Amy Franceschini: Presence as Practice ReGrowing A Living Culture: Poetics, Praxis, and Performance
Wednesday, February 5, 2025 4:30-6pm VCAM Screening Room Haverford College
So many things seem to be in motion these days. The ungrounding becomes quotidian in ways that are often difficult to describe, to remember what things used to be like. Or were they ever that way? As we track a shifting culture, we also wonder what of the present time we wish to preserve, and what we might seek instead to reinvent or transform.
The arts of communality and compassion are ever more urgently needed, even required to live. This series offers seeds and possibilities for (re)growing a living culture, through listening, being, feeling, engaging with our senses and each other. What are the elements needed to extricate ourselves from the fragmentary polycrisis of our time? How do we generate these elements if not through poetry, art, collective dreaming, a longing for something better, fairer, more “whole”?
As we gravitate toward resilience and a path forward, we keep a close eye on history so as not to rebuild the very structures that got us here to begin with. How might ideas such as just transition, reparations, regenerative agriculture, deep listening, more than human rights, and the embrace of premodern and Indigenous lifeways guide us in this work?
This semester, the Bi-Co Environmental Studies Department continues a series of talks, workshops, gatherings, performances, and dinners—open to all students and faculty across departments—to explore what it might mean to grow a living culture inside what often feels like a dying one. Where we, too, can be part of the growth, roots spreading out, of something to ground us.
This spring, we reground our practice in such concepts as mindfulness, deep listening, historical research, socially engaged art, working across timescales and land and water-scapes, with visits by artists and thinkers including Amy Franceschini, James Allister Sprang, and Annea Lockwood.
AMY FRANCESCHINI is an artist who draws from her training as a photojournalist and designer to extend a creative practice into the world of people, places, and objects. Amy grew up amidst the divergent agricultural projects of her father, an industrial farmer in the San Joaquin Valley of California, and her mother, who owned and operated a small-scale bio-dynamic farm. Amy is interested in the notion of “farming” as a relational practice, where dailyness and seasonality, orality, ritual, myth and an acute awareness of one’s bioregion organize our collective imaginaries and how we live together.
In 1995, Amy founded Futurefarmers, a collaborative platform to consider the social, political and environmental organization of space. Futurefarmers are artists, architects, computer programmers, farmers, writers and anthropologists who form situated working groups informed by the contexts in which they work. They find themselves entangled in overlapping lines of inquiry in the commons, hi/low tech horizons and a critical view on the tools we create. Based in enmeshed acts of wandering and material processes, Futurefarmers interweave their practices to cultivate public life in place. Through time and the practiced presence of Futurefarmers, the meeting place of people and materials transform from provisional arrangements into durable forms and functions of their works. Futurefarmers have been the lead artists of Flatbread Society (2010-2018), a permanent public farm and community baking house in Oslo, they have been artist/researchers in residence at the University of California in Santa Cruz (2018-2020) and the lead artists on the sea-faring Seed Journey (2016- 2018+).
Amy received her M.F.A from Stanford University (2002) and her Bachelor in Fine Art in Photography from San Francisco State University (1992). She is the recipient of a 2010 Guggenheim Fellowship, a 2017 Herb Alpert Award and is currently visiting faculty in the Master of Eco-Social Design at the Free University in Bolzano, Italy.
Collectively, Futurefarmers have published A Variation on Powers of Ten, Sternberg Press, 2012, For Want of a Nail, MIT Press, 2018. Exhibitions include Solomon R. Guggenheim, 2010 (solo), New York Museum of Modern Art 2008, Whitney Museum of American Art, Biennial 2000, Sharjah Biennale 2017, and the Taipei Biennale 2018.
Sponsored by the Bi-Co Environmental Studies Department, Distinguished Visitor Fund at Haverford College, VCAM, and the Hurford Center for the Humanities.
