FIELDCLUB online archive.
FIELDCLUB was a four acre smallholding in the UK, set up as a collaboration between artist Paul Chaney and curator Kenna Hernly to investigate issues relating to off-grid living, self-sufficiency and agrarian reform. Sometimes involving other artists, scientists and philosophers, our initiatives took the form of interdisciplinary artistic research and the organisation of seminars and events. The project ran for eight years until 2012.
Our main intention was to design, create and interrogate, an exemplary Unit: a system of low-impact self-provision predicated on the hypothetical division of available UK land between the current UK population. The problematic complexities encountered during the physical application of this theory at FIELDCLUB's site led to a large body of projects, practical research, and Neo-Agrosophy - a weird fusion of agriculture, futurology and contemporary philosophy.
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Hypothetical Reterritorialisation - Donetsk 2012
IZOLYATSIA Center for Cultural Initiatives (Donetsk, Ukraine) hosted this interactive workshop as part of Paul Chaney's residency during 2012.
During the workshop 25 members of the public remapped downtown Donetsk as an ‘off-grid’ autonomous food production community using the FieldMachine web tool, with parameters set for Ukrainian agriculture. The workshop was attended by some members of the city planning office - who were understandably critical of the intentional disregard shown towards existing city zoning policy.
Hypothetical Reterritorialisation - Haifa 2012
FIELDCLUB was invited to make a Hypothetical Reterritorialisation at Haifa Museum of Contemporary Art (Israel) as part of File Tranfer Protocol - an exhibition in an experimental downloadable format jointly curated by Pil and Galia Kollectiv and Sala-Manca.
New parameters for Israeli crop types, current population and land surface area were added to the FieldMachine database. Participants were asked to construct an agricultural community using the visual framework of the Piet Mondrian painting - Composition 2 (1937).
FIELDCLUB was asked to develop and lead a fieldtrip as part of the Penzance Convention:
Beginning with the sun’s eternally extravagant glare beating down on the hunter gatherer’s primeval forest, and concluding with computerised food production systems dependent on globally sourced synthetic inputs, 'The Story of NPK: Agriculture as Extraction' offered an agrosophical examination revealing the changing dynamic of extraction in agricultural techniques from prehistory until today.
Accompanied by local experts, and our agricultural-system modelling tool FieldMachine, we traced the history of Cornwall’s agricultural industry through the landscape, visiting examples of Iron Age, Medieval, Pre-Industrial, and contemporary farming. We looked closely at the relationship between the scientific advances of the Industrial Revolution and their influence on the Agricultural Revolution, the effect of geological and chemical contingency on plant evolution, and the plant itself as kleptomaniacal scrounger – whose ability to disrupt the dissipative flow of the sun’s energy facilitates all higher life.
The very nature of the agricultural ‘cycle’, was up for debate as we scrutinized the change in agricultural production from cyclicality to linearity, and consided what, in the context of agriculture, can be meant by the term extraction.
Paul Chaney and Kenna Hernly will present 'Am I Here Yet? - The Materiality of Place' at:
Designing Alternatives
A Symposium of Contemporary Radical Design Practice
Wednesday 13th June 2012, 11.45 – 17.00
Edinburgh College of Art/University of Edinburgh
Design plays a vital role in tackling the economic, environmental and social challenges facing us today and tomorrow, and both design practitioners and educators need to be equipped with the right tools to address these unprecedented scenarios. Bringing together a number of speakers engaged in 'alternative' approaches to design practice, this symposium will examine how we can find ways to educate, interpret and communicate the different design approaches these challenges entail. Designing Alternatives has been organised by Dr Sonia Matos and Dr. Catharine Rossi and has been made possible thanks to the University of Edinburgh's Research and Knowledge Exchange Committee Fund.
Please see the blog http://designingalternatives.tumblr.com
Whey to Go: On the Homanid Appropriation of the Pig Function is re-published in the latest edition of Ord & Bild - Sweden's longest established cultural journal (Piglet Round-up is used for the front cover).
THERE WAS A COUNTRY WHERE THEY WERE ALL THIEVES - Curated by Natasha Ginwala
Artists: Gary Colclough, Jasper Coppes / Stijn Verhoeff, FIELDCLUB, Gauri Gill, Pil & Galia Kollectiv, Helen Mirra Abigail Reynolds, Edward Clydesdale Thomson
'What might it mean to be overexposed to a land? Such that one is like a glacial striation on bedrock – a pattern of selfness and crystal.
The countryside is as much an imagined terrain as it is an assemblage of components: rock, crops, air, people and histories. Hence, the look and shape of land is a production of labour, industry and capital as much as it is a factor of wind speeds and sedimentary formations. This exhibition is an accumulation of fictions that are registrations of/from place, taking the form of immersive dispatches, field notes and temporal mediations.'
www.jeaninehofland.nl/