A digital artistic research platform for rural biographies, transgenerational and cross-continental storytelling
Fields as contested territories shape many biographies, of how individuals leave their rural associations behind due to ecological destruction, dispossession of communities or the promise of emancipation. How can stories of rural biographies inspire new perspectives on the present with its colonial continuities and gendered and social divisions? The multi-disciplinary and transgenerational project Field Narratives aims to collect and share stories which originate from or reflect on rural spaces.
Departing from personal memories, we propose our method of “agro-centric thinking”: challenging the”fixity” of land as infrastructure, while exploring how agriculture is related to caring and how agriculture maintains its presence across personal biographies even after its practices have been abandoned.
Through the participation of rural actors from Denmark, Cameroon, Italy and Germany, “agro-centric” narratives are captured in the form of documentary and fictional video collages, drawings, poems and essays that are hosted on the online platform. The project entails a discursive on-site program at an urban agriculture site in Berlin that enables conversations on questions of belonging and pedagogies of situatedness, while fostering hands-on agricultural practices.
Origins of Field Narratives
Field Narratives emerged out of a workshop at the New Alphabet School on #Caring in collaboration with the Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung and the HKW (June 2020). The workshop “Agro-Centric Thinking: A Pathway to a Collective Biographical Imagination?” formed part of an online program, co-curated by Sascia Bailer and facilitated by hn. lyonga & Andreas Doepke; Lene Markusen was a participant. The group formed out of its shared interest in rural spaces, art and social change. Field Narratives spans the genres of film, drawing, storytelling, creative writing, artistic and curatorial activism. Field Narratives regards rural/global tensions as a subversive potential towards social transformations. Field Narratives joined the residency/symposium “Dis da Lavur - Practices of Situating in Rural Spaces” in Tschlin (CH) in June 2021, organized by the Dalvazza Group. Field Narratives is funded by Neustart Kultur of Deutsche Künstlerbund e.V. and the Hamburgische Kulturstiftung.
Sascia Bailer
is a feminist researcher, writer, and curator working at the intersection of care, contemporary art, and social transformation. In her practice-based curatorial PhD at the Zurich University of the Arts and the University of Reading she explores the activist potential of curating as a form of care. She is the author of Curating, Care, and Corona (2020), and the co-editor of the anthology Letters to Joan (2020), and the artist monographs Re-Assembling Motherhood(s) (2021) by Maternal Fantasies and What We Could Have Become: Reflections on Queer Feminist Curating (2021) by Malu Blume. She has worked internationally within the arts, including MoMA PS1, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. In 2019-20 she was the Artistic Director at the M.1 Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung, today she works as an independent curator and educator. She holds an MA from Parsons School of Design, and a BA from Zeppelin University.
hn. lyonga
is a writer and curator of words, notions, and perspectives. He has an academic and personal interest in Anti-Black racism, the use of language in Black speculative fiction, the Black familial dynamic and the role of women in black postcolonial literature, Museums as carceral systems where looted art, histories, cultures, and bodies are being held hostage. He graduated with a Bachelor’s in American Culture and Sociology from the University of Kassel. Currently, he is an MA student in Amerikanistik at the Humboldt University of Berlin, a founding member of the Black Student Union at Humboldt, a member of the AK Museen und Sammlungen von Decolonize Berlin e. V. and a member of the Kuratorium of BARAZANI.berlin - Forum Kolonialismus und Widerstand. lyonga was born at a place in rural Western Cameroon called Mutengene. His work, which has appeared in Kunstraum Kreuzberg – Berlin, Bärenzwinger im Köllnischen Park, in Boykott Magazine, Textur Magazine, etc., addresses ways of existing in a foreign country with respect to bureaucracy, immigration politics, etc. He is deeply interested in Agriculture in the context of rural and urban spaces across Africa. The dialogue-centric workshop he held for the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in 2020 entitled “Agro-Centric Thinking: A Pathway to a Collective Biographical Imagination?” tackled the ”fixity” of land as infrastructure.
Lene Markusen
is a visual artist and filmmaker. She was born and raised in a farmer family in rural northwest Denmark and lives in Hamburg. In 2021 she received the Villa Romana Prize, Florence. From 2011 until 2017 she was a professor at the University of Fine Arts, Hamburg. Her films and video installations have been screened and exhibited at Kunstverein Braunschweig (2022), Center for Contemporary Art, Glasgow (2019), BeFem Festival, Belgrade (2019), Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2019), Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow (2018), Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg (2017), Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2013), Hamburger Kunsthalle (2012), Photo Paris (2011), Halle für Kunst Lueneburg (2010), K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen, Duesseldorf (2006), Stuk, Leuven (2006), and Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn (2005), among others. In 2019, she published the art book Sisters Alike. Female Identities in the Post-Utopian (Spector Books).
Andreas Doepke
is a cultural worker and writer who works at the intersection of arts and civic environmentalism. With degrees in political science and geography, his interests revolve around concepts of nature, social justice, putting transdisciplinarity to practice and decolonization. As an author, he collaborates conceptually with artists, for example for the essay Blue Canary together with Barbara Marcel (intercalations 6, K. Verlag/HKW, 2022), and for the workshop “Agro-Centric Thinking: A Pathway to a Collective Biographical Imagination” with the poet hn. lyonga (New Alphabet School #4: Caring, 2020). Andreas has worked as a researcher in the development of the digital archiving platform Ocean-Archive.org (2019); as producer and coordinator, he realised the exhibition cycle Disappearing Legacies: The World as Forest (2018-2019); as copywriter, he worked on the project Owned By Others (2020), which developed digital and analogue narratives on the public space of the Museum Island in Berlin. Currently he is employed by HKW Berlin in the long-term Anthropocene Project.
Design by visual intelligence (visual-intelligence.org)
A digital artistic research platform for rural biographies, transgenerational and cross-continental storytelling
Fields as contested territories shape many biographies, of how individuals leave their rural associations behind due to ecological destruction, dispossession of communities or the promise of emancipation. How can stories of rural biographies inspire new perspectives on the present with its colonial continuities and gendered and social divisions? The multi-disciplinary and transgenerational project Field Narratives aims to collect and share stories which originate from or reflect on rural spaces.
Departing from personal memories, we propose our method of “agro-centric thinking”: challenging the”fixity” of land as infrastructure, while exploring how agriculture is related to caring and how agriculture maintains its presence across personal biographies even after its practices have been abandoned.
Through the participation of rural actors from Denmark, Cameroon, Italy and Germany, “agro-centric” narratives are captured in the form of documentary and fictional video collages, drawings, poems and essays that are hosted on the online platform. The project entails a discursive on-site program at an urban agriculture site in Berlin that enables conversations on questions of belonging and pedagogies of situatedness, while fostering hands-on agricultural practices.
Origins of Field Narratives
Field Narratives emerged out of a workshop at the New Alphabet School on #Caring in collaboration with the Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung and the HKW (June 2020). The workshop “Agro-Centric Thinking: A Pathway to a Collective Biographical Imagination?” formed part of an online program, co-curated by Sascia Bailer and facilitated by hn. lyonga & Andreas Doepke; Lene Markusen was a participant. The group formed out of its shared interest in rural spaces, art and social change. Field Narratives spans the genres of film, drawing, storytelling, creative writing, artistic and curatorial activism. Field Narratives regards rural/global tensions as a subversive potential towards social transformations. Field Narratives joined the residency/symposium “Dis da Lavur - Practices of Situating in Rural Spaces” in Tschlin (CH) in June 2021, organized by the Dalvazza Group. Field Narratives is funded by Neustart Kultur of Deutsche Künstlerbund e.V. and the Hamburgische Kulturstiftung.
Sascia Bailer
is a feminist researcher, writer, and curator working at the intersection of care, contemporary art, and social transformation. In her practice-based curatorial PhD at the Zurich University of the Arts and the University of Reading she explores the activist potential of curating as a form of care. She is the author of Curating, Care, and Corona (2020), and the co-editor of the anthology Letters to Joan (2020), and the artist monographs Re-Assembling Motherhood(s) (2021) by Maternal Fantasies and What We Could Have Become: Reflections on Queer Feminist Curating (2021) by Malu Blume. She has worked internationally within the arts, including MoMA PS1, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. In 2019-20 she was the Artistic Director at the M.1 Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung, today she works as an independent curator and educator. She holds an MA from Parsons School of Design, and a BA from Zeppelin University.
hn. lyonga
is a writer and curator of words, notions, and perspectives. He has an academic and personal interest in Anti-Black racism, the use of language in Black speculative fiction, the Black familial dynamic and the role of women in black postcolonial literature, Museums as carceral systems where looted art, histories, cultures, and bodies are being held hostage. He graduated with a Bachelor’s in American Culture and Sociology from the University of Kassel. Currently, he is an MA student in Amerikanistik at the Humboldt University of Berlin, a founding member of the Black Student Union at Humboldt, a member of the AK Museen und Sammlungen von Decolonize Berlin e. V. and a member of the Kuratorium of BARAZANI.berlin - Forum Kolonialismus und Widerstand. lyonga was born at a place in rural Western Cameroon called Mutengene. His work, which has appeared in Kunstraum Kreuzberg – Berlin, Bärenzwinger im Köllnischen Park, in Boykott Magazine, Textur Magazine, etc., addresses ways of existing in a foreign country with respect to bureaucracy, immigration politics, etc. He is deeply interested in Agriculture in the context of rural and urban spaces across Africa. The dialogue-centric workshop he held for the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in 2020 entitled “Agro-Centric Thinking: A Pathway to a Collective Biographical Imagination?” tackled the ”fixity” of land as infrastructure.
Lene Markusen
is a visual artist and filmmaker. She was born and raised in a farmer family in rural northwest Denmark and lives in Hamburg. In 2021 she received the Villa Romana Prize, Florence. From 2011 until 2017 she was a professor at the University of Fine Arts, Hamburg. Her films and video installations have been screened and exhibited at Kunstverein Braunschweig (2022), Center for Contemporary Art, Glasgow (2019), BeFem Festival, Belgrade (2019), Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2019), Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow (2018), Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg (2017), Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2013), Hamburger Kunsthalle (2012), Photo Paris (2011), Halle für Kunst Lueneburg (2010), K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen, Duesseldorf (2006), Stuk, Leuven (2006), and Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn (2005), among others. In 2019, she published the art book Sisters Alike. Female Identities in the Post-Utopian (Spector Books).
Andreas Doepke
is a cultural worker and writer who works at the intersection of arts and civic environmentalism. With degrees in political science and geography, his interests revolve around concepts of nature, social justice, putting transdisciplinarity to practice and decolonization. As an author, he collaborates conceptually with artists, for example for the essay Blue Canary together with Barbara Marcel (intercalations 6, K. Verlag/HKW, 2022), and for the workshop “Agro-Centric Thinking: A Pathway to a Collective Biographical Imagination” with the poet hn. lyonga (New Alphabet School #4: Caring, 2020). Andreas has worked as a researcher in the development of the digital archiving platform Ocean-Archive.org (2019); as producer and coordinator, he realised the exhibition cycle Disappearing Legacies: The World as Forest (2018-2019); as copywriter, he worked on the project Owned By Others (2020), which developed digital and analogue narratives on the public space of the Museum Island in Berlin. Currently he is employed by HKW Berlin in the long-term Anthropocene Project.
Design by visual intelligence (visual-intelligence.org)