the farms project

The farms project is an archeological-type dig at my grandparents’ long abandoned farms. I will go in, sort, organize, document, make assumptions, resort, demolish and create large-scale temporary sculptures using every material available to me while recreating my own documentary fiction of this place.

I have long regarded our family farms as potential sites for residency programs. Recently my parents told me they were selling these lands. No one has lived on either for years and the houses have become uninhabitable. Upon hearing they were selling the lands I was struck by a sense of the loss of something big. My thoughts quickly shifted to potentiality and I started dreaming about doing something now—using the land, the houses and everything that has been long abandoned/collected as a reservoir of materials.

I don’t want to simply mine the sites for materials, but I want to approach the sites as a combination of non-scientific archeological digs and earthworks. In their dismantling, I want to turn that act of destruction into greater acts of creation. And through this destruction/creation I will be reinventing the narrative of these farms and my family.

I will document my sortings/creatings daily with video, audio, photography and writings. Both farms are remote, so not many would likely come to the actual site (though they’d be welcomed!). I will install several webcams where people can “visit” me online in real-time and snoop around the farms at will. This website will also act as a way for people to participate in the project beyond simply viewing.

The fun is: there are no facilities or running water. While using high technology to render the site accessible to others, I will be going low-tech just to survive on the land—as my grandparents had to when they first settled there. And even though I will be working on my family farms, my recreated narratives will be rather unsentimental, especially in how I’ll tell the stories—via the internet. While some creations will be immediate and quick, and others completed over the duration of the project, all of them will be temporary.

Keep checking back periodically – the official the farms project website will be up soon. (Well, maybe not soon, as most people think of it).