Agri/Culture 2.0
7 August - 13 August 2021
Saturday 7 August Launch event from 11am – 11pm
Saturday 7 – Friday 13 Interactive Display on show in the Studio at Kestle Barton during opening hours
Featuring: Paul Chaney, Bram Thomas Arnold, Urbanomic, William Arnold, James Fergusson, Andrew Ormerod.
Kestle Barton Rural Centre for the Contemporary Arts is nestled within fifty-six acres of farmland bordered by woodland on the fertile northern side of the Lizard Peninsular alongside the Helford River Estuary.
Over the last thirteen years we have gradually been converting the farmland from conventional dairy grazing to an agroecological system with a more biodiverse range of crops and biodiverse habitats including 1ha of apple orchards, 4ha of walnut and chestnut plantations, ponds, and our ever popular wildflower meadow.
For a long time we have been working on ways to meaningfully link the gallery programme with the land that surrounds the gallery and encourage our audiences to participate in the seasonal cycles of food production. We have held apple picking days, foraging workshops, and invited our audiences to get involved with making cowslip wine and cider.
In response to the deepening ecological crisis we wish to intensify our agroecological food production Kestle Barton and convert more of the dairy pasture to regenerative methods and contribute more to the local food economy. We are considering the possibility of opening up the land around Kestle Barton for new kinds of agricultural co-production where audiences become stakeholders in new participatory food systems.
In 2020 Kestle Barton (with the generous support of Arts Council Emergency Response funding) commissioned a team of carefully selected artists and experts with experience of sustainable agriculture, food systems planning, and participatory practice to begin thinking through this opportunity. Their report proposed that artists and audiences work together to create a new kind of sustainable food production effectively blurring the lines between cultural production, sustainable food production, and digital technology creating a new third form of production the authors called Agri/Culture 2.0.
For the launch event members of the team will be present to introduce the possibilities of Agri/Culture 2.0 in collaboration with audience members and participants from the local community.
The Launch day (Saturday 7 August) will include a tour of the orchards, a talk by the authors of the report, an interactive exhibition in the studio at Kestle Barton and an evening in the Orchard around the campfire at Chaney’s Encampment Supreme including an iteration of Bram Thomas Arnold’s performance Bibliotherapy for the Anthropocene and an off grid disco provided by Urbanomic’s editor in chief Robin Mackay publisher of the journal Collapse and internationally renowned contemporary philosophy.
2pm Sunday 8th August
Food Forest Generator software prototype demonstrations in the studio (Paul Chaney)
