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2019
Wind Theater
Public Projects
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2019
Sirens
Performance
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2018
Further On... to Land
Public Projects
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2017
Flatbread Society Bakehouse
Architecture
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2017
Are You Receiving Me?
Sculpture
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2017
Seed Journey
Public Projects
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2017
Bruegel Awakens
Public Projects
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2015
Soil Procession
Public Projects
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2015
Seed Mast
Sculpture
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2014
Annual Harvest
Public Projects
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2014
Open Outcry
Exhibition
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2014
Consortium Instabile
Sculpture
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2014
For Want of a Nail
Sculpture
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2013
Canoe Oven
Sculpture
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2013
A Variation on Rossum's Universal Robots
Performance
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2012
Ethnobotanical Station
Public Projects
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2012
Flatbread Society
Public Projects
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2012
Flatbread Society, Stockholm
Public Projects
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2012
A Variation on Powers of Ten
Public Projects
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2012
Land, Use: Blueprint for a New Pastoralism
Public Projects
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2012
Flatbread Society Riga, Latvia
Public Projects
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2011
Shoemaker's Dialogues
Sculpture
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2011
Soil Kitchen
Public Projects
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2010
The Reverse Ark II
Sculpture
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2010
This is Not a Trojan Horse
Public Projects
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2010
Erratum
Sculpture
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2009
The People's Roulette
Public Projects
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2008
Nearest Nature
Sculpture
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2008
Lunchbox Laboratory
Sculpture
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2008
Headlands Garden Boat
Sculpture
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2008
The Reverse Ark
Sculpture
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2008
Urban Garden Registry
Project Websites
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2008
Civic Cycle
Public Projects
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2007
Rainwater Harvester/Greywater Feedback Loop
Sculpture
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2007
Victory Gardens
Public Projects
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2006
Bingo: Field of Thoughts
Public Projects
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2006
Radio Forest
Public Projects
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2005
Shoelace Exchange
Public Projects
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2005
F.R.U.I.T.
Public Projects
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2003
Project Websites
- Sculpture
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Are You Receiving Me?
Sculpture
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Seed Mast
Sculpture
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Consortium Instabile
Sculpture
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For Want of a Nail
Sculpture
-
Canoe Oven
Sculpture
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Shoemaker's Dialogues
Sculpture
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The Reverse Ark II
Sculpture
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Erratum
Sculpture
-
Nearest Nature
Sculpture
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Lunchbox Laboratory
Sculpture
-
Headlands Garden Boat
Sculpture
-
The Reverse Ark
Sculpture
-
Rainwater Harvester/Greywater Feedback Loop
Sculpture
- Public Projects
-
Wind Theater
Public Projects
-
Further On... to Land
Public Projects
-
Seed Journey
Public Projects
-
Bruegel Awakens
Public Projects
-
Soil Procession
Public Projects
-
Annual Harvest
Public Projects
-
Ethnobotanical Station
Public Projects
-
Flatbread Society
Public Projects
-
Flatbread Society Riga, Latvia
Public Projects
-
Land, Use: Blueprint for a New Pastoralism
Public Projects
-
A Variation on Powers of Ten
Public Projects
-
Flatbread Society, Stockholm
Public Projects
-
Soil Kitchen
Public Projects
-
This is Not a Trojan Horse
Public Projects
-
The People's Roulette
Public Projects
-
Civic Cycle
Public Projects
-
Victory Gardens
Public Projects
-
Radio Forest
Public Projects
-
Bingo: Field of Thoughts
Public Projects
-
Shoelace Exchange
Public Projects
-
F.R.U.I.T.
Public Projects
- Project Websites
-
Urban Garden Registry
Project Websites
-
Project Websites
- Performance
-
Sirens
Performance
-
A Variation on Rossum's Universal Robots
Performance
- Exhibition
-
Open Outcry
Exhibition
- Architecture
-
Flatbread Society Bakehouse
Architecture
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Seed Journey included in: Climate Changing: On Artists, Institutions, and the Social Environment
First week in South Tyrol with BAU and Hotel Amazonas residencies.
A series of backflips for a new project initiated by curator Marina McDougall with the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society + supported by the Pew Center for Arts & Heritage.
In the framework of KEX | RAND, On the Edge focuses on Vienna's urban periphery, urban planning and agriculture.
Delighted to announce A Variation on the Powers of Ten is presented in the group exhibition, "Interrupted Meals".
#36: New Utopias: Amplifiers of the Unimaginable by Tomas Uhnak
The Penumbral Age: Art in the Time of Planetary Change. Futurefarmers presents new transmissions from Seed Journey, Warsaw, 2020.
In great company at Kunstpalais featuring Futurefarmers' newest sculpture: The Sea Inside the Kettle...
Six pairings of researchers whose exchange consists of wandering to sites relative to their work, performative enactments by invited artists and hard -core knowledge exchange. Hosted by the Institute of the Arts and Sciences.
Futurefarmers presents Flatbread Society at the cx centre for interdisciplinary studies in the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. A wonderful set up for a 3 month series: Amy Franceschini, Jason W. Moore, Silvia Federici.
So excited to return to Utopiana! We will enact Le Voyage des Semences. See their great program!
Very excited to be working with Kabinet K again on a new piece. Inspiration from Claire Simon
We are enchanted to be working with Michael Taussig during a 3-day seminar here in Rome: Join us on Day 2 for The Mastery of Non-Mastery.
Join us for a workshop in collaboration with the Ljubljana Botanical Garden within the context of The 26th Biennial of Design in Ljubljana
A small village in the north of Norway... salmon fishing no longer, a ferry, a road, 13 children, a headmaster of the school, a swimming pool and the wind coalesce in a new project this August - Wind Theater.
So very excited to be releasing our book published by no place press and distributed by MIT Press.
Join us at miart in Milan between 14-15:00 with fellow panelist's: Maria Thereza Alves and Mel Chin.
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"Who is part of our assemblage?
Who is the other that co-determines or co-constitutes what is of importance?
What provokes this pre-subjective process of communization?"
With projects such as Flatbread Society, the Futurefarmers collective focuses on concrete practice. They conduct hands-on exploration of how people and things, neighbors and grains effect each other...
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Nico Dockx + Pascal Gielen
While we collaborate with scientists and are interested in scientific inquiry, but we want to ask questions more openly. Through participatory projects, we create spaces and experiences where the logic of a situation disappears - encounters occur that broaden, rather than narrow perspectives, i.e. reductionist science.
We use various media to create work that has the potential to destabilize logics of "certainty". We deconstruct systems such as food policies, public transportation, campus design and rural farming networks to visualize and understand their intrinsic logics. Through this disassembly new narratives emerge that reconfigure the principles that once dominated these systems. Our work often provides a playful entry point and tools for participants to gain insight into deeper fields of inquiry- not only to imagine, but to participate in and initiate change in the places we live.
Futurefarmers work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New York Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim, MAXXI in Rome, Italy, Sharjah Biennale, Taipei Biennale, Henie Onstad Museum, Oslo, New York Hall of Sciences and the Walker Art Center.
Amy Franceschini
San Francisco, USA
Amy Franceschini is an artist and designer whose work facilitates encounter, exchange and tactile forms of inquiry by calling into question the "certainties" of a given time or place where a work is situated. An overarching theme in her work is a perceived conflict between "humans" and "nature". Her projects reveal the history and currents of contradictions related to this divide by challenging systems of exchange and the tools we use to "hunt" and "gather". Using this as a starting point, she creates relational objects that invoke action and inquiry; not only to imagine, but also to participate in and initiate change in the places we live.
In 1995, Amy founded Futurefarmers, an international group of artists, anthropologists, farmers and architects who work together to propose alternatives to the social, political and environmental organization of space. Their design studio serves as a platform to support art projects, an artist in residence program and their research interests. Futurefarmers use various media to deconstruct systems to visualize and understand their intrinsic logics; food systems, public transportation, education. Through this disassembly they find new narratives and reconfigurations that form alternatives to the principles that once dominated these systems. They have created temporary schools, books, bus tours, and large-scale exhibitions internationally.
Amy received her BFA from San Francisco State University in Photography and her MFA from Stanford University. She has taught in the visual arts graduate programs at California College of the Arts in San Francisco and Stanford University and is currently faculty in the Eco-Social masters program at the Free University in Bolzano, Italy. Amy is a 2009 Guggenheim fellow, a 2019 Rome Prize Fellow and has received grants from the Cultural Innovation Fund, Creative Work Fund and the Graham Foundation.
Michael Swaine
Seattle, USA
Michael Swaine was originally trained as a ceramicist, but he works in a variety of materials, methods, and media and has had a long-time focus on collaborative work. Michael has collaborated with Futurefarmers since 1997. Michael's Free Mending Library Project involved him pushing an old fashioned ice cream style cart on wheels with a treadle-operated sewing machine on it through the streets of San Francisco. This project became an on-going, monthly happening that took place in the Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco from 2002-2015. Michael received his B.F.A. from Alfred University in Ceramics and his M.A. in Design from UC Berkeley. Michael is a professor in the 3D4M at the University of Washington, Seattle.
Lode Vranken
Lode Vranken has been the lead architect and philosopher of Futurefarmers since 2008. Lode's fascination with installing situations of renewed socio-spacial dynamics began with a Transpolar Catapult built in Anchorage, Alaska and has manifest in various modalities since then. Lode has been practicing architecture internationally since 1993. He received his masters in a UN Course on Human Settlements + Architectural Philosophy from the KU Leuven, Belgium. He has been teaching since 2005 as a Ned delegate at The Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain and from 1993-94 at the Asian Institute for Technology in Bangkok, Thailand. Lode co-founded the architectural research coalition, De Bouwerij in Belgium that focuses on social living structures, passive housing, and zero 
energy construction. He is also a partner of Dear Pigs in Belgium and member of the The Ghent School for Metaphysics.
Stijn Schiffeleers
Working in many media Stijn reveals the subtleties of life via film, video and interactive installations. His work embodies a sense of play and sensitivity that reminds us to take a closer look at what surrounds us. He has been seen soaring above the streets of San Francisco in a canoe mounted to the top of the Futurefarmers Volvo and most recently in Gent, Belgium. Stijn collaborated with Futurefarmers between 2003 - 2017.
Anya Kamenskaya
Anya Kamenskaya is an ag-centric organizer and green building apprentice. Within Futurefarmers, she manages the Indigenous Farming Project, a tribal food sovereignty initiative in California's Owens Valley and fostered early relations with farmers in Flatbread Society in Oslo, Norway. Since 2009, she has curated educational events, film screenings and social mixers for the advocacy non-profit, the Greenhorns. She is a member of DIG Cooperative, Inc., a design-build firm focused on decentralized urban water infrastructure.She received her B.S. in Agroecology from UC Berkeley.
Dan Allende
Daniel is an artist, builder and inventor. He spent many summers orienteering by canoe in Canada where he went several months at a time without seeing other humans. Dan received his B.F.A. in Interdisciplinary Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art and his M.F.A. (2015) at Carnegie Mellon. Dan collaborated with Futurefarmers between 2009-2015 on the Reverse Ark at the Contemporary Museum, Baltimore, Maryland, 2009, the People's Roulette for the Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture, 2009 and Soil Kitchen, 2011, a temporary public artwork commissioned by the city of Philadelphia.
Cooley Windsor
Cooley Windsor is the Futurefarmers eternal writer in residence and has graced us with his presence and work since 2009. Many of our projects have emerged from the writings of Cooley Windsor; The Reverse Ark I, The Reverse Ark 2 and This is Not a Trojan Horse. Cooley's seminal work, Visit Me in California has left an everlasting impact on us. Cooley teaches in the MFA Program at the California College of the Arts, and is co-director of the annual Meant to Be Seen Festival at the Eureka Theater in San Francisco. He was one of the founding board members of Bayview Hunters Point Community Advocates, an environmental-justice organization focused on the southeast section of San Francisco. He is affiliated with the Headlands Center for the Arts in Sausalito.
Open Outcry
University of Michigan, East Lansing
2014
The history of human civilization, from early technological innovations to cultural evolution, can be told through the story of grain. The Land Grant: Flatbread Society was an exhibition, an experimental bread oven, a variety of public programs, and a publication that looks at scale, biological diversity and local food systems. A range of tools are presented in the gallery that illuminate ideas about the history of grain � they connect astrology to baking, seeds to starvation, and commodity trading to community activism.
At the heart of the exhibition is a sculptural interpretation of the Chicago Board of Trade grain... more >
The history of human civilization, from early technological innovations to cultural evolution, can be told through the story of grain. The Land Grant: Flatbread Society was an exhibition, an experimental bread oven, a variety of public programs, and a publication that looks at scale, biological diversity and local food systems. A range of tools are presented in the gallery that illuminate ideas about the history of grain � they connect astrology to baking, seeds to starvation, and commodity trading to community activism.
At the heart of the exhibition is a sculptural interpretation of the Chicago Board of Trade grain pit, the oldest operating trading floor for commodities� futures (a contract to buy or sell a commodity at some point in the future). Traditionally, the pit�s raised octagonal shape allows traders to be seen and heard at optimum levels. In the gallery, the pit is a modular sculpture that comes apart to host various events and gatherings; a threshing party, performances, artist talks, and a symposium. Through the physical transformation of the pit, people can re-define and occupy this space that is usually out of reach. (behind the doors of the Chicago Board of Trade)
Inside the Grain Pit bottles of ancient grains are displayed. In light of recent free-trade agreements between the European Union, the United States, Canada, and many South American countries, the practice of cultivating and saving seeds has taken center stage. In many countries this practice has become endangered, and in some areas it is now illegal. A small collection of grains here carry with them stories of brave and curious individuals who maintained and reestablished these landrace* seeds. Some were once thought to be extinct, while others helped families to subsist in extreme environments. Rather than being selectively bred to conform to certain standards and stored away in seed banks, landrace varieties evolve by adapting to a variety of environmental situations and to the agricultural practices used by the people growing them. Flatbread Society continues to collect and share these seeds, from one hand to the next.
The term �open outcry� describes a method of communication between professionals on a board of trade. It involves both shouting and the use of specific hand signals to communicate buying and selling on the trading floor, also known as, the pit. Flatbread Society at the Broad MSU appropriated this term as the name for its public programming in an effort to evoke a series of spirited dialogues from different viewpoints on the nature of farming and agriculture, our changing relationship to grains, and the commodity of natural resources.
Flatbread Society, with help from MSU students and Assistant Professor of Ceramics Paul Kotula, built a clay tandoor oven in the Broad MSU�s Sculpture Garden. This oven was used in a bread making workshop and during a discussion titled Material Encounters: What We Make. The oven will move from the campus to Food Fields, an urban farm in Detroit, where it will live permanently.
*The term �landrace� represents a classification of crops and farming methods widely present before industrialization, in which farmers did not grow a single variety of wheat in just one field. Instead, they selected entire wheat populations for individual and collective taste with special characteristics for brewing, bread baking, and for survivability.
Threshing Movement with Micah Ling. Thank you to kabinetk.be for choreography input.