The School of Art Visiting Artist & Scholar Series

Futurefarmers (Amy Franceschini + Lode Vranken)
April 16, 2019 at 6:00 pm in DAAP 5401

Futurefarmers is a group of artists, activists, farmers and architects with a common interest in creating frameworks of participation that recalibrate our cultural compass. Their work uses various media to enact situations that disassemble habitual apparatus; performance, architecture, temporary public art, permanent public art, lectures and publications. They produce relational objects that serve as tools for audiences to gain insight into deeper fields of inquiry- not only to imagine, but also to participate in and initiate change in the places we live.

Wandering might be what Futurefarmers do best—sure, on land and at sea, but also through anecdotes of history, or lines of inquiry that trespass disciplines, or into the materiality and means of production of everyday things. This kind of wandering, a bit more directed than flânerie, a bit more open than academic research, has led them from grain fields to nuclear test sites to the brick pathways of Harvard; from orchards to stock exchanges to the telescope observatories; from studios to picnics to libraries and factories; from galleries to the highest peaks of San Francisco. Up there, where the clouds touch the ground, the fog bodies will condense, and transform the environment. Their work has been exhibited at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Whitney Biennial in New York, NYMOMA, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Canadian Center for Architecture in Montreal, the 2014 Venice Architectural Biennale and beyond.

Visiting Artist Lecture Series with assistance from the Agnes Croll Blackburne Visiting Artist and Scholars fund and the Elise Zeller Sauer Fund for Fine Arts; Wave Pool and People’s Liberty