What weaves us together?
Seasonal Neighbours
During this talk, Seasonal Neighbours will present their work and discuss the many questions about co-habitation in the European countryside that keep them awake. Seasonal Neighbours came together as a collective of artistic researchers during the corona crisis by a call from two artist-architects aiming to research the contemporary countryside through the methods "learning by doing" and "research through making". An international collective of 16 early career and multidisciplinary artists and designers was formed, who all worked among seasonal labourers on a farm somewhere in Europe. Over the course of two years, they developed their own collective research approach, responding to a range of ethical questions concerning the engagement in complex environments with local actors of the countryside and relationships that emerge between them: the farmers and the workers, the permanent and the temporary residents, the plants and the humans.
This talk is related to the presentation and screening of the collective's work on June 3.
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Seasonal Neighbours is a loose-fixed collective, focusing on different forms of seasonality and of cohabitation in Europe’s countryside. Through fieldwork, art and design interventions, conversations with stakeholders, critical representations and written research, this subject is explored in a myriad of themes such as the evolution of the metabolism of horticulture, the rural landscape and European labor migration stories, as well as questions about the economy of scale in the agricultural sector, domesticity, public space and new forms of citizenship, among others.
The 16 current members of the collective share a common fieldwork experience as seasonal laborers in agriculture, in several European countries. The works presented during foodculture days’ biennial are the results of individual experiences in the fields and the two-year collective research.