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August 2023
Artistic Residency: Resilience, Art and Agri- culture Silo - Art and Rural Latitudes, Itatiaia, Brazil with the support from Shuttle, Plaka Porto To end our residency at Silo, we marked a huge square on the ground and filled its dug perimeters with grinded GMO corn. The performance started with us distributing little bamboo sticks amongst everyone. Then we entered the square, and told we were standing on a 20mm microscope coverslip. From the bushes a loud present voice instructed everyone to start drawing. People kneeled down and started scratching the compacted dirt. Through simple geometric operations, the first forms of life on earth emerged: bacteria and yeasts, unicellular decomposers. The square then came to represent a large-scale farm of 1,000 hectares. Extractivism against the earth, agro- chemicals, GMOs and other imperial weapons that violently limit the web of life to its simplest stages; the very base and nothing else. |
With visitors' help, we covered the square with compost made from vegetable debris from the surrounding lush forest. The square of once almost dead dirt then became reinoculated with organic matter thriving with myriad layers of teaming life.
We then served food from perennial plants found locally in the Atlantic forest biome. Perennials, for they live many years, and avoid annual soil disruptions altogether. Annual plants were also included, provided they were spontaneous. Everything was served on banana leaf cut square of 12x12cm, exactly a thousand times smaller than the large 12x12m square we were all inside of. The size of the leaves proportionally represented the area of land a friend held in an occupied camp close-by in the Landless People Movement plots. In just about a tenth (0.1) of a hectare, he harvested everything his family needed and still got to sell some of the produce. Participants then went back to the square to symbolically occupied the 1,000 hectare mega farm with the tastes and dreams of their diverse and resilient small holdings, producing nutritious food for all beings inhabiting them. |
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