Futurefarmers

Futurefarmers is an international working group founded in San Francisco in 1995 and working in Gent, Belgium since 2003. They are artists, architects, computer programmers, farmers, writers and anthropologists who form collaborative constellations based on the context in which they work. Based in enmeshed acts of wandering and material processes, Futurefarmers cultivate public life in place. Rather than inserting pre-determined forms and concepts into public space, they do so through a process-led approach and inviting materials and communities to arrive and intersect at a specific site or situation. Through time and the practiced presence of Futurefarmers, the meeting place of people and materials transform from provisional arrangements into durable forms and functions of their works.

For their residency at Rupert, Futurefarmers collaborative constellation Amy Franceschini and Marthe Van Dessel (ooooo.be) will research the history of puppetry, telecommunications and notions of power and control that orbit this space.

Together Amy and Marthe (ooooo.be) have collaborated since 2004. They find themselves entangled in overlapping interests in the commons, hi/low tech horizons and a critical view on consequences of the tools we make. They have been the lead artists of Flatbread Society, a 10-year-long public art project in Oslo, artist/researchers in residence at the University of California in Santa Cruz and lead artists crew on the sea-faring Seed Journey (2016+).

Marthe Van Dessel (ooooo.be) (Antwerp, BE) is a techno-activist, pedagogue and performer and host of ooooo.be, a transuniversal constellation that initiates, mediates and facilitates, composes and takes over projects, and encourages thinking, reflection and practice-formation on relevant societal issues. Their ‘open’ network is the basis for [intra-actions] and for inspiring participatory processes, mutual learning and collective emancipation.

Marthe graduated in Political & Social Sciences and Graphic Design and was a researcher at the Jan Van Eyck Academy (NL) and a resident of UNIDEE (IT). Together with the Futurefarmers they initiated several public art programs, explored urban terrain and facilitated hybrids of art, science and ecology. Marthe’s practice emerged during the transition from the analogue world to the digital highway – which argues her critical technopolitical stance. She/he* advocates the use of free and open software, the commons, co-authorship and redistribution in the public domain.

In recent years she became an active system administrator within various feminist server [infrastracuture] projects: Systerserver, SERVPUB, Anarchaserver and Tribidou. Her passion is radio, in the technical aspects as a radio amateur but also as a presenter on local independent radio. In her eternal search for non-normative learning environments and feminist pedagogies, she visits and supports with her energy various (queer) hackerspaces, (bio)electronic labs, workshops, communities and gatherings.

Amy Franceschini is an artist and founder of the international art collective, Futurefarmers. Her practice draws from her training as a photojournalist and having grown up amidst the divergent agricultural projects of her parents – her father, an industrial farmer in the San Joaquin Valley of California and her mother, a small-scale bio-dynamic farmer involved in the ongoing struggle to transition conventional farms to organic farms. Amy is interested in “farming” as a relational practice involving a complex web of interdependencies across time, scale and geography where dailyness, seasonality, orality, ritual, myth organize our collective imaginaries and how we live together.

Amy creates work that 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 resides in tensions between nature/culture. Her projects reveal the history and currents of contradictions related to this tension by challenging systems of exchange and the tools we use to “hunt” and “gather”. Using this as a starting point, she invents new 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.

Amy Franceschini received her Masters of Fine Art in 2002 from Stanford University and her Bachelors in Photography from San Francisco State University. She is the recipient of a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 207 Herb Alpert Award and is currently visiting faculty in the Master of Eco-Social Design at the Free University in Bolzano, Italy.

Collectively, Futurefarmers have published A Variation on Powers of Ten, Sternberg Press, 2012, For Want of a Nail, MIT Press, 2018. Exhibitions include Solomon R. Guggenheim, 2010 (solo), New York Museum of Modern Art 2008, Whitney Museum of American Art, Biennial 2000, Sharjah Biennale 2017 and the Taipei Biennale 2018.