Art, Climate & Land-Use
Socio-Environmental Imagination in the age of the Agripocene With Amy Franceschini
The Agripocene* course will look at different forms of art and activism that address issues of land use, climate change and environmental justice with a focus on strategies of collaboration, durational approaches and methods for developing unconventional partnerships to realize the unthinkable. Lectures and invited guests will demonstrate how to move, be moved and to move mass(es) - from the small gesture to large-scale productions that overturn policy, food systems and practices of everyday life to form new paths of resistance, mutual aid and reciprocal engagement.
Theories of Felix Guattari, Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour and Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (among others) will be contextualized through the practice of invited guests and a series of short assignments will form the basis for discussion around student work.
*Agripocence questions how humans have transformed the planet through the act of growing food , i.e.agri-culture. Agriculture has transformed how we use and relate to land, it has domesticated plants and animals and shaped our cities and ultimately how we live together. A new field of practices are emerging with fertile dreams, landscape-wide aspirations and determination to become autonomous from large-scale food systems and wishes to shape stable networks of producers and consumers that can support life. Let us be among them!
Amy Franceschini’s Futurefarmers work in contexts where intricate social structures are intertwined with city infrastructure and the complexities of collective memories embedded in (and around) a site. Through processes of participatory research, critical reflection, and sustained public programming, hidden potentials held within these scenographies can emerge. Members of Futurefarmers collective will join to share their perspectives from the frameworks of architecture, philosophy and anthropology.
Office hours: Thursdays 2:30 -3:30 pm ET (for 1-1 meetings with Amy)
***ALL Classes include FREE & Continuous Membership Access to our virtual campus Programming called Student Life
** Payment Plans Available
September 28th - November 9th
Thursdays
12 - 2:30 pm EST
16
Students
$1,500 New Student
$1,250 Returning Student
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.
Flatbread Society Bakehouse
OSLO, NORWAY
2017
Victory Gardens
2007
This is Not a Trojan Horse
2010
This is Not a Trojan Horse
2010
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