All the West is Wasteland: Art in the Post-Agrarian Landscape
Outside of the metropolis, rural area is increasingly becoming a contested zone where the most pressing issues of our time are being played out. These issues include environmental sustainability, global economics versus local economies, issues of food production and genetic modification, and cultural commodification. In the process of adaptation to a shifting global, order vast transformations are taking place in the biophysical, social, and cultural realms - a scenario that is not exempt from conflict.
In this context Fernando Garcia Dory's experimental intervention in rural Spain called "Inland / Campo Adentro" questions the role of creativity and arts, and the artist's function, as grounds for a new genre of landscape.
Fernando GarcÃa-Dory is an artist and agro-ecologist who splits his time between Madrid, Berlin, and the mountains of northern Spain. He has a background in fine arts and rural sociology, and his work engages specifically with issues affecting the relationship between culture and nature embodied within the contexts of landscape, identity, utopias, and social change.
His work addresses connections and cooperation, from microorganisms to social systems, and from traditional art languages such as drawing to collaborative agro-ecological projects, actions, and cooperatives. He is currently a resident at Grizedale Arts, with whom he presented his work "A shepherds school as a Microkingdom of Utopia" at Tate Britain. Together with MyVillages he presented a social form of food production and distribution in Berlin at Haus der Kulturen der Welt. He is currently pursuing the next prototype of Bionic Sheep, and preparing the selection and training of a new group of artists commissioned to stage interventions in different rural villages, a project he is carrying with Museo Reina Sofia Madrid. He also serves as coordinator of the National Shepherds Federation and Trustee of the World Alliance of Mobile Indigenous Peoples.
This lecture is co-presented with the David Brower Center.