Art, Climate & Land-Use
With Amy Franceschini
The *Art, Climate & Land Use* course explores how art and activism intersect to address critical issues of land use, climate change, and environmental justice. With a focus on collaboration, durational practices, and unconventional partnerships, we’ll examine strategies to challenge the status quo and imagine new ways of living. From small gestures to large-scale interventions, the course will showcase projects that transform policies, disrupt food systems, and reshape everyday life to build new paths of resistance, mutual aid, and engagement.
Through lectures and guest speakers, we’ll engage with the theories of thinkers such as Felix Guattari, Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour, and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, grounding their ideas in the practices of invited artists and activists. Short assignments will foster discussion, allowing students to apply these theories to their own work.
In this time of environmental crisis, a new field of creative practices is emerging, driven by the need to rethink land use, grow autonomous food systems, and form sustainable networks of producers and consumers. Amy Franceschini’s Futurefarmers collective exemplifies this ethos, using participatory research, critical reflection, and public programming to uncover hidden potentials in urban spaces and collective memories. Members of Futurefarmers will share their insights from the perspectives of architecture, philosophy, and anthropology.
LIMITED TIME: Buy this workshop & get a year of Membership for FREE
Enrollment deadline: November 15, 2024
November 18th - December 16th
Mondays
6 pm - 7 pm EST
20
Students Max
$750 New Students
$500 TAAS Members
USD
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.
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