If you’re anywhere near Connecticut in the USA, the exhibition taking place at Franklin Street Works is worth checking out: a set of collaborative art projects, designed by multiple artists with unique perspectives. Amy Lipton, curator for ecoartspace, is leading a team of artists in a project titled Digging Deeper. This audience-interactive installation, according to the ecoartspace blog, will bring together “inventive projects around agriculture from greenhouses to urban furniture gardens to canning and color-coding vegetables to making cheese from goat’s milk.” Some of these projects will approach farming as an artistic form, and as a form of activism.
The Digging Deeper installation includes a farm stand, seedling production, a garden, and the Habitat for Artists structure outdoors, as well as a group exhibition indoors. One of the interlinked concepts being explored by this installation is co-evolution, a topic explored by Bethany Fancher in the pamphlet for one aspect of this exhibition, the Franklin Street Heritage Garden & Farmstand. Fancher analyzes the war rhetoric often deployed when writing about germs, bacteria, and microscopic forms of life–for instance, the proclamation that a soap “Kills 99.9% of germs.”
What’s the solution to this violent rhetoric? Fancher suggests a recognition of the health benefits bacteria can provide might be a step in the right direction. Suggesting some health-conscious ways of incorporating fermented foods into our diet, Fancher writes, “we begin to get comfortable with the idea that microbes are a part of our existence and well-being. It is not all disease and virus; these attitudes toward micro-organisms are good reminders that concepts of power as violence can shift towards non-violence as power, even at levels invisible to the human eye.”
For more on Digging Deeper, and the broader collaboration titled Strange Invitation, visit the Franklin Works website here.