Ringvorlesung: Sustainability and Compatibility

In the art-compatible farming practice of Tamarind Rossetti and Stephen Wright, sustainability is less about slowing down or speeding up, scaling back or scaling up, than about finding modes of compatibility between disparate rhythms and scales, to bring about a compatible beneficium, a benefit which can be held together with another one in a mutually beneficial arrangement. On the agro-ecological test-site they ran in the Corrèze, La Ferme au Sauvage, they strove for compatible beneficium between the practicalities of farming and teaching at an art academy. In their presentation, they will use the example of their farm-embedded art project to draw some conclusions about the compatibility of art and agriculture, arguing that sustainability depends upon seeing art as the future of agriculture as the future of art.

Vita: Tamarind Rossetti and Stephen Wright are Usership Coordinators (artistic directors) of the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, where their artistic program, One Usership: agriculture is the future of art, draws on an integrated, eco-systemic vision of human and other-than-human artistic and aesthetic agency. This approach stems directly on their experience on a 1:1 scale agroecological test site in the Corrèze called Ferme au Sauvage, growing organic fruits and vegetables, offering farm-to-table meals and farm-to-panel ‘ideaseeding’ workshops, all documented through art. As usership coordinators, they see their role as an opportunity to plant out ideas germinated during their farm experience, transplanting a certain practice of permaculture within an art institution — a reciprocation of creative agency in the broadest sense in order to find out the hard way if art and agriculture are truly compatible.