Will there still be sugar after the rebellion?
text by Maja & Reuben Fowkes, exhibition curators
Potential Agrarianisms sets out to diversify agriculture and pluralise its histories, recovering suppressed peas- ant pasts and activating their unrealised possibilities, destabilising urban-rural dichotomies, repairing the disconnect with the natural world and restoring caring and reciprocal relationships to the soils and plants that nourish us. Uncovering its origins in colonial plantations and embeddedness in the operations of extractive capitalism, the exhibition explores alternatives to the globalised system of industrial agriculture with its patent formula of chemical additives, noxious pesticides and genetically modified seeds, vigorously cultivated with fossil fuel machinery. The rediscovery and reimagining of attentive relations to the land challenges the relentless expansion of intensive farming which promised a new age of abundance, but by depleting the natural vitality of the soil, endangering biodiversity and contributing to climate change now undermines its own aims. Drawing on feminist, postsocialist, black, indigenous and beyond-human perspectives, the artists in this exhibition propose reparative and future oriented land reforms for a just social and ecological transition.
Potential agrarianisms. Will there still be sugar after the rebellion?, exhibition view, Kunsthalle Bratislava 2021
The planetary scale of the transformation of agricultural methods and rural life since the colonisation of the Americas and onset of industrial modernity is epitomised by the parallel trajectories of sugar cane and sugar beet, whose potential histories are reactivated by artists in the show. Decolonial theorist Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s observation that ‘potential history does not mend worlds after violence but rewinds to the moment before the violence occurred and sets off from there’ also speaks to the entwined social and environmental predicaments of the land. Artists in the exhibition rewind to the moment before the establishment of monocultural plantations, before a patchwork of biodiverse farms was ploughed over, erasing centuries of situated plant knowledges, and before genetically modified corn replaced varieties cultivated by First Nations to suggest that another agrarian path was and is still possible. These art practices infer that in order to establish reparatory procedures, it is necessary to understand the complexity and interconnectedness of agrarian struggles in which all terrestrials, the flourishing of plants, the vitality of the soil and wellbeing of Earth are at stake.
Potential agrarianisms. Will there still be sugar after the rebellion?, exhibition view, Kunsthalle Bratislava 2021
The realisation that the potential histories of post-1989 transition in Eastern Europe could have followed a different course is another underlying stream of the exhibition. This arises from Ilona Németh’s collaborative research and editorial project Eastern Sugar that outlined the demise of the region’s sugar industry as a result of neoliberal marketization and financial opportunism. Building on the momentous revolutionary history of the region and reactivating its empowering legacies of peas- ant revolts, Potential Agrarianisms points to a convergence with the multiple forms of rebellion required to address the environmental crisis, in which intensive agriculture is inextricably implicated. Anticipating that ‘rebellion will come,’ the protagonists of Animal Farm nevertheless wonder, ‘will there still be sugar after the rebellion?’, reveal- ing the tension between existential anxiety about the imminent future and preparedness to bring about change.
Reflecting the plurality of agrarian histories and potential futures, there is more than one way into the exhibition and a multitude of connections between the works. The entry to the left takes visitors straight into the here and now of the Central European countryside, where the local traditions and the contested legacies
of socialism collide with the impact of economic globalisation and climate change on rural communities. The alternative entry on the right leads into the
deep histories of the Anthropocene, the momentous connections between European colonialism and capitalist extractivism, and the entangled destines of all terrestrials in an epoch of social and ecological crisis. These two pathways meet at the apex of the exhibition space, where the reactivation of indigenous knowledges intersects with experiments in non-hierarchical and anti-capitalist ecological practices. A third route into the exhibition leads through the central space, a site
of planetary struggles between the intensification of technological, economic and political control of the land and the green shoots of agrarian rebellion.
Potential agrarianisms. Will there still be sugar after the rebellion?, exhibition view, Kunsthalle Bratislava 2021
POTENTIAL AGRARIANISMS
Will there still be sugar after the rebellion?
Melanie Bonajo, Gerard Ortín Castellví,
Anetta Mona Chişa, Annalee Davis, Ferenc Gróf & Jean-Baptiste Naudy, Oto Hudec, Marzia Migliora, MyVillages, Ilona Németh, Uriel Orlow,
Prabhakar Pachpute, Alicja Rogalska
Curated by Maja & Reuben Fowkes
Kunsthalle Bratislava
August 21–October 31, 2021
