Hi Amy. >> Hello. >> Thanks for taking the time to talk to us. I know you're traveling a lot between places and projects. And one of the reasons we thought it would be fantastic to have your contribution in this module on art, art history, and cultural institutions is because the students assignment for this week is a bit against the grain, right? We're going to ask people around the world, who are participating in the MOOC, to think of projects that can be with food, with farming, right? The whole idea of cultivating in the most literal sense. And you've spent many years doing these types of projects, so on one hand, we know our students will be inspired by learning about your work if they didn't know it already. But of course they can learn about your practice. Like the whole thing has evolved. And so, as a first question, I wanted to ask you, with your work with Future Farmers but also the Flatbread Society, how did you arrive at this type of work, as an artist? >> It was very organic in a way. I mean, Future Farmers was pretty organic. It was an outgrowth of actually wanting to work with other people. Not wanting to work alone. And in 1994, I just started Future Farmers as a design studio, actually. And I started an artist and residency program. So, with money that was made from the design studio. I invited artists to come and spend three to six months, or designers or architects, or writers to work with me on a project with the agreement that we would do some work for pay, and that we would then create a new project together. And this residency basically formed the basis of all of our collaborators now. So most of the people that came through the residency between 94 and 2,000 are still collaborators. So that was not expected. I just started the residency thinking, I wanna be continually inspired and challenged by other skill sets, and other contexts. So that's how Future Farm is formed. >> And in your collaborations, you already brought up designers, architects, it's certainly deciplinary from the outset The word farmers and your name, right? Like, do you collaborate with farmers, there's the politic dimension of farming the future, right? But there's also a direct engagement with, with baking and some said but they're also growing up food. I know you've learned from farmers but how often do you get to collaborate with people who farm for a living? >> More and more, I collaborate directly with farmers. The name was one of the metaphorical charge, or a reminder of a certain type of farming that is very collaborative. Like when I was a child, I lived on a small farm, and during harvest, we had to borrow tractors from each other, and all the farmers stayed up late to help each other get harvest done before the rain. And of course, many of the wives made big feasts and we ate until the moon was full in the sky. And it was really a very communal moment in the area where I lived. And I didn't realize until I was out of undergraduate, that I was yearning for some sort of an ethos like this to find a way where people could share resources and skills, and work together. >> It's cool. >> So a few things. One thing that we do at Future Farmers, that's kind of a standard, is we quickly prototype things. And we also just throw an idea on the table and say, let's just try to make a prototype of it really quickly. So we often make scrappy wooden prototypes or we perform something quickly to see how we can embody an idea, what materials are needed, what other skill sets. And that comes from design thinking background, I think, which for me has been really helpful as an artist as well. Especially working in public art context where you have to work with a lot of different people and types of people. And so that's one kind of, what we call it a studio secret, not a secret but. >> Yeah. >> It really helps because you can immediately be like this is never, we need to really have the engine to make this pendulum work. Or we need 20 people to lift this thing, how are we gonna recruit 20 people to do something like this. So that's one thing. Another thing is, I always ask for advice and that's a more recent thing because of the scale of our projects, and the politics around our project. I've started lately to form kind of boards of consciousness, or like conscience withing a group of people who I admire. I ask them to be with me on the project, so that I can consult them and make sure that I'm staying in check with my politics. So for instance in Oslo, we were invited to do a permanent public art piece and new waterfront development. And for me, that's a charged situation, it's this huge economic gentrification, charged environment, especially in a city that I don't live in. So I formed a committee of thinkers. Neil Smith was a geographer, passed away a couple of years ago. But Neil Smith, Kobe Metu, a seasoned artist in Brussels who deals with intellectual property, Kendrick Lugan, he's an urban planner and anarchist in Berlin, teaches at Humboldt University, and Amy Belkin, artist from San Francisco. And Amy Belkin wasn't formally on my committee, but she's a confidant. And basically, I felt I needed to run the ideas that we were having about making a public artwork in this context with people who were hyper critical of this kind of a development project. And it was interesting cuz I was on the fence. Should we situate ourselves in this project or should we not? And I was pretty impressed that everyone said, you can decide not to take part in this project or you can do it and try to change. And if you have one foot in this development, you can then talk to people who maybe you never have a chance to talk to like, bankers or mayors of the city, or ministers of agriculture of Norway, we're talking with now. So that gave me the confidence to walk into this new territory, or territory that I was uneasy about. So I think it's, I always say like, your network is your nest egg, or your friends are your best allies. And that's another kind of, it's not a secret but we really just depend on the people we know, and try to keep those relationships really healthy, so that we always have people to fall back on and ask questions, to.
