About

Seed Mast: Arrange (2017)

The exhibition Futurefarmers: Arrange highlights specific projects from the past 23 years of Futurefarmers work and attempts to place the group into the canon of important socially engaged artists and designers. Arrange highlights key thematic threads within the collective’s practice and the viewer is thrust into the world of Futurefarmers where, like a small ecosystem, their projects intertwine art, science, design and the environment. The exhibition title harks to an inherent resistance to the typical retrospective exhibition model and also the collective’s interest in arrangement, organization, and non-hierarchical cataloguing structures. The viewer, guided through the exhibition by professional actors—Messengers—sees art objects act as props to the stories, interpretations, and phantoms of Futurefarmers’ past projects through a scripted, performative experience. The exhibition can be understood as an experience that grasps the temporal and interstitial moments of dialogue, conversation, performance, and collaboration - processes that are deeply rooted in the work of Futurefarmers.

For the exhibition, Seed Mast is re-arranged in the form of flotsam and jetsam in the wake of Seed Journey. Messengers rehearse the telling and re-telling of the journey around the wood and grain assembly.

At the closing of Futurefarmers: Arrange, Futurefarmers together with Messengers and audience, rehearsed a traditional sea shanty and spiritual: Roll the old chariot along. Participants rehearsed with song and whistling.