet’s current condition of multiple ecological crises was manufactured in urban-industrial agglomerations and infrastructures, as well as on farms and fields, through the accumulation of the doings of modern machines and human beings, animals and plants[3]. At the same time, peasants around the globe, though operating under very different conditions, are currently struggling for their rights — to earn a living, to continue traditions, to stay on their lands. The following text tries to string together some of those diverse and partly contradictory ties that define this complex situation.

In the self-mythologization of the early GDR, the “land reform” of 1945 — i.e., the expropriation of large landowners and (alleged) collaborators of the Nazi-regime and the redistribution of their land among small farmers — and  the subsequent collectivization of land and work in agricultural production cooperatives (LPG: Landwirtschaftliche Produktionsgenossenschaft) was presented as the completion of the Peasant’s War: “Via defeats and victories in the class struggle, the peasants’ path through the centuries has led to socialism. The oppressed class of feudal farmers became the socialist class of cooperative farmers under the leadership and alongside the working class in the GDR.”[4] After the end of the GDR in 1990, many of the LPG’s vast agricultural lands were bought by multinational agribusinesses and, more recently, bypassing existing laws that are intended to prevent this, by real estate speculators. Seen from today, the period of “actually existing socialism” in agriculture turned out to be a rationalisation measure that prepared the land for total neoliberal plundering by real existing capitalism[5]. This was a dialectical dynamics somewhat comparable to the historical role of the German Peasants’ War as a trailblazer for early capitalism and a punitive counter-reformation: in its aftermath, the peasants, freed from serfdom, were now in possession of themselves and their labour power, but not much more (except for a tighter grip on their wives and children as a result of extended property rights); at the same time, they were deprived of their traditional rights to common property as well as traditional entitlements to community services provided by the landlords[6].

Technical and scientific revolutions

Parallel to political and socio-economical turns, a potentially even more profound revolutionary dynamic has transformed things around the globe, on all political sides: the development of modern agronomy and the mechanization, industrialization and “chemicalization”[7] of agriculture. A key figure was the doctor and agriculture researcher Albrecht Daniel Thaer (1752 – 1828), who is considered the originator of the science of agronomy. He began to work for the Prussian state in 1804, founding agricultural research and teaching facilities north and east of Berlin. In 1809 he published the first of four volumes of his seminal Principles of Rational Agriculture (Grundsätze der rationellen Landwirtschaft). Another key figure was the economist, agronomist and farmer Johann Heinrich von Thünen (1783 – 1850), one of Thaer’s first pupils, who pioneered principles of business administration in agriculture. Later, the centre of agronomical research in Germany moved south, to the fertile grounds of the Prussian province of Saxony (which is also where Thomas Müntzer came from, and where the Werkleitz festival 2025 Planetary Peasants is focused). Here, Julius Kühn (1825-1910) worked as the founding professor at the institute for agronomy at Martin Luther University Halle. His experiments on the monocultural cultivation of crops, which he called “eternal rye”, and which started in 1862, continues to this day.

In the mid 19th century, the region between Magdeburg to the North, the Harz mountains to the West, Merseburg to the South, and the Saale river to the East had become one of the world’s leading regions for sugar production refined from sugar beets. The world market price for sugar was determined at sugar boards in London and Magdeburg — an encounter of colonial and continental productive economies. What used to be one of the most important colonial commodities (and a luxurious one for most) — sugar made from cane grown on slave-operated plantations in tropical regions — was turned into a kind of staple food. Production exceeded demand, so new demands had to be created to normalise an ever-increasing sugar consumption. For some time, sugar was the most important export of the newly found German Empire. Prussian Saxony went through a phase of agriculture-led industrialization. The implementation of the infrastructure needed to produce sugar, namely mills and refineries and the machines used in them, attracted a saccharine geography of factories for the production of specialized agricultural machines and for food production (bread, cakes, chocolate). This economic success in competing with the colonial economies and breaking free from the dependency on their main goods, such as  sugar, rubber or saltpetre, developed into an important trope in the self-historization of the “belated nation” of Germany. Without significant access to the colonial production regions, it had to apply principles of an “inner colonization”: intensified agriculture, industrialized production and innovation. 

Popular publicists, including the non-fiction author and early Nazi propagandist Karl Aloys Schenzinger, repeated this trope time and again, especially with regard to the historical development and significance of the chemical industry[8]. The rendering of an “agricultural biological chemistry” and the development of the first artificial phosphate fertilizer by the chemist Justus von Liebig (1803-1873) in the 1840s, who taught and lived in Gießen in the state of Hesse-Darmstadt and later in Munich, were a pillar of the emerging chemical industries of Germany and other nations. When the new “Badische Anilin und Soda Fabrik” (BASF) Ammonia Synthesis Factory Merseburg opened in 1916, as the first in a network of chemical production plants later known as the “chemical triangle” formed by Bitterfeld/Wolfen, Leuna and Buna, its production was directed towards ammunition for the ongoing war (replacing the saltpetre from Chile that was no longer accessible because of the British Naval Blockade) and towards artificial fertilizers for an intensified agriculture.

From Gerechtigkeyt to Climate Justice

The invention and large-scale deployment of artificial fertilizers, together with the mechanization and industrialization of work, instigated by far the most profound changes in agriculture since its invention. Following tractor tracks and artificial fertilizer traces of phosphor, potash and nitrogen leads us to regions around the globe and across political borders. The same machines were put to work, the same substances used, even in the strictly politically divided countries on both sides of the “iron curtain”. The tracks and traces of agriculture’s industrialization lead to fields of maximized productivity, as well as to exhausted and eroded soils and to areas of excessive accumulation akin to the dead zones that result from the over-nitrification of runoff water close to ocean estuaries around the globe. Today’s planetary condition is to a significant degree defined by such—human-made, intended or unintended—migration of organic and inorganic substances linked to agricultural activities: plants and animals, but also, and mainly, chemical compounds such as CO2 or ammonium-nitrates and their accumulation in the Earth’s ecosystems.

Today, agricultural machines in the former LPG plantations of Müntzer’s homeland are tracked and controlled by GPS, and the yield of local fields is sold at international stock exchanges such as the Chicago Board of Trade. Peasantry, like the working class, seems to have dissolved into milieus. So, the question might be, what do our present and future have in common with the causes of the Peasants’ War? Seen from a planetary perspective, it quickly becomes clear that the adversities of peasant labour have only shifted — whether to the exploitation of seasonal workers, very often migrant workers without passports and legal rights, who are still made necessary in many agricultural processes, despite all mechanizations and automatizations, or to regions of the world where crop failures and extreme weather events continue to be existentially threatening. Besides, the end of serfdom in European countries was paralleled by the enslavement and forced migration of millions of people to work on plantations in the American and Asian colonies. Their insurgencies and anti-colonial struggles carry many of the aspects of the European peasants’ wars, both in their contents and in their outcomes. The “Plantationocene” holds up under post-colonial conditions[9]. The question of justice today must be considered not only on the level of classes or strata of one society, but also between the populations of rich and poor countries. The concept of climate justice, as it is discussed and demanded today, emphasizes how much people within and between societies benefit from industrialization, and the price they pay for it: pollution, devastation, or the loss of habitats due to climate change.

Feeding the world-to-come in a fairer way still requires revolutionary action, or so it seems. Given the expansion of capitalist conditions in the development of the world system in the last 500 years, but especially in the last decades, many ecological thinkers and activists around the globe interpret the rule of ownership and capital as being at the core of all environmental problems. The question of agricultural land for a steadily growing world population is still decisive for territorial conflicts and geopolitics, and will increasingly become so in the climate-changed future. The expansion of plantations reduces rainforests and displaces human communities. On the other hand, the growth of settlements, industries and infrastructures is destroying agricultural land worldwide. These circumstances, as well as the expansion of markets, the ongoing industrialization of agriculture, and the threat to rural areas due to changing climate conditions, have resulted in a massive increase of migratory movements of people leaving soils that don’t feed them anymore. In order to end the destructive dynamic of this age of “capitalist realism” and open up perspectives for sustainable, post-capitalist, post-profit maximizing future societies, as advocated by the Japanese neo-marxist Kohei Saito[10], we must once again turn to the agrarian sphere and its modes of (re)production as a main source of inspiration, energy, and revolutionary dynamics.

Notes

(1)  Manfred Bachmann, „Zum Geleit“, in: Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden (ed.), Der Bauer und seine Befreiung. Ausstellung aus Anlaß des 450. Jahrestages des deutschen Bauernkrieges und des 30. Jahrestages der Bodenreform [The peasant and his liberation. Exhibition on the occasion of the 450th anniversary of the German Peasants’ War and the 30th anniversary of the land reform], Dresden 1975, p.7; translation by authors.
(2) The idea was to show an ascending line of important individuals in a revolutionary history, starting with Müntzer on the 5 Mark note and culminating in Lenin on the 500 Mark bill.
(3) For an analysis of agriculture as the initial force that led into today’s anthropocenic condition, see: David R. Montgomery, Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, Oakland 2012.
(4) From the concept of the Committee of the Council of Ministers of the GDR for the 1975 exhibition on the German Peasants’ War and land reform in Dresden, quoted after Bachmann, ibid.; translation by author.
(5) see Ramona Bunkus and Insa Theesfeld, “Land Grabbing in Europe? Socio-Cultural Externalities of Large-Scale Land Acquisitions in East Germany”, in: Land 2018, 7, 98.
(6) Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch. Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation, Brooklyn/New York 2004; Eva von Redecker, Revolution für das Leben. Philosophie der neuen Protestformen, Frankfurt/Main 2023.
(7) “Chemisierung” is the German neologism used to describe the application of chemically produced substances to enhance productivity and reliability in agricultural production.
(8) His books Anilin (1936) and Bei IG Farben (1951), about the advent of the German chemical industry, sold a million copies during the NS-time and in post-war West Germany.
(9) see Maan Barua, “Plantationocene: A Vegetal Geography”, in: Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 0(0) 2022, pp. 1–17.
(10) See Kohei Saito, Marx in the Anthropocene. Towards the Idea of Degrowth Communism, Cambridge, New York, Melbourne 2022.

For more information on the exhibition see: https://werkleitz.de/en/planetarische-bauern-ausstellung. It is part of the state exhibition of Saxony-Anhalt/Germany in 2025, titled Gerechtigkeyt – Thomas Müntzer & 500 Jahre Bauernkrieg (Justice – Thomas Müntzer & 500 years of Peasants’ War)

Eating the sun: the Disnovation collective explores the Solar Share at the Ars Electronica festival in Austria

Tue, 03 Sep 2024 14:54:52 +0000

The collective Disnovation.org is presenting its new project The Solar Share from 4 to 8 September at the Ars Electronica festival in Linz, Austria. It will be on show in the S+T+ARTS section of the festival. We are republishing here the text written by the collective for the journal The Laboratory Planet #6, released last June as part of the More-Than-Planet programme and that will be distributed at the Ars Electronica festival at the Platform Europe section.

Disnovation.org

Through an economic lens, this text explores how solar energy circulates through the biosphere as a primary life-supporting value [1]. Photosynthetic organisms convert solar energy into organic matter, generating the carbon compounds that form the basis of life on Earth. Energy from the sun is the basis of the entire food chain and fuels human activities, such as gathering, hunting, fishing, agriculture, cooking, heating, and building [2]. This investigation examines the terrestrial metabolization of solar energy as a means to reconsider the concept of sustainability. It explores how heterodox economic representations could inform governance to achieve lighter ecological footprints and sustainable human coexistence within ecosystems.

In Search of Sustainability

What does sustainability mean? We propose to examine sustainability as a social goal for humans to coexist on Earth over a long time[3]. Since the sustainability of the material affordances of human needs is a core topic in economics, we will explore how a broader comprehension of economics, value, and accounting can effectively address such ecological issues. We propose to embrace the prospects of human ‘sustainability’ from the following perspective: Earth’s geological materiality is finite, mining is irreversible, and geological matter is poorly recyclable[4]. Consequently, only the network of matter-energy fueled directly and indirectly by the Sun can be understood as truly sustainable.

What Isn’t Counted Doesn’t Count

Accounting as a practice involves complexity reduction, generating biases in the process. It is therefore critical to question what is being measured or quantified. Quantification is the basis of all modern economic rationality, but quantification is incomplete by definition. Understanding that all elements of an environment are in symbiosis and cannot exist independently[5], it can neither be sufficient to examine any isolated phenomena nor can sufficient relations be enumerated. Any accounting model must be seen more as an instrument of observation, especially control, than as one revealing the truth of a circumstance. Further, quantification is essential to digital cybernetic operations that are designed to conform living beings to desired models of productivity and activity[6]. In this sense, accounting can only be understood as part of a regime of governance. What is measured, and how it is measured, has to do with what results are desired.

Distinguishing Value From Money

“The cost of a thing is the amount of life which is required to be exchanged for it” (H. D. Thoreau). While monetary accounting systems are commonly used to assess sustainability, they are inadequate to the task of balancing human needs within planetary boundaries. Quantifying the value of goods or environmental assets in monetary terms — of a viable ecosystem, for example — is doomed to produce insufficient and varying assumptions due to methodological, regional, and ideological factors. In contrast to monetary accounting, alternatives which employ plant-based units with inherent metabolic value can provide valuable insights into our sustainability challenges. Historical examples such as cocoa beans, hemp, beer, or tea bricks are tangible accretions of biospheric photosynthesis, representing products of ecosystem energy flows, stocks, and human labor. Their “intrinsic value” is tied to the photosynthetic biomass they contain, the labor invested in their cultivation and preservation, and the underlying biodiversity that supports the ecosystems of which they are a part. By emphasizing the interconnectedness of goods and services with their origins in planetary biophysical processes, plant-based units can help model a sustainable global economy.

Energy as a Universal Currency[7]

The study of energy flows as a fundamental unit for comprehending economic interactions finds its origins in recognizing the Sun’s role as the primary source of energy on Earth. This idea is rooted in various cultural, scientific, and philosophical perspectives as noted by V. Vernadsky[8]: “The biosphere is as much, or even more, the creation of the Sun as it is a manifestation of Earth-processes. Ancient religious traditions that regarded terrestrial creatures, especially human beings, as ‘children of the Sun’ were much nearer the truth than those which looked upon them as a mere ephemeral creation”. Similar visions explored how solar energy flows and stocks fuel terrestrial systems, and how trophic chains drive vital processes to form the basis of our economic and ecological existence. “Earth is a chemical battery where, over evolutionary time, billions of tons of living biomass were stored in forests, ecosystems, and fossil fuels. In just the last few hundred years, humans extracted exploitable energy from these living and fossilized biomass fuels to build the modern economy”[9]. By recognizing the matter-energy of solar origin that is circulated within the Earth system, via photosynthesis on land and in the ocean, we can develop new economic instruments that help better account for, model, and address anthropic needs within the affordances of the planet.

Accounting for Historical Solar Energy

To unfold our investigation into solar value, we propose to look at Emergy (with an M), an accounting method proposed by American ecologist H. T. Odum in the 1970s to analyze energy flows in ecosystems. In the Emergy model, the Earth system, biosphere, and all human activity on the planet from the most rudimentary to the most industrialized are examined as transformations of solar energy flows. Emergy provides a unit: “solar-equivalent joules”, which allows us to model an energetic economy of the Earth related to solar income (for instance, 1 joule of plant matter is the product of 40,000 solar-equivalent joules). This systemic approach can be applied to concrete examples, such as the food chain or the economic flow of a country. It models the interconnectedness of ecological and economic cycles, much like a circuit diagram. Emergy promises detailed and comprehensive modeling of goods and services as tree structures, where all anterior solar energy consumed is factored in. Though it helps to radically rethink fundamental questions in economics, such as how to adequately value a commodity[10]. While the Emergy method is not intended for exact quantitative analysis, it provides a unique insight into the magnitudes of solar energy embedded in vital processes across the economy.

Beware of Zombie Sustainability!

We need to recognize the limits of renewable energy, as the mathematician-economist Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen has pointed out: “Future generations will still be able to access their inalienable share of solar energy. However accessible material low entropy is by far the most critical element from the bioeconomic viewpoint, […] a piece of coal burned by our forefathers is gone forever, just as is part of the silver or iron mined by them”[11]. Today, any circulation of energy in industrialized human society requires the use of non-renewable minerals. Even renewable energy infrastructures rely intensively on non-renewable mineral resources, raising critical justice concerns about the intergenerational allocation of finite resources. For the physicist José Haloy, technologies characterized by non-renewables, planned obsolescence, and fossil fuel use are “zombie technologies” that, as waste, continue to affect the biosphere after they are “dead,” destined to haunt humanity for ages.

Planetary Photosynthesis as an Indicator of Renewable Flows

Since 2000, ground data and satellite imagery of photosynthetic processes monitored on a planetary scale are increasingly confirming earlier theories of solar value flows. Recent instruments developed for planetary observation[12] provide data that inform our understanding of the links between solar energy, autotrophic biomass — microalgae, algae, plants — and global human needs. This data provides estimates of the quantity of stored energy generated by photosynthesis, which is critical for sustaining human activity on the planet. NASA’s annual Net Primary Production (NPP) figures illustrate and estimate the primary work of the Earth’s ecosystem, which continually captures solar energy via photosynthesis and physically stores it in living matter, sustaining flows in the rest of the living organisms. NPPs can now be used to test and challenge the hypotheses of the last century linking sustainability and biomass energy. The annual NPP is estimated to be 104.9 petagrams of carbon per year[13]. We propose to provisionally consider this as “solar income”, a reference for the primary matter-energy budget renewed via photosynthesis each year in the Earth system. This hypothesis enables us to construct realistic “strong sustainability” scenarios that recognize the maximum biomass energy available to all living beings.

The Limits of Biomass Exploitation

NPP, a measure of renewed autotrophic biomass mentioned above, is estimated based on satellite observations of fluorescence produced during photosynthesis. But how do human activities relate to this process? A significant proportion of photosynthesis production (NPP) is consumed by humankind, either directly for food, fiber, livestock, and wood, or indirectly through land use. The Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production is an indicator (HANPP) that represents vectors of appropriation, extraction (setting nature to work[14]), and transfers of wealth (exploitation) from the biosphere and its biodiversity to human societies; from rural areas to cities; from peripheral regions to megalopolises; from the Global South to the Global North; from oceans to land. HANPP is currently estimated at 25% to 40% of global photosynthetic production (NPP)[15]. As an indicator of the decline in biodiversity, a critical HANPP threshold of well below 50% of NPP has been identified as likely to trigger irreversible systemic disruption[16]. How can we use these complementary indicators at both global and ultra-local levels to guide sustainable human projects on this planet? Can these indicators help reorient economic policy away from the narrow imperatives of GDP growth, and “green” profiteering?

The Solar Share, a Portion of the Biosphere’s Work

Autotrophs give life to the Earth. Photosynthetic organisms can effectively slow down the speed of light by converting solar energy into persistent carbohydrates. This phenomenon provides the basis for a tangible method of reconsidering human activities as embedded in Earth’s ecosystem processes. Starting from an accounting of photosynthetic biomass, human-available metabolized energy income from the sun, it becomes possible to elaborate a basic energy unit, a “solar share” on which comprehensive models of accounting for human material needs within the affordances of the planet can be built. Such a unit can meaningfully and reliably inform sustainable governance of human-ecosystem interactions, emphasizing the pivotal role of photosynthetic organisms and the ecosystems they regenerate. The Solar Share can bridge between our cosmic origins and our common cause of long-term planetary viability.

This investigation prefigures The Solar Share, an artistic research by disnovation.org, a research collective whose core members include Maria Roszkowska (Pl/Fr), Nicolas Maigret (Fr), Baruch Gottlieb (Ca/De) and Jérôme Saint-Clair (Fr).

The Solar Share (live) and Disnovation.org websites.

Find The Laboratory Planet #6 at the Platform Europe of the festival or download it on the newspaper website.

The Solar Share was commissioned by ART2M / Makery with the support of the More-Than-Planet cooperation program co-funded by the European Union. It was supported by the S+T+ARTS program of the European Union – co-commissioned by HacTe Barcelona. It was also co-produced by IFT Paris and prototyped at Xcenter Nova Gorica in May 2024.

The Solar Share is presented at Ars Electronica festival 2024 in the S+T+ARTS program exhibition.

Notes

1. Value, in this sense, refers to an amount of solar energy metabolized through photosynthesis.
2. Excerpt from the book Énergies Légères, “énergies du vivant”, Éditions du Pavillon de l’Arsenal, November 2023
3. See the basic definition provided by Wikipedia, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sustainability accessed April 2024
4. See José Halloy’s definitions of living machines and zombie technologies, in Sustainability of Living Machines, January 2018, Authors: José Halloy.
5. See Margulis, Lynn. 1998. Symbiotic Planet : A New Look at Evolution. Basic Books
6. For example, see Mejias, U. A. & Couldry, N. (2019). “Datafication”. Internet Policy Review, 8(4).
7. “Energy is the only universal currency: one of its many forms must be transformed to another in order for stars to shine, planets to rotate, plants to grow, and civilizations to evolve.” — Vaclav Smil
8. Vladimir Vernadsky has remarkably demonstrated the energetic relations between the cosmos, photosynthetic organisms, and human needs in his essay “Human Autotrophy”, 1925. The quote above is from his book The Biosphere, New York: Copernicus, p44, first published in Russian in 1926.
9. See the concept of the Earth-Space Battery in the article “Human domination of the biosphere: Rapid discharge of the earth-space battery foretells the future of humankind” by John R. Schramski et al. (2015)
10. Karl Marx explores the issues of valuation of a commodity in Part I of Capital, Critique of Political Economy. 1859
11. Non-renewables, and the fair allocation of resources are core topics of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen’s work. See: “Energy and Economic Myths”, Southern Economic Journal, Vol. 41, No. 3 (Jan., 1975), p370.
12. See NASA Earth Observing System, Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS picture), Terra and Aqua satellites.
13. Global Net Primary Production per year is an estimate of new autotroph biomass. Field, CB et al. “Primary production of the biosphere” Science vol. 281,5374 (1998): 237-40.
14. The concept that “Capital sets all of nature to work” is exposed in the lecture by Paul Guillibert “Vivants de tous les pays” at L’École des Impatiences, 2023
15. Human appropriation of planetary photosynthesis (NPP) is studied notably by Vaclav Smil in this paper. Smil, V. (2011), Harvesting the Biosphere: The Human Impact. Population and Development Review, 37: 613-636.
16. ibid.

Sharing open-source knowledge: from Do-It-Yourself electronics to artist-run associations

Sun, 01 Sep 2024 14:10:48 +0000

Laureate of the Rewilding Cultures Mobility Conversation grant, belarusian artist Maryia Kamarova attended a residency in several locations in Central France together with artist Pierre Pierre Pierre (aka PPP) dedicated to the development of portable multichannel setup assembled with electret microphones, diy electronics and found objects. Starting in the village of Saint-Arnoult-en-Yvelines, the artists then went to Orléans, to stay in La Labomedia and present their work as part of the Re/Dé}Connecte festival. Maryia recounts her summer on the move for Makery.

Maryia Kamarova

Maryia Kamarova is an interdisciplinary artist whose practice is situated on the borders of performing arts, scenography, sound and installation art. She creates spatial settings that foster a sense of curiosity and attention toward everydayness. By staging and technically repurposing mundane objects, the artist emphasizes creative potential of the non-human world. Approaching sound as a performative medium, she continuously develops DIY electro-acoustic objects and lets them temporarily inhabit the sites of performances and installations. Her work has been presented internationally in Europe, Belarus, Ukraine and Mexico.

Preamplifiers, goats and their mutual effects

I remember observing my hands carefully turning it around from one side to another. I was trying to find a bend or at least a hint that this white piece of hard plastic had a different layer, hidden at first glance; so, that I could take it apart and reveal its function, as it sometimes happens with strange useful objects. But it was in vain — my hands were holding a breadboard without holes. “What’s the point,” I thought, “…if it has no holes?”

This remained a mystery. Hours spent above the table with circuit diagrams clearly found their way into my dreams during the quiet nights spent on a countryside. Spoiler: the simplicity of objects such as breadboard does not guarantee their eternal reliability. So, when it comes to prototyping, even with minimal set of employed tools and passion for failures, it is best to ensure their competence.

The first part of our residency took place in the small village of Saint-Arnoult-en-Yvelines, at the private home of Pierre’s friends – musician couple Rachel Langlais and Nicolas Cueille. When searching for a context to meet and continue our collaboration after the first residency in December 2024, Pierre reached out to his network in France (1). He received a positive response from Rachel and Nicolas who offered their place, as well as from La Labomedia, an association based in Orléans, where we headed after a week in the village. We scheduled an appointment for noon on the 12th of June at Paris Bercy Seine, from where we continued towards Vendôme, the nearest train station to our destination.

Rachel and Nicolas’s house had two sound studios, a cozy living room with a vinyl record collection and a library filled with comic books. The musicians were away when we arrived, but they allowed us to use their rooms, garden and car, making it easy to move around the area and do grocery shopping. However, when they returned at the end of our stay, I felt as I already knew them through their music and personal objects guarding their household during the abscence of their owners. There were also other guards – two black goats, who roamed the hillside and occasionally joined us during lunch breaks.

Prior to the residency, we gathered several preamplifier schematics suitable for use with electret microphone capsules and purchased all the necessary materials. I experimented with different electret capsules, starting with some cheap ones I had in my electronics box and moving on to PRIMO EM282 ordered from Micbooster in the UK. The main choice turned out to the capsule issued by PUI Audio (AOM-5024L-HD-R), which sounded good and was readily available from many manufactures in Europe.

For a couple of days, one of the house studios was transformed into an electronics workshop. Pierre was building a circuit he found on one of the forums (2) based on an op-amp NE5534. I was working on PNP transistor based circuit found in a Graham Bishop’s book on audio circuits (3). We wanted to test several schematics to compare the results and choose the best one for building a prototype on a perfboard. The sounds of the radio and feedback merged with our monologues, me speaking in russian and Pierre talking in french. I imagine that it could be an interesting audio compilation of soundscape electronics workshops, fablabs, hacker spaces, featuring people talking to themselves in fablabs. (which I believe, many of us do while working). In the end, we have chosen an op-amp based circuit.

Working towards of our idea about the modular setup for real-time sound capture and reproduction, we aimed to use independent sound objects, each incorporating a microphone, a preamplifier with adjustable gain, an amplifier board, a speaker, and a power supply; replacing with them the omnipresent mixing console, The portability and compact size of these objects allowed for what we called “performative roo(u)ting”, which reffered to an act of moving the objects around the room rather than controlling them with a panoramic knob on a mixer.

The first tests were conducted in Porto in December 2023, in Sonoscopia (4), where we installed our initial improvised setup using an old mixer. With its multiple subgroups, we were able to emulate our system by sending each input channel to a separate output. The sound was produced by assemblages of found objects and small gear motors in a way, allowing us to hear both their acoustic and amplified versions from different places in the room simultaneously. The space resembled a somewhat foley studio for a bizarre mockumentary, with the soundtrack produced in real-time. Small electronic devices mimicked the sounds of footsteps in the forest, knocking of hooves, rustling of wings and screams of weird monkeys, while we stood to the side, adjusting the technology and setting to facilitate the behaviour of the devices.

Minimal gestures achieved with maximum efforts. First we installed the intricate network of cables and integrated circuits to happily listen to the imitation of footsteps in the forest. After, we travelled to a different country, spending a week hunched over half-broken breadboards and then at the soldering station, debugging a circuit commonly available online and deliverable straight to your mailbox. “What’s the point?”, one may question all this action for what might seem like a modest effect. Well, besides having a chance of listening to footsteps in the without any actual trees in your private room, the demanding nature of DIY electronics often yields unexpected results. It enhances in extending our knowledge about things we use and, I believe, fosters a closer and more personal connection with the technology and the materials involved in our creative process.

Both me and Pierre are self-tough in electronics field. I’ve learned (and keep learning) almost intuitively, taking my time and allowing space for failure and imperfection. In moments when one can get surprised by the unexpected behaviour of the object, allowing it to unfold, dynamic interactions occur where we collaborate with the material, treating it as an active agent – a partner and collaborator. What I enjoy most in this niche is precisely these slow and challenging collaborative processes.

Gare à la Rochette!

“What attentiveness to the time of production and engagement with matter reveals is that the production of any artifact is much closer to a negotiation than the simple imposition of a form upon a passive matter. And as is the case with all negotiations, the final outcome or product of the negotiation cannot be said to be the result of a pre-existent and well-defined plan.“
BRYANT, R. Levi. Onto-Cartography. An Ontology of Machines and Media. Edinburgh University Press. 2014.

A few days after the residency, I received a message from Pierre with a link to a product from a French electronics manufacturer: “Look, a legit preamp board with the same op-amp we used.” The board was bigger, mainly due to its stereo configuration and the two large 3300µF capacitors that dominated the design. It costed 49 euros, with a shipping time of two or three days. Within four days, we built several working prototypes, with the material cost for each being less than 4.90 euros. Yet not perfect, they were ready to be tested.

During the week, we had the chance to spend time with our goat friends and attend a festival Gare à la Rochette! happening around the old train station – Thoré-La-Rochette. There, we met Antoine Capet, an artist and maker Pierre knew, who moved to the nearby village from Paris recently and was slowly organizing his activities in a workspace settled on the top floor of the station, just under the attic. He showed us a light room equipped with a laser cutter, 3D printer, and several worktables used during the workshops for local community, which Antoine organises together with his colleague and artists from the area. Simple DIY instruments and other crafted objects were lying on the tables. While having an extensive practice of a specialized educator and being busy with Brut Pop (5), Capet works towards the accessibility of art and music practice in specific communities which he now incorporates in his activities in the place he live.

Rachel and Nicolas arrived on the last day of our stay in Saint-Arnoult, so we could still share a dinner together. Like Antoine, both artists moved to the countryside from larger cities a few years ago. Now, this place offers them a quiet retreat where they can escape the hustle of city life, finding a peaceful environment to rest and focus on their music. For those whose work involves frequent travels and social commitments, having a place to unwind and slowdown is invaluable. Living in countryside has its own advantages: lower living costs, possibility to cultivate personal agriculture, more space and freedom to play music without disturbing the neighbours. Given the current housing situation in cities, this alternative becomes a great survival strategy. On another hand, villages and small towns benefit from growing artistic communities, as they contribute to the development of the local cultural landscape. The next morning, a couple was leaving for Tours, while Pierre and I headed to Orléans for our next destination, La Labomedia. Antoine kindly gave us a lift to the train station.

Infinite Summer – Slow Down. One of a few projects in which the couple of Rachel Langlais and Nicolas Cueille collaborated musically playing ironic R&B and Soul music:

Places to return

Our stay at La Labomedia well corresponded with the dates of their annual festival Re/Dé}Connecte where we were planning to do the first public presentation of our project-in-progress. Located in the city of Orleans, La Labomedia functions as a platform supporting artistic creation, research and digital development in the field of media art. Besides offering a consistent programme of both artistic and educational activities, the assotiations stands for its (h)activism practice and is involved in various projects on the field of digital etics and promotion of open-source knowledge, reaching a very broad audience. One of them, for instance, is FuturÉtic – a francophone digital platform which offers free, ethical, decentralized online tools that prioritize data privacy (6).

Upon our arrival, Benjamin Cadon (one of the founders of La Labomedia) met us directly near the appartment and gave us a quick guide inside the house. After he rushed back to the hub. It was the first festival day and many activities were about to accumulate. The assotiation was located in Le 108 – cultural hub nested in the building of a former choclate factory which among others was giving a room to school workshops, artist ateliers, a social center and other local cultural initiatives.

At Monday’s evening vernisage of SKIPP 99 exhibition, we were approached by Paul Laurent, who invited us to share our project during his Tuesday evening MusicLab Workshop, to which we of course agreed. Over the next days, Pierre and I oscillated between the electronic workshop and a conference room, setting up our installation on a long conference table. We held two presentations, each accompanied by a brief artist talk and space for audience feedback and questions. The first was attended by participants from MusicLab, people aged from 15 to 60 years old, while the second involved a close circle of festival audience and people involved the organization as partners and collaborators. The communal setting allowed us to arrange our devices for live performance while moving around the table with the audience, who could closely observe the manipulations. Some compared this setup to an X-ray or an anatomical theater, where all the parts of the technological “body” were exposed to the observer.

Re/Dé}Connecte festival at La Labomedia attracted a large and diverse audience from the local community and beyond. All events were free of charge, making them accessible to spontaneous visitors passing by the neibhorhood drawn by concerts and sounds of no-input mixings. Combining open studios, dinners, performances and conferences, the program balanced between acts of critical reflection, sharing and presentation.

Thursday evening, I attended a lecture by Marie Lechner on lithium extraction in France and other countries, which was her main research subject in recent. Lechner highlighted concerns about the social, ecological, and economic impacts of Europe’s energy transition, questioning the course and matters related to “low-carbon economy.” I was kindly offered a simoulteneous translation by the team and some of the audience. It made me consider the value of hosting such events more often in the evenings, perhaps after shared dinners or even between concerts, opening up the space for reflection and sharing in less expected contexts.

Overall, this stay at (and with) La Labomedia was a great opportunity to advance and share our work, but also to exchange ideas and observe processes of others, getting mutually inspired. As someone who travels frequently, I value the chance to return to places I have visited before. But to return, one must first arrive and spend time there, forming connections with the place and its people.

One such place I recently returned to is Sonoscopia in Porto, from where I am currently writing this report. This is my third time here as a resident, and I have also worked here as an intern in the past (much as Pierre did years ago). When I arrived last Saturday, João Ricardo welcomed me at the door, offered dinner, and showed me the changes at the house. The collection of vintage electronic equipment donated to Sonoscopia between 2022 and 2023 has been beautifully organized into a studio in joint affords of João and Wouter Jaspers. They coordinated the collection and arranged the transport from Germany, as most of the pieces were delivered from there. The synthesizers, oscillators, noise generators, and tape machines were gifts from various people, including Hainbach, Jochen Hänsel, Jaspers himself and the others (7). The rooms on the southern side of the house have been transformed into a library (with many books donated by Vitor Rua), a gallery exhibiting collective works and also a chill room. Previously, this part of the house suffered from a leaky roof, so one or two rooms would flood during the rainy season. When the chill room was empty, I used it to dry objects I found on the coast, since there was getting a lot of natural light. Now, it got some nice plants, a sofa, and a sound system to listen to tapes or just the music from a phone.

Five years ago, when the association moved here from their previous location, the collective had to renovate the entire building, restoring the floors, ceiling, electricity, and water. Now, the shelves are filled with electronic equipment, archives of tapes and records, functional and obsolete media objects, and DIY instruments. And, of course, there is plenty of room for people – artists, touring musicians and residents, visitors and friends of the collective. This will be my base for the next two months (September and October 2024) and a place to continue our collaboration with Pierre.

Few last words

Speaking about the transparency and economy of music making, we often witness a clear hierarchy in what aspects of the processes are presented to the public, what technology and means are visible and what remains behind the curtain. A horizontal approach can be applied and appreciated in that field simmilarily to other community-driven systems. While the act of listening to a concert or watching a performance can be considered entertaining or even immersive, they also create a powerful social context, that we, as creators and organizers, can shape collaboratively with audience and participants. Bringing critical discussion about the contemporary technology to the mass is as important as presenting the ouputs it affords for.

As we navigate the rapidly evolving landscape of multimedia art within the context of an ever-advancing technology market, the importance of sharing skills and knowledge cannot be overstated. In these times of constant innovation, maintaining a balance between our fascination with new tools incorporated into our work and a healthy scepticism toward them is essential. Just as those marginalized by societal systems have developed creative strategies to resist and subvert their limitations, so too must we, as cultural workers, cultivate a critical awareness of the tools at our disposal. Sharing this awareness allows us to harness technology’s potential while remaining vigilant against its pitfalls, ensuring that our work remains both innovative and grounded in ethical practice.

All pictures by the author.

More information on the artistic project and the process of Pierre and Maryia is available via the following link.

Maryia Kamarova was laureate of the 2024 Rewilding Cultures Mobility Conversation grant. Rewilding Cultures is co-funded by the European Union.

notes:

(1) Pierre Pierre Pierre is a self-taught sound artist interested in dysfunctional electronics and situations. He works with handmade electronics, common and cheap hi-fi devices, audio synthesis, and coding software. He has collaborated with various artists and presented his work internationally, with releases on labels like Amateur and Fougère Musique. Formerly a member of Cable# and the Mire experimental cinema collective in Nantes, Pierre now runs 50hz and participates in public space projects with La Méandre and Veiculo Longo. He is also a member of Concerts Dispersés collective which organizes off-grid events and performances in central France region.
(2) Circuit Exchange International. Op-Amp Microphone Preamp: https://www.cxi1.co.uk/Circuits/Audio/lf071_mic.htm
(3) BISHOP, Graham. Audio Circuits and Projects (Revised Edition). Macmillan Education ltd, 1980. ISBN 978-0-333-37221-0. p. 30 (figure 3.2b)
(4) Sonoscopia is an association based in Porto, Portugal, which functions both as an art collective and space for reflection and creative development within the field of sound art and experimental music. The association has existed since 2012 while the collective has been actively involved in the cultural landscape of Portugal and abroad since the late 90’s.
(5) Brut Pop is an artist run association, initiated by Antoine Capet and David Lemoine which is active since 2009 and focused on artistic practice, involving people with mental or psychological disabilities. Activities of the association cover facilitation of sound workshops in care facilities, publications and organisation of various events that intersect art, disability, and reflections on the role of new technologies in social care and healthcare.
(6) FuturÉtic was made primarily for the Centre-Val-de-Loire region but is open and accessible to everyone.
(7) More information about the studio (including the full list of donators).

Fungal cosmology investigations in Patagonia: “art-science research is an invention of modernity”

Tue, 27 Aug 2024 14:50:33 +0000

Fungi Cosmology is a project that emphasize new forms of dialogues, translations and collaborations between art and science around the fungal kingdom. The program was created by CAB Patagonia, LabVerde Amazonia, and Swiss partners Artists-in-Labs and foodculture days with the support of Pro Helvetia and a greater consortia of funding bodies from Brazil, Chile and Switzerland. Over three years, the program brought together artists and scientists to study the reign of mushrooms as a societal metaphor in the three countries. Makery had already published Maya Minder’s account of the Amazon, and as the third and final chapter opens in Switzerland, the artist takes time to recount her impressions of their second chapter in Patagonia last winter. The Swiss leg kicks off this Thursday, August 29, with an open discussion at Zurich’s Theater Spektakel festival, and will continue with a trip to the Valais mountains of Switzerland.

Maya Minder

According to philosopher Bruno Latour, the age of the Anthropocene is not mainly about the concern over human-made decline of biodiversity, the devastation of soil, the rapid rise of global temperatures, or the imminent end of fossil fuels, but the overwhelming comprehension of us all sitting on the same planet. We might not understand the vastness of this complex interplay between geographies, geophysics, and geopolitics, but like a drop of oil staining our ground, we might start to understand the term “Spaceship Earth” – we navigating our planet together through the universe.

Latour uses the word “parsing” as a keyword to be used as an antidote to the overwhelming and demotivating feeling of the dawning Anthropocene. Parsing is a term used to dissect and break down our imagination into smaller units of interest: a piece of land, a singular garden, the littoral zone, one square meter of soil, one acre of forest. Their findings offer a much more realistic picture of a political process in place than the bigger idea of “planetary terraforming” relate to the impossible task of taking stewardship of a whole planet.

In this text I would also like to address the heterogeneous agencies, talking about not only human agency, but also about the many actors that influence the different factors of change in our planetary world. For example, Latour uses the term “critical zone,” the layer of soil not deeper than 20cm, which is composed of so many various actors, like human agency of agriculture, petrochemical agency, rainfall, nematodes, microbes, plants and their root systems, and many more. “Critical” carries the notion of stress, crisis, conflicts, and history, the term “Zone” concepts as territory, land, heterotrophy, and transformation.

While Bruno Latour is helping me to lay the foundations for my research into fungal cosmology, I am supplementing this by also taking into account the domestic sphere and the theory of everyday practice as proposed by Michel de Certeau, Lucie Giard and Pierre Mayol in their book The Practice of Everyday Life. According to this book, domestic life is a place for the creation of knowledge, shared rituals and the embodiment of community building. Finally, the work of Silvia Federici adds to this in her use of the term domestic space as a place of both submission and resistance.

The complexity of the Fungi Cosmology project, as an international research program, lies in the manifold aspects of a transdisciplinary project and the heterogeneity of cultural identities and disciplines of Art/Science that created the context. Visiting three different areas in terms of geography, landscape and ecosystem enabled extreme comparisons to be made. The participants are artists, scientists, and curators, from Brazil, Chile, and Switzerland. As methodology can vary greatly between disciplines and territories, we agreed to start from a common ground with a site-specific approach, a processual approach and a Do-it-with-others approach, sharing our methodologies in group meetings and discussions. We also shared the same critical zone and habitat, common spaces for eating and sleeping, the same meals and the same daily rhythm of resting our feet and minds, eating the same harvest and sharing these common experiences.

Patagonia – a phantasmagoria at the end of the world

Werner Herzog’s documentary Encounters at the End of the World tells the stories of people who choose to live in the most hostile environment on our planet. It is the stories of scientists, logistic workers, and other deserters that live in the most unreachable place to devote themselves to solitude and the pure passion of their field of research.

With this film in mind, I traveled to Patagonia, the starting point of scientific and tourist expeditions to Antarctica, a city marked by colonization and immigration, and even a place of remote refuge for outlaws and fugitives from justice.

The capital of the most south region of Chile, the XXII Region Magallanes and Antartica Chilena, is a place is a place hybrid by its wild mix of urban architectural carpentry, with records of last century’s settlement movements and of an advent of touristic exploitation. Some curiosity cabinets remind us the era of the “conquest of the Wild West” or of the “New World”, and a few brick factories reminiscent of the old whaling industries stand alongside shopping centers and a hotel chain that stands out for its difference and poor relationship with the environment and the context of the small city in the end of Americas continent. The overwhelming beauty of the landscape, the impressions of the vast sky and the rapid changes in the weather have overtaken the faded taste of this surreal place of non-architecture and the fact that all consumable goods, all living is brought from more than 800 km in distance ether by ground transportation, ship or then plane. Patagonia is very remote and only reachable by a certain clientele of tourism. One could ask, what are people searching for in Patagonia and what kind of crowds end up in this remote region of the planet. – “What are we doing here and why are we here?”

Transdiciplinary encounters in art and science

“The tips of the hyphae, of the mycelia is like a single brain, it is ALL collaboration.” Peter McCoy during his presentation at Spora event, Paris, 2024

The richness of this heterotroph zone was imagined upon our arrival. Maria Luisa Murillo, the Chilean curator and organizer of the Patagonia edition of Fungi Cosmology, organized a three-day conference of “Encuentros en Arte y Ciencia” (Encounters in Art and Science). It was a conference, a meeting point, a starting point for networking between many local players and agencies in the field of art and science. The conference sought to give reflection on the importance of linking the sciences and the arts in the fields within the arts and science that research, conserve, and think about cultural heritage and knowledge in Chile. It also aimed to promote the construction of inter- and transdisciplinary collaborative networks, to think ecological crisis and post-colonial trauma in the sense of art/science, encouraging the exchange between the professionals interested in sharing experiences where art and science coexist and evolve. Amongst the presenters were curators, artists, scientists, residency hosts, and researchers: the Antarctic Institute of Chile, Magellan University, Catholic University of Maule, Prisma, Museo del Hongo, the science museum Museo Interactivo Mirador, LABVA, and many more. Enriched with the many impressions and new acquaintances to share networks, us participants of Fungi Cosmology went further to travel to the CAB residency in Tierra del Fuego the next days to start a week of summer camp in the outback of the wild lands.

Summer camps as a methodology is the subject of many current contemporary community movements that create shared spaces and time within a group of people to share knowledge and skills. The content is mainly generated by the constitution of the camp, its environment, and the people participating; to create a transdisciplinary experience for all the members is the common goal. This format is not new but has been practiced by the early environmentalist Patrick Geddes in his “Summer Meetings” in England in 19th century. First held in 1887 in Edinburgh, the motto for the meeting was “Vivendo Discimus” – ‘by living we learn’. Geddes, who was a transdisciplinary scientist as biologist, socialist, and town planner, also marked the terms “from hand, to head, to heart” or “think globally, act locally!”. His ideas of transdisciplinary exchange by bringing people together from different disciplines was pioneering bringing people from different disciplines to study the same subject by sharing time and habitation together.

My house is your house and the otherness

As Maria Luisa Murillo told us, each residency she hosted at the CAB was different. The space gets constellated by the guests present on-site. Formerly the main building of an old timber factory Puerto Yartou, it was also her great-grandfather’s house. A settler, olderst son of swiss immigrants whom arrived in 1877 to the beginning of “Sandy Point”, now a days Punta Arenas. Alberto Baeriswyl evaded his family heritage because he did not want to go to finishing his studies in the country of their parents and who decided to stay in the wild south hunting wild hourses and then went on to establish his own settlement in the Tierra del Fuego hinterland. The house was very vast, with many rooms with different functions. You could see that the architecture stems from a colonial heritage and is based on ideas of functionality and the use of space according to hierarchy and representation: the open entrance room greets you with an opulent furniture and tapestry on the wall, he library is the next room, then the kitchen, which is the central core but is hidden at the very back of the house with its own entrance from the backyard. On one side is the dining room, followed by the salon for reading and contemplation, connected by a long, hidden walkway that leads to the kitchen and a maid’s room. On the other side are the private rooms, bedrooms and bathrooms and, again, an opulent walkway with large windows overlooking the backyard.

It was an extensive stay at the residency in CAB. The landscape and its seemingly rough appearance and lack of vegetation opened a playground to apply the methods of parsing the micro zones, to get a deeper understanding of the “critical zone”. Fungi Cosmology members instantly transformed the space into a temporary science lab, a reading room and library, a kitchen lab and an intimate space of retreat for all.

When we arrived in this remote place, we were stunned by the landscape, which gave us the impression of being inside a dream. Devoid of human activity, it is impressive in its nature. The ocean, mountains, shores and forests touched the horizon and reflected each other.

In order to approach the mycelium and fungi as a kitted bond in-between an ecosystem, our group slowly became fungal in this remote isolation in Tierra del Fuego. This place, a non-place, was inhabited by indigenous peoples for centuries before being extinguished by white settlers. Tierra del Fuego is called the isle of fire, not because of a volcano or other geographical feature, but as the historic narrative says because of the many fires lit by the natives at night, when Magellan discovered the island and named the Magellan’s straight. Far out on the land the many fires became visible as small dots in an intrinsically connected web of evidence of life existing in this remote place.

What is the history of the edible today?

“Through my experience at home – through my relations to my parents – I also discovered what I now call the ‘double character’ of reproductive work as a work that reproduces us and ‘valorizes’ us not only in view of our integration in the labour market but also against it.”
Silvia Federici, Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction, and Feminist Struggle, Oakland Press 2012

“Historically, the home has been a place where life is reproduced and where the people involved in the reproduction of life are connected through intimate relationships, by kinship, trust, affection; it is a place of social encounters. What we argued in the International Wages for Housework campaign is that in the history of capitalism, the home has been subjected to all kinds of state interventions and legislations that have turned it into a centre for the production of labour-power. The Campaign read the home as a workplace, a workplace for women, the designated subject of reproductive work. This means that the home, like reproductive work itself, has had two contradictory components that have produced a constant tension. On the one side the home and reproductive work have had to produce exploitable workers for the labour market, and on the other hand they have (re)produced our lives, and our struggles. Thus, the home has been both a place of subjugation and a place of resistance.”
Silvia Federici, in: (Home Works) A Cooking Book: Recipes for Organizing with Art and Domestic Work, Ed.: Jenny Richards and Jens Strandberg, Onomatopee, 2020

The bow I am taking here is that in the two disseminations of Fungi Cosmology, there has been an encounter and a critical approach to how fungi, as a food source, have raised many questions in the history of the acquisition of human food cultures, non-human entanglements and indigenous knowledge. As an artist I work with the non-human world and am mainly interested in human interaction, the entanglement and the history of non-human agency with the human world.

Having grown up in the 90s, I am a child of the dawn of hyper-globalized capitalism and the process of a sheer commodified world. I witnessed how the Swiss government took part in the co-founding the European Union by bilateral consent, only to be rejected by the mass movement of right wing populism in the early 90s, allowing free trade in goods while people rested within their borders. Sensing the hybridity of my origins early on, I never felt that I belonged or was attributed to a system, but I understood that non-belonging could also function as a tool of deregulation parallel to the neoliberal freedom of deregulated market politics. Capitalism was an ambiguous role-play of deregulation and individual self-regulation within its intrusive cages of late capitalist society.

I only started asking questions through the lenses I received through my mother’s eyes, when she was searching for her home culture in a foreign Western country, belonging to the otherness and was constantly reduced to her exoticism, as a female Asian women, in the role of a mother and housewife, staying at home in a foreign culture, wrapped in domestic work to raise her children in Switzerland in the 80s and 90s.

Her cooking was an investigation in her own culture. She arrived in Switzerland as a young woman with no knowledge of culinary practices. She has shown great creativity in adapting her skills and in replacing missing ingredients that were not available. Korean cuisine is rich in indigenous knowledge. Fermentation is actively practised in a wide variety of dishes and beverages that are produced in the domestic spheres and have not yet been outsourced to processed food industry. Many wild foods are integrated into recipes and cooking practices, and the production of foods such as tofu or miso are integral part of many recipes. I gradually became aware of why these ancient cooking practices have become so important and are still actively practiced and lived on into the 21st Century.

One of the reasons why cooking and recipes have been preserved in Korean culture is that food is strongly linked to its cultural identity. Cooking practices are an expression of cultural belonging. Recipes are intrinsic and are passed down from one generation to the next within the private domestic sphere. From the Asian Colonial history in the early 20th CE Korean identity has been heavily oppressed during the Japanese occupation from 1910 to 1945, to the extent that Koreans were forbidden to speak their language in public spaces and at school. Oppression of the Occupier became as rigid, that the silent and privat domestic space was the only space where cultural identity could be proclaimed. By way of comparison, capoeira was a form of resistance, practiced secretly as a dance by African slaves in Brazil. The music and dance concealed the secret practice of martial arts and defence techniques. A subverted way of practising culture, similar to the need to practice food culture among the Korean population at the time. Korean cooking was a private domestic practice that strongly expressed once belonging. Our eating food cultures are sensual body knowledges, that functions on a neurological sphere of memory and culture inscription – Food feeds the soul. The food is internalized and becomes culture from the inside, and as Silvia Frederici puts it, the domestic is a place of resistance. The incorporation of wild, foraged foods also testifies to the scarcity witnessed by the Korean population during this period of occupation, where most of the material resources produced in Korea were used to support Japanese soldiers in the wars and battles taking place on the Western mainland.

It is notable that, in a post-industrial society, most of the local, ancient or indigenous recipes of food culture, such as preserving, pickling, fermenting or processing food, got lost in the advent of postmodern society. With the invention of fridges and supermarkets, it became evident that those hardship requiring practices were no longer necessary and were outsourced to local food producers. Foraging and fermenting were regarded as retro and poorman’s survival needs in a post-war world. Cultivation, education and technological progress are still the main pillars of modern society. The remarkable thing is that these skills and knowledge got lost within few generations only, whereas previously they were passed down from generation to generation for centuries. In such a short space of time, a profound body of knowledge has been lost.

Domestic work is devaluated within capitalist society, it is undervalued because it does not generate wages. It has not been validated for storage in libraries or other domes of knowledge protection, since it is not regarded as high culture. It is only with the loss of the ancient practices of these recipes, similar to the knowledge of soil embodied by farmers, and only with the advent of ecological awareness and the climate crisis, that we are beginning to understand their invaluable capacity to go beyond the transfer of knowledge in deep time. It has enabled humanity to survive for centuries, even millennia. Can we say that pre-industrial societies lived in greater harmony with ecology? The substantial division of dual and non-dual wisdom underwent paradigm shifts with the advent of modern form of capitalism, which divided the body from capital, material from nature, nature from culture. Practices such as fermenting, preserving, pickling, working the land, cultivating the soil and the knowledge of foraging for wild foods are hyperlocal and fluid practices. By adapting from generation to generation, these recipes made it possible to cope with climatic or geographical changes and interruptions such as war, floods, droughts or other natural and human-made disasters.

Learning from fungi

The loss of knowledge of edible fungi is a clear sign of the loss of this deep temporal connectivity that our contemporary society is witnessing. Modern societies lack the capability of surviving in a wilder context. I theorize here that this is not the result of a break and a division that occurred with the entry into the Holocene, when humans became sedentary whereas they had been previously hunters and gatherers. I think it was rather at a later stage that most of the knowledge was lost, through displacement, wars and above all the advent of capitalism and the disembodiment of body and mind, the commodification of all the material entanglements we humans maintain, so to speak, with the non-human world.

Silvia Federici inside her seminal book of Caliban and the Witch, has conducted in-depth research into the history of the body in relation to the expansion of capitalism, arguing that perceived division was an essential condition for the development of labour power and the gendered categorization of work. Witches hunts in sixteenth-century Europe were expressed as the struggle for the monopoly of curative knowledge of plants and fungi by the reign of monasteries (religion) and monarchs (government). In a similar way, we came across similar interesting views on the knowledge of the indigenous Yanomami people in the Amazonian forest, how this knowledge is still alive and how fungi can be used for food, medicine and crafts.

The difficulties our contemporary society has in distinguishing between fungi and plants, the fear they arouse, the fear of poisoning and the fear of the unknown are for me indicative of this oppressed knowledge that has been lost, and the struggle to recover it as popular knowledge is not only on the eve of today, but is imperial to the struggle to fight against a capitalist society. Learning what is edible and what is not in a survival situation must have been a centuries-old struggle for humans in times gone by. We have given up this knowledge to capitalize on it and to be regulated by the state or the free market. Sciences and arts seem to be free disciplines, but as scientists understand the gap that separate them from society, impassable gorges are being dug. It is with the help of the arts and more community-oriented movements that this kind of knowledges will be opened up for people to use in a bottom-up approach.

Learning and knowing one’s own local territory is the power that has been given to indigenous peoples. It is undoubtedly this uncanny and awkward feeling that Magellan and the conquerors of the “New World” felt, which led them to the genocide of millions of people. The capitalist world, with its focus on extraction to generate exponential profits, was and still is one of the deadliest viruses our planet possesses.

Read Maya Minder’s account of Chapter 1 of Fungi Cosmology in Amazonia.

The website of the Fungi Cosmology project.

Meet the participants of the program at the Stammtisch of Theater Spektakel festival in Zurich, August 29, 6-8pm.

A telltale of Sarjapura Curries and associated art space SARLA in Bangalore

Fri, 23 Aug 2024 11:42:16 +0000

This spring, Makery co-produced issue 6 of the occasional newspaper The Laboratory Planet. This issue imagines a peasant and neo-peasant future, invented by global peasants, organised in diverse territories, cultivating biotopes that are more heterogeneous, more democratic and therefore more habitable. The central section is devoted to the recent Soil Assembly initiative, and develops some of the experiences, reflections and surveys gathered within this emerging network. Here Deepanjali Naik presents Sarjapura Curries, a community ran by the artist Suresh Kumar G, which combines artistic and agro-ecological activities near the city of Bangalore (India).

Deepanjali Naik

For the past decade, Bangalore artist Suresh Kumar G has been committed to the art of growing food and reviving recipes that his community has long forgotten in the fast-growing capital city of Karnataka. After focusing on large-scale installations and site-specific sculptural works that addressed social and environmental issues within his community, the artist began to imagine a community that would be nurtured through a nearby farm. There would be constant sharing between the farm and the community, for example household waste recycled as compost, vermicompost, and various types of natural pest repellent, while these same households would eat the vegetables and herbs grown on the farm. It was his vision to encourage healthy eating at a reasonable price, without the costly “organic” label.

Nurturing this vision, Suresh Kumar also likes to add Samuha (“community/group”) to his name, as a testament to his passion for community. Food is at the center of any community’s well-being, and Suresh has always fiercely guarded this idea from other lucrative business opportunities to package anything remotely organic into a premium “organic” product.

The backstory of Sarjapura Curries

“Space is never an issue, any space is suitable for growing a garden,” says Suresh, basking in the sun in his garden. He has collected used trays, drums, and fabricated structures to transform his home terrace into a green haven – unlike most other private patios in big cities, which remain  unused. Suresh’s terrace is where it all started, where the artist practiced making sculptures and designed spaces to grow plants, including edible weeds, forgotten vegetables, indigenous flowers that repel pests, and animals that nurture the soil.

Sarjapura Curries emerged when Suresh Kumar transitioned from his home terrace to initiating a community garden at the village community center where he had spent his childhood—a journey nurtured by passion. The pivotal moment was when the Bangalore Sustainability Forum granted Suresh a year-long grant. With this support, he began gathering seeds of lesser-known plants and weeds, cultivating them meticulously on well-organized growing beds.

It was an eye-opener to his kith and kin, who had never attached much value to the weeds, as they were unaware that the village landscape on which the weeds grew was going through a drastic change. These wildly available weeds would soon go extinct at a time when farms were being replaced with townships and high-rise apartments; these weeds had no future, and the recipes attached to these edible weeds were almost lost. Growing them in a kitchen garden was the only way to keep them in the local diet. Suresh organized meet-ups and giveaways to inspire more and more villagers to grow these lost vegetables and cook them.

As the community garden became increasingly popular and successful, Suresh’s cousin Satish invited him to grow the same edible plants in a bigger space in the neighboring village of Hosahalli (meaning “new village”). This paved the way for Sarjapura Curries Farm: an old practice in a new village. Now Sarjapura Curries had a permanent home base. Hosahalli was already known for growing the largest quantity of vegetables in the taluk of Anekal, approximately 30 kilometers southwest of central Bangalore. Truckloads of vegetables are sent to the market every day.

This was a place for healthy competition and teaching farmers to adapt to organic farming. Suresh shared seeds for free with everyone who came to the farm. It was mostly village women and city-dwellers who took the seeds home for personal gardening. When Suresh suggested growing organic to neighboring farmers, they were skeptical about the customer base for organic produce. They were used to using chemical sprays to destroy all growth in the soil, calling it weeds, and exposing the bare soil. This is not how it is done, Kumar told them: “Soil is a living being just like your pet, a dog, a cat, or a cow. You cannot strip all life from it and expect to get the yield of selected crops.” The first formative years of farming must be spent on growing soil, regenerating the soil, and then there will be yield.

All Soil is Sacred

Gradually, Suresh scaled up his organic vegetable garden to an integrated farm with ducks, chickens, rabbits, goats, cows, and dogs. Some of the animals had been abandoned or donated by other farmers. Everyone found shelter at Sarjapura Curries, as the farm was focused not just on monetary profit, but on holistic benefits to animals on the land. Land is as fertile as the number of animals stomping the earth on the farm. At one point, even a mare (female horse) found a home at Sarjapura Curries, which made the farm more interesting to people who had a liking for horses! All in all, the farm kept sparking interest in all types of people for its unique and wholesome vision.
Mr Nagaraj, a retired school teacher who had been following the farm’s activities, invited Suresh to replicate the model on his own land. The new farm is located next to Satish’s farmland in the same village of Hosahalli.

This land came with a small hut where one could rest and cook meals, with space left for Suresh to design and develop. He designated an open kitchen to demonstrate recipes, a nursery, a storeroom for the harvest and seeds, and a dedicated space for birds and other animals. Raju, Manisha, Bhadhur and Shamala were the full-time caretakers of the farm, with a proper schedule for harvest and delivery.
After visiting the farm and documenting their process, online platforms such as Farmizen started placing bulk orders for fresh veggies and greens from Sarjapura Curries. Suresh began collecting produce from other farmers who followed in his footsteps and supplied it to Farmizen along with his daily produce. Nearby educational institutes brought their students for farm tours. The professional colleges Srishti Manipal Institute of Art, Design and Technology, IIHSc (Indian Institute of Human Sciences), and APU (Azim Premji University) supported workshops at Sarjapura Curries to expose their students to organic farming. This gave way to more workshops, farm walks, and projects around farming and sustainable living. APU has since introduced a whole new course on farming in collaboration with Sarjapura Curries.

Launching SARLA art space

During this time, a new facility opened up. After Suresh’s good friend Lata vacated her house, he took over the rent for his new venture: Sarjapura Arts Residency at Lata’s, also known as SARLA. Along with Nancy Popp, Seema Jain, and Advithi E, the budding art space launched as a workspace, artist residence, and art gallery. These days, SARLA organizes regular art exhibitions.
The Bengaluru art scene is mostly confined to the city center, where art galleries and colleges flourished before the Information Technologies boom. SARLA is a one-of-a-kind art center situated outside the conventional artist circle, where it is gaining traction in the not-so-arty suburbs. Now SARLA has shifted its focus from artist residencies and exhibitions to neighborhood and community engagement, with new volunteers working passionately alongside Suresh Kumar.

From an artist standpoint, SARLA is a sister concern of Sarjapura Curries. Artists have an additional leeway to use farm environments and natural materials to make art. The association of art and an organic farm space brings a unique advantage to artists, art lovers, and the community.

The website of Sarjapura Curries.

Electric Wonderland: The chilly willy of maker camps, run by wizards

Wed, 14 Aug 2024 10:40:24 +0000

From july 21 to 28, the 6th edition of Electric Wonderland took place in Baške Oštarije, Croatia. We follow the rabbit into Hobbiton, a camp full of makers, tinkerers and artists gathered to create and share their knowledge. Makery was there sketching their secrets.

Roger Pibernat

Text and drawings by Roger Pibernat.

When landing in Wonderland, I was expecting a mad tea party, a caterpillar smoking a pipe, a grinning Chesire cat… but since logic is twisted in this side of the mirror, I found myself in the Shire hosted in a Hobbit wooden cart surrounded by Hobbit huts dug in the ground.  

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Velebit camp is run by Luka, a streamer who met Radiona’s magicians when attending an OBS workshop they offered. Deborah Hustić is the Gandalf of Radiona’s makerspace. She’s a great storyteller. After the introductory session, a few of us stayed in the dome drinking home-made rakja while she explained how miserably the camp failed on the first edition, more than ten years ago; what was supposed to be a happy maker camp, turned into a survival experience during a very rainy week in the middle of the mud eating only cookies. She promised herself not to do another camp ever again. But a few years later, Uroš Veber, from Projekt Atol, offered to join the Rewilding Cultures project, and she accepted. “But I knew food had to be good, as I learned the hard way that it’s the most important part of the camp” she says. That’s why another Ana, the cook, served us delicious food all week long.

The dome where the introductory session and the storytelling happened was built during last year’s camp, in one week only (!) while there were ongoing projects and workshops. I heard it was tough, but the result is amazing. The dome is made out of wood; it’s fresh during hot days, warm on cool nights, dry in the rain and sounds astonishingly well. It is very cosy with carpets filling the floor. Here’s where the workshop tools would be set up during the whole week, and also where concerts happened. There were 3D printers, managed by magician Paula Bučar, a vinyl cutter run by Damir Prizmić, and soldering stations in charge of Tomi Tukša… Some of the workshops also ran here.The more dangerous laser cutter and dirty silkscreen printing were set up on a different hut by the solar showers.

Deborah explained that, in this edition, they programmed less workshops, as she wanted people to have time to work on their own projects without feeling pressure to attend too many activities. The last two editions were especially chaotic and intense and they felt they had to take it easier this year, although they had been told this was a very “chilly willy” camp compared to others like PIFcamp.

Radiona’s community

Deborah has given a lot to Radiona since the beginning, 14 years ago, and today the strategy is to let the Radiona community manage itself. She and some of the core team will now dedicate more time to projects devoted to inclusivity. Paula showed me the 3D model they are working on to make a mould to print illustrations for blind people. Also in the team will be Monika Pocrnjić, who I met in her hometown Maribor (Slovenia) a couple years ago, and who will be joining Radiona soon. Ana Horvat, a composer from Zagreb and unofficial co-founder of Radiona (she was away on vacation the day the papers were signed) is also part of this core. During the camp she helped Ana the cook with meal setup and other important management stuff.

The gender ratio is unusual for a maker environment. Deborah said they have never consciously done anything to create such a balance, it happened naturally. She thinks there may be two reasons for this: her, a woman, being the head of the party; and having workshops led by women. This may have contributed significantly to people joining the community. 

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The daily routine started every morning with Monika’s body landscaping exercises. Related to this, she offered a workshop with Serbian Una Mladenović, where we learned how to use our body as an artistic medium by decorating it in different ways. Documentation (taking pictures) is how it is finally rendered.

Workshops ran after breakfast and lunch. Some of them started with a session but were ongoing during the week, like Fox Hunt, where we soldered wifi mini devices that would later be hidden around the camp and people would hunt with their phones. We also built FM receivers that we used to listen to the local radio broadcasted from a local FM transmitter. T-shirt printing with silk screens built with the vinyl-cutter happened mostly by the end of the week.

Sandra Maglov set up a workshop of Mobile Holder Monsters made out of cardboard. Dimitra Barouta taught us the very basics of mobile photography, with useful tips for seasoned and newbies alike. Ana Horvat gave a lecture on freak composers, which was followed by Deborah’s findings and thoughts on her research on her family tree using DNA.

All this creativity was fueled with a special brand of chocolate bars that have become a tradition; it’s the electrons of Electric Wonderland. Everyone made sure that there was always enough supply.

DIY post-apocallyptic antidepressant pills

Vito Menjak and Tomi Tukša offered a workshop on off-grid pharmacy. Vito told us about plants found around the camp that we could use for different healing purposes, while we drank local herb-tea and smoked local-herb cigarettes. Tomi taught us how to create post-apocallyptic antidepressant pills from cell batteries (dead or alive), extracting the lithium chloride contained in them. First, we carefully opened the batteries with wire cutters to get the lithium out. We then soaked it in water one by one, waiting for the bubbles to calm down. Mixing vinegar and baking soda we generated CO~2~ that we added to the mix through a pipe into the lithium water, converting it to Lithium Chloride. When the liquid was PH neutral enough, which we checked with a paper strip, Tomi filtered it through a funnel to extract the dust that would make the pill. He said that it’s not realistic to use this process to get the amount of lithium chloride needed for a proper antidepressant dose, but it’s very interesting nonetheless, and after the apocalypse we may have all the time in the world. If not, the sole act of extracting it is very soothing.

Igor Brkić showed us the ins and outs of KiCAD, an open source PCB design software, which we wouldn’t need for Stefanie Wuschitz’s clay PCBs. Stefanie is an Austrian artist who came with her children. The little one spent most of the time decorating her own skin and that of other campers with crayons. Stefanie gave an introductory lecture on her research for alternatives to plastic and copper PCBs. After the talk, we went to hunt clay at the top of the hill behind the camp, where a tree had fallen exposing underground soil full of mud. We gathered clay stones that we later smashed with hammers and filtered with colanders to turn into clay dust, while sitting and chatting like maybe our ancestors did. By adding water we created  clay balls that we later flattened and stamped with a 3D-printed mould of an electronic circuit. After they dried up overnight, Stefanie cooked them on the fire, and filled the holes from the mould with copper tape, instead of the usual home-made silver ink she normally uses. The circuit allows the soldering of pre-programmed Attiny and external components that can be soldered on the pads. Stefanie’s research looks for more sustainable and feminist ways of doing electronics with materials available on site, but this PCB making technique not only connects electronic components: it also connects people, building community.

Melma et al.

At the camp there was also Servando Barreiro, a nomad musician originally from Galicia (Spain), who has been in Stockholm for the last couple of years. He provided the soundtrack to the camp throughout the week with his portable setup, which includes an Organelle — an electronic synth-like instrument that he programmed by himself— and two bluetooth speakers. Audience curiosity spontaneously ended in an improvised Organelle workshop on the first evening. He didn’t bring his guitar because of packing optimization, but Luka, the camp owner, let him use his. Servando (who sometimes calls himself Sir Random) came to perform with Melma, an ensemble from Milan that makes visuals with a set of two microscopes that feed a TouchDesigner (a visual plateform) patch from mobile phones attached to their lenses. The visual effects are controlled with a MIDI device.

Melma is formed by three artists and a dog: Zoe Romano, Alex Piacentini, Giacomo Silva and Onda. Alex and Giacomo are designers and have started a publishing project. Zoe has a background in philosophy, but she started a makerspace after quitting Arduino, where she had worked for a few years during its beginnings. Giacomo said he likes Zoe’s philosophical approach to everything she does, and Alex’s technical expertise and the passion he puts into the projects. Alex is very curious and open-minded, continually asking questions to people about their projects and knowledge, while sharing his own.

Talks with Zoe were deep and very interesting. She was reading a book about decolonizing through mushrooms. Very appropriate read while being at Wonderland. She told me the story of hacker/maker spaces and the difference with fablabs. We also discussed gender (un)balance in the maker scene, which may be due to cultural sabotage, as women tend to be more perfectionist and self-demanding, not allowing themselves to fail in front of an audience; as opposed to men, who are more relaxed about it, probably because of embedded unconscious cultural heritage.

Melma’s performance on Friday night was great. The next evening they decided to jam again and it was even better. We laid down on the dome’s carpeted floor with blankets and pillows in front of the custom built screen they had hung from the dome’s ceiling; the image was duplicated on the outside, projected on the exterior dome surface for the campers to enjoy. We listened to Servando’s cool and mesmerising sounds on Zoe’s new semi-modular synth, while watching beautiful trippy microlife that Zoe, Alex, and Giacomo had gathered around the camp during the previous days. At one point, Onda came to lie on the ground with us.

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Thursday was the day off. Some people went to the beach, others stayed in the camp, and I joined the hiking group, guided by Tomislav Mikić, a young bird-watcher who led us up and around the Velebit range from where we could enjoy great views of the surrounding mountains and not-so-distant coast full of islands. Onda also joined the pack and herded us all the way, making sure no one was left behind or went too fast. She struggled a bit while climbing down a specially difficult rocky step, but she eventually managed to overcome it. Overall, she climbed up and down the rocks five more times than all of us put together.

Once back in the camp, we chilled for the rest of the day, getting ready for the final days of making.

All very chilly willy.

Electric Wonderland is organised by Radiona with the support of the Rewilding Cultures program, co-funded by the European Union. Roger Pibernat is Makery’s resident columnist for Rewilding Cultures during the summer of 2024.