Hi Amy. >> Hello. >> Thanks for taking the time to talk to us, I know you're traveling a lot between places and projects. And one of the reasons we thought it would be fantastic to have your contribution in this module on art is because the students' assignment for this week is a bit against the grain, right? We are going to ask people around the world who are participating in the MOOC to think of projects that can be with food, with farming, right, with the whole idea of cultivating in the most literal sense. And you have spent many years doing these types of projects. So, on one hand, we know our students will be inspired by learning about your work, if they didn't know it already. But of course they can learn about your practice, like how the whole thing has evolved. And so as a first question I wanted to ask you, with your work, with future farmers, but also the flat bread society, how did you arrive in this type of work as an artist? >> It was very organic, in a way. I mean, Futurefarmers was pretty organic. It was an outgrowth of actually wanting to work with other people, not wanting to work alone. And in 1994, I just started Futurefarmers as a design studio, actually, and I started an artist and residency program. So, with money that was made from my design studio, I invited artists to come and spend three to six months, four designers and architects or writers, to work with me on a project with the agreement that we would do some work for pay, and that we would then create a new project together. And this residency basically formed the basis of all of our collaborators now, so most of the people that came through residency between 1994 and 2000 are still collaborators. So that was not expected. I just started the residency thinking I want to be continually inspired and challenged by other skill sets and other contexts. So, that's how Futurefarmers formed. >> And, you know, in your collaborations, you already brought up designers, architects, extremely from the outset, the word farmer is in your name, right? Do you collaborate with farmers? There's that poetic dimension of farming the future, right? But there's also a direct engagement with baking in some sense but also the growing of food. I know you've learned from farmers, but how often do you get to collaborate with people who farm for a living? >> More and more, I collaborate directly with farmers. The name was more of a metaphorical charge or a reminder of a certain type of farming that is very collaborative. When I was a child, I lived on a small farm, and during harvest we had to borrow tractors from each other. And all the farmers stayed up late to help each other get the harvest in before the rain. And of course many of the wives made big feasts and we ate until the moon was full in the sky. And it was really a very communal moment in the area where I lived. I didn't realize until I was out of undergraduate that I was yearning for some sort of an ethos like this, to find a way where people could share resources and skills and work together. So a few things, one thing that we do at Futurefarmers that's kind of a standard is we quickly prototype things. And we also just throw an idea on the table and say, let's just try to make the prototype of it really quickly. So, we often make scrappy wooden prototypes or we perform something quickly to see how we can embody an idea, what materials are needed, what other skill sets. And that comes from design thinking background I think. Which for me has been really helpful as an artist as well as specially working in public art context where you have to work with a lot of different people and types of people. And so that's one kind of, what do we call this, studio secret? [LAUGH] Not secret, but- >> Yeah. >> It really helps, because we can immediately be like, we need a really heavy engine to make this pendulum work or we need 20 people to lift this thing. How are we going to recruit 20 people to do something like this? So, that's one thing. Another thing is that I always ask for advice, and that's a more recent thing because of the scale of our projects and the politics around our project. I've started lately to form kind of boards of consciousness [LAUGH] or a conscience. Like a group of people who I admire, I ask them to be with me on the project so that I could consult them and make sure that I'm staying in check with my politics. So, for instance, in Oslo we were invited to do a permanent public art piece in a new waterfront development. And for me, that's a charged situation, right? It's this huge economic gentrification. A charged, charged environment, especially in a city that I don't live in. So I formed a committee of thinkers. Neil Smith was a geographer, passed away a couple of years ago, but Neil Smith, Kuba Matu, seasoned artist in Brussels who deals with intellectual property. Hendrik Luben, he's a urban planner and anarchist in Berlin, teaches at Humboldt University, and Amy Balkin, artist from San Fransisco. And Amy Balkin wasn't formally on my committee but [LAUGH] she's a confidant. Basically, I felt I needed to run the ideas that we were having about making a public artwork in this context with people who were hyper-critical of this kind of a development project. And it was interesting because I was on the fence. Should we situate ourselves in this project or should we not? And I was pretty impressed that everyone said, you can decide not to take part in this project or you can do it and try to change. And if you have one foot in this development, you can then talk to people who maybe you would never have a chance to talk to, like bankers or mayors of the city or ministers of agriculture of Norway who we're talking with right now. So that gave me the confidence to walk into this new territory or a territory that I was uneasy about. So, I always say your network is your nest [LAUGH] and your friends are your best allies. And that's another kind of, it's not a secret, but we really just depend on the people we know. And try to keep those relationships really healthy so that we always have people to fall back on and ask questions to.
