Period
2012
Proposed by
Joseph Del Pesco
Location
Oslo
About the project
Flatbread Society is a growing constellation of farmers, oven builders, astronomers, artists, soil scientists and bakers aligned through a common interest in the long and complex relation we have to grain. The project takes the form of the site-specific Bakehouse’s which are hands-on knowledge sharing spaces, whose heart is a multi-functional bread oven/baking facility. Futurefarmers locates each Bakehouse in a site where it serves as a counter-narrative to the surrounding situation; new urban development, peripheral neighborhoods, industrial agricultural landscapes, and university campuses to name a few. In these locations, a Flatbread Society can assemble local actors with the aim of establishing many expressions of exchange, knowledge production, magic, and emergent new networks.
Through the physical site of the Bakehouse, Flatbread Society connects various actors to discuss the history of our human relation to grains; farmers, economists, folklorists, historians, scientists, etc. Our human relation to grains and bread is the lens of our program i.e. the beginning of civilization; granaries, accounting, writing, architecture. This historical grounding forms the basis for an arc of inquiry that regenerates traditional knowledge, wonder, confusion, and intuition to contribute to new knowledge-forming processes.
A focal point for the project has been a site within a new development in Oslo, Norway. Over the next 2 years, we will develop a permanent Bakehouse within this context. Due to the duration of this project, Futurefarmers has focused their research in a wide sense around issues connected to this project; climate change, small scale farming, heritage grains, intellectual property in connection to seed saving and agriculture, land use, astronomy, banking, systems of exchange and traditional knowledge.
External links
About the artist
Futurefarmers is a group of practitioners who come together to make work that responds to the time and space around them. Aligned through an interest in creating tactile frameworks for exchange that catalyze moments of “not knowing”, they create spaces and experiences where the logic of a situation disappears – where moments of surprise and wonder open the possibility for new and unexpected encounters. Founded in 1995, their design studio serves as a platform to support art projects, an artist in residence program and their research interests. Collectively, they have exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New York Museum of Modern Art and Solomon R. Guggenheim.
