Futurefarmers–A Farm Sailed Away and Came Back a Garden

Futurefarmers is a group of diverse practitioners aligned through an interest in making work that is relevant to the time and place surrounding them. Participatory in nature, their work manifests as temporary public art, museum exhibitions, publications, bus tours, public programs and most recently permanent public art. A consistent line through their work reveals sustained questioning about how “nature” and “culture” are perceived. They use various tactics to uncover histories and currents related to this divide by challenging systems of exchange and tools used to “hunt” and “gather.”

Founded by Amy Franceschini in 1995, their design studio serves as a platform to support art projects, an artist-in-residence program, and their research interests. The group includes artists, researchers, designers, architects, scientists and farmers with a common interest in creating frameworks for exchange that catalyze moments of uncertainty where learning is made possible. They use various media, social conditions, and physical environments to create situations that destabilize the logics of certainty, often deconstructing or taking things apart as a means to visualize and understand the intrinsic logic of an object or subject. Through acts of disassembly new narratives emerge and hidden potentials awaken. Futurefarmers leverage these situations to create playful entry points and tools where participants gather valuable insight into deeper fields of study–not only to imagine, but to produce knowledge through experiences with the places we live, materials we touch and food we consume.

Futurefarmers 

Futurefarmers work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Museum of Modern Art, NY, Solomon R. Guggenheim, NY, MAXXI in Rome, Italy, New York Hall of Sciences, and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Amy Franceschini and Michael Swaine will spearhead a forthcoming project at the Carpenter Center. They teach at the California College of the Arts and the University of Washington, Seattle, respectively.