The Farm

• In Event: 60.067 - Collaborative Art and Activism for Eco-Justice Education

Abstract

Objectives or purposes

This paper explores the role of artistic collaboration in critical pedagogies of food system transformation. I inquire into how artists collaborate with youth and diverse actors in the food system in the context of producing contemporary art exhibitions, and what characterizes these exhibitions as places of learning about a resilient and just food system. This paper is based on a self-study of my own arts-based food education project called The Farm, which was produced for a large, collaborative public art exhibition called Land|Slide: Possible Futures. The Farm brought together youth from across Markham, Ontario, to collectively explore the future of farming in both the fastest growing and one of the most agriculturally rich cities in North America.

Perspectives

This research interrogates the nuances of collaboration in order to foster transformative relations to socio-ecological places. In contrast to the colonial line/s that set limits on the land, in the form of property lines, we explored the tangible dimensions of the agricultural line and what anthropologist Tim Ingold calls the ‘earth sky world’ (Ingold, 2013, p. 136) in a series of place-based workshops on food, farming, and growing art. Youth participants envisioned a future food policy for Markham in collaboration with diverse food policy groups, such as the Toronto Youth Food Policy Council (TYFPC), and created this vision with artist Angel Chen in a workshop called Let the Dry Goods Speak. In the mural that came out of this workshop, participants connected childhood memories of cooking and growing beans, lentils, and other dry goods to a food policy vision of protecting farmland, reflexively localizing agricultural production, and providing healthy veggies for the citizens of Markham. In this way, youth participants worked with a diverse array of artists, urban farmers, and food policy activists, to design and implement a small farm, called The Farm.

Modes of inquiry and data sources

Collaborative art practices pose a tremendous challenge to poststructuralist methods of art theory and criticism (Kester, 2011). In The One and the Many, Grant Kester (2011) shows how long-duration collaborative art practices necessitate a kind of methodological shift from focusing on the culmination of a creative process in a particular artwork to examining how artists work alongside diverse actors in ways that utilize the potentialities of the aesthetic but are irreducible to any single interventionist text or creative endpoint. Building on this theory, this research focuses on the overarching process of collaboration and draws on visual sources, exhibition documents, blogs and exhibition catalogs.

Scholarly significance and conclusions

This paper contributes to our understanding of the role of art and storytelling in socio-ecological learning (See: Barndt, 2012; Bigger & Webb, 2010; Coutts & Jokela, 2008; Dobrin, 2010; McKenzie, 2008; Payne, 2010; Song, 2012; Wason-Ellam, 2010) by offering an in-depth account of the role of artistic collaboration in the production of informal places of learning (Ellsworth, 2005) about food citizenship, justice and a transformative food politics (See Levkoe 2011).

Author

• Andrew Bieler, University of Saskatchewan