Hi all,
the opening reception for DIY happens this Wednesday, October 16th, from 4-6 pm @ the Liu Institute fro Gl0bal Issues which is located @ 6476 NW Marine Drive @ The University of British Columbia.
The show will be up until December 13th, 2013. If you get a chance to make it out for a look, I'd love to hear what you think! Hope to see you @ the opening or sometime soon x Scot
Here's a little more info about the show -
DIY- a statement
Part manifesto and part how-to manual, DIY is a series of linked video works that combine old fashioned
recipes, the latest cultural theories, guerilla gardening tactics, situationist
performance antics, wiki-wisdom and homespun logic to promote global
biodiversity and local food sovereignty.
The videos follow a black clad, ski-mask
wearing figure called ‘The Activist’, as she sows seeds, picks vegetables, digs
holes, performs a series of backyard interventions, and most importantly,
preserves food for the coming winter. Titles including Digger, Chopper,
Selfish Gene Theory, playfully explore the mystique
of food production, the perceived militancy of
guerilla gardening and the inevitable bonds between culture and nature.
In Terminator, the ‘Activist’, in a symbolic act of resistance against the forces
of ‘terminator’ seed technology, deposits a land mine of heirloom seeds,
helping to turn an ordinary city lot into a potential urban sanctuary. Over
–Extension Theory finds her sawing and sorting
firewood and considering needs and wants in the real world and the symbolic
world. In Time is Ripe and The Process, she cans
peaches and tomatoes and wonders about the relationships between global
logistics, food processing and genetic well being. In The Race to the Bottom, ‘Green-washing’, Game theory, and Memetic theory are played out in the
middle of a GMO cornfield and In The Great Divide, The Activist ponders social inequality, the politics of poverty
and the responsibilities of the individual.
Locally, the last few years has witnessed a
proliferation of urban farm markets, community gardens, and an inspiring
increase in the number of individual consumers who are rejecting their role in
the corporate food chain. Downturns in the global economy and climate change
fears have prompted many consumers to become more aware of where their food
comes from and what it actually takes to keep the supply lines open. Of course,
for many people on the planet, the contingencies and consequences of a tenuous
food chain are nothing new.
But ‘Big Food’ isn’t letting go of its
market share willingly; the household cupboard of the West is still contested
ground and the kitchen table of ‘Developing Nations’ is a potential
battlefield. Chemical companies continue to pump out toxic cleaning agents
alongside their new “green” line of products, “factory farms” may be going
organic, but they still practice destructive monoculture on a mass scale, and
Agri-business giants continue to develop strains of GMO and non- reproducing
seeds (all the while, trying to make it illegal for individuals to propagate
and maintain heritage seed banks).
Throughout history, populations have been
managed or manipulated via the control of the food supply. In a post 9-11 environment where ‘do it
yourself’ activism is often equated with threatening behaviour, it’s not too hard to imagine that
individuals attempting to thwart
state authorized food production practices might be labeled as eco-terrorists.
In fact, Agri-Business giant Monsanto has been implicated in the burning of crops and the attempt to dictate
farming practices in a number of
countries where it considers itself to have propriety rights over the methods
of food production.
DIY imagines a multi-national, corporate
driven, ‘green’ war which classifies guerilla gardening as an act of terrorism,
drives home canning underground, calling it a threat to the stability of the
fair market economy, spins backyard composting into a public bio-hazard, or
claims that seed saving is bio- terrorism. While open warfare against Food
Sovereignty hasn’t been declared yet, a good gardener always plans ahead. As
the ‘Preppers’ (modern day hipster survivalists) like to say, “Resistance is
Fertile!”
DIY
is both a meditation on cultural and corporeal survival and a crash course in
sustainable living, giving you everything you need to start disentangling
yourself from the corporate food chain and learning how to grow, sow and share
in the place where you live.
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