Åsa Sonjasdotter: Peace with the Earth. Tracing Agricultural Memory – Refiguring Practice. 2017- 2020

Cancelled due to Covid-19

The vast majority of the world’s farms are small or very small. Farms smaller than 2 hectares account for 84 percent of all farms and control only 12 percent of all agricultural land.
The Food and Agriculture Organization. fao.org/family-farming/background/en/2020

Anyone who aims to understand why viruses are becoming more dangerous must investigate the industrial model of agriculture.
Rob Wallace. Big Farms Make Big Flu: Dispatches on influenza, Agribusiness, and the Nature of Science. NUY Press, 2016.

Initiated by visual artist, researcher and amateur plant breeder Åsa Sonjasdotter, in collaboration with practitioners involved in multispecies cultivation, Peace with the Earth revisits histories of agriculture. A long-term enquiry, the project investigates soil, habitat and dwelling histories, in order to challenge and transform long-established cultural narratives of cultivation and ecological thinking.
The project’s title was borrowed from a call to action written in 1940 by two Swedish suffragettes and peace activists: Elisabeth Tamm (1880–1958, an organic farmer one of the first women in parliament) and Elin Wägner (1882-1949, a writer on matters of ecology, suffrage and peace). Their proposal was based on: ‘…a long, hands-on experience of old as well as new agricultural methods and the effect they have on the soil, the animals and on the humans.’[1] Their conclusion was as simple as it was challenging, suggesting that humankind must make peace with Earth, not (only) on Earth. In their view, the reconsideration of humankind’s relation to the land and soil is a prerequisite to solving problems of peacekeeping, maintenance of health and soil, as well as demographic and educational challenges. Eighty years on, their call is alarmingly timely and powerful. Tamm and Wägner not only spotted problems that are still acute, but also proposed solutions for how to reconsider a sustainable relation to soil and the land.
Following in their footsteps, Sonjasdotter investigates the overlooked knowledge and role of smallholder farmers and kitchen-gardeners, which were so often women and children. She points to the potential of cracks, reading between the lines of dominant narratives.

[1] Elisabeth Tamm, Elin Wägner, Fred med jorden, Stockholm, Bonniers, 1940. The pamphlet was translated to English by Katarina Trodden. It was edited by Åsa Sonjasdotter and published by Archive Books, Berlin.

Peace with the Earth was planned to be presented in Dublin between 3 April and 13 June in 2020. It has come as an enormous disappointment to us that the exhibition and related public programming, which was to include cultivation and workshops at various sites in Dublin had to be cancelled due to the Covid-19 outbreak and circumstances beyond our control.  However, being able to produce and disseminate the spring issue of Archive journal (in collaboration with Archive books, Berlin) partially support the overview of the wider scope and Irish context of Åsa Sonjasdotter’s ongoing research.

Peace with the Earth is supported and hosted by various institutions and organisations including: the Baltic Art Centre, Visby; the Museum of Gotland and The Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg in Sweden; The Irish Seed Savers Association, Scarriff; The Céide Fields, Ballycastle; The National Museum of Country Life, Turlough; The UCD School of Archaeology, Dublin; National College of Art and Design (NCAD), Dublin; An Taisce, the National Trust for Ireland; Environmental Education Unit (Green Flag Award Scheme); Goldsmiths University of London, UK and Archive, Berlin, Germany.

The exhibition at Project Arts Centre was informed by a research residency in summer 2018, was planned to be clustered around habitat systems and time perspectives: on broadleaf forests and deeper time; on kale and nurturing multispecies’ relations, polyrhythms and dung heaps; on living and dying well; and on soil time. Various research samples would have been presented, including: organic matter produced from forests (in relation to deeper time space matter); waste from the global trade of goods (in relation to linear economy and narrative of growth); and providing excellent food for compost worms (in relation to soil time and polyrhythms).

In collaboration with Archive Books, the spring issue of Archive journal presents Sonjasdotter’s long-term project that investigates soil, habitat and dwelling histories in order to challenge and transform long-established cultural narratives of farming and gardening. Located in the context of Ireland, the project enquires into small scale and non-extractive cultivation methods.