Futurefarmers: Out of Place, in Place

Futurefarmers: Out of Place, in Place is organized by Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and curated by Lucía Sanromán, director of visual arts.

Founded in San Francisco in 1995, Futurefarmers is a partnership of artists, designers, architects, seafarers, sailmakers, farmers, shortwave radio operators, seed historians, bakers, scientists, and more. The internationally renowned collective takes a playful, inquiry-based approach to art making that spans multiple disciplines and ways of inhabiting the world, from sailing and farming to environmental design and DIY scientific experimentation. Their ecologically-conscious projects provoke audiences to question the many ways that humans attempt to intervene in nature, or fruitlessly imagine themselves as separate from it.

Always experimental, Futurefarmers engages in a form of social sculpture, a concept that activates art’s potential to intercede in societal structures. A project will often begin by deploying a “relational object,” a piece that may look like a functional sculpture but whose main purpose is to inspire curiosity, and to detonate unexpected moments and interactions. These charismatic objects emerge from relationships facilitated by the research process. Futurefarmers come together around materials, skills, and knowledge, and this making-together is itself the artwork—a performance of active research and experience-sharing that encourages bottom-up responses to the conservation and redistribution of resources and offers sustainable alternatives to existing systems, all while embracing improvisation, intuition, and group thinking. The resulting artworks are processes that, while often useful, are always unpredictable and poetic.

Futurefarmers: Out of Place, in Place surveys ten Bay Area and international projects that are key to understanding the art collective’s practice, concepts, and methodologies. The exhibition also exemplifies YBCA’s commitment to presenting, in the display context of an art gallery, social and participatory art processes that happen in public space over long or short periods of time.

Over the course of this exhibition, one of YBCA’s galleries is a stage for the creation of Speculative Machine (2018), a hypothetical fog-making and fog-harvesting device. This is a collective inquiry in which Futurefarmers, invited guests, and other participants utilize a collection of materials to be used in the creation of a movement—understood physically and politically—or a fog community. For Futurefarmers, fog is an apt metaphor for the confusion or multiplication of vision, the coming together and dispersal of bodies, and the extension of the visible and the invisible beyond sight. The gallery features a large wooden platform that recalls a stage and serves as a site for experiments and rehearsals. Other “protagonists” include a 1895 S-5 Singer sewing machine said to have fabricated conveyor belts to move earth in the building of the Hoover Dam and five canvas sails hanging from the ceiling that wait to be used, along with a stack of Monterey pine.

Futurefarmers occupy the gallery through to the exhibition’s end, making constant alterations and additions. A series of public programs and monthly gatherings punctuates the inquiry and invites guests to reflect on related themes. The remaining programs in the series are:

Galileo’s Smoking Club
Sundays, July 8, August 12), 4–6pm

Monthly gatherings include discussions on Galileo, “electromagic,” rehearsals for Sea to Sutro, workshops, and more.

Speculative Machine
Thursday, Jun 21, 5–7pm

The origin of chess and the origin of the compass are said to have had their root in a single divination tool from first century China. In a similar exercise of serendipity, can we create a weather system inside YBCA? As an experiment in situational intelligence, a constrained number of materials and time frames will guide Futurefarmers with musician Yasi Perera and guests in a perceptual enactment of fog making.

Electromagic Fog
Tuesday, July 19, 5–7pm

Trans-universal constellation bolwerK combines parascientific history, anthropology, and technology to introduce participants to the electromagnetic spectrum and how radio and farming metaphors intertwine. Hosted by Marthe Van Dessel of Futurefarmers, and electronic musician Yasi Perera.

Sea to Sutro
Saturday, August 4
Begin at YBCA, end at Mount Sutro

A one-day procession where choreographed groups of people move through the streets of San Francisco as a metaphorical body of “fog” rolling through the city. This “fog body” clad in sailcloth uniforms will disassemble and reassemble along a predetermined trajectory. The movement of this “fog body” draws from the iconic movement of fog associated with San Francisco summers, as well as the forced dispersal of bodies during political demonstrations. Futurefarmers will work with Elaine Bucholtz, artist and associate professor at Massachusetts College of Art and Design, to choreograph the procession, and filmmaker Jeff Warrin and artist Jin Zhu will film it. 

Futurefarmers: Out of Place, in Place is made possible, in part, by the National Endowment for the Arts. Support is provided by the Changing the Ratio Circle of Advisors: Abundance Foundation, Berit Ashla, Diana Cohn, EMIKA Fund, Jennifer C. Haas Fund, La Mar SF, Rekha Patel, Catalina Ruiz-Healy and Jonathan Kevles, Vicki Shipkowitz, and Meg Spriggs. YBCA Exhibitions are made possible, in part, by The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Panta Rhea Foundation, Mellon/American Council of Learned Societies Public Fellows Program, and Meridee Moore and Kevin King. YBCA Programs are made possible, in part, by The James Irvine Foundation, with additional funding by National Endowment for the Arts, Grosvenor, and members of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. Yerba Buena Center for the Arts is grateful to the City of San Francisco for its ongoing support.