© Selma Gurbuz
Migrating Seasons
Contributor: Anastasia Eggers
Can a farmers’ almanac become a tool to explore the distorted nature of post-seasonal agricultural practices?
The farmer’s almanac is a traditional calendar documenting the rhythm of the agricultural year including knowledge on sowing dates, tide tables, and weather forecasting. However, due to global trade and the modernization of agricultural technology, the knowledge of this almanac became obsolete or at least out-of-tune, as well as the traditional harvest celebrations and rituals.
Migrating Seasons is an attempt to redraw the farmers’ almanac according to the contemporary post-seasonal world, where the growing, harvesting, and consuming of food is no longer dependent on natural factors. The project looks at agricultural practices and their interdependence with phenomena such as the trans-European movement of workers and goods, international politics, labour rights, and energy supply. Several events representing crucial aspects of modern agriculture are highlighted on the timeline of the year. Can they become the subject of new celebrations and rituals that introduce the invisible realities behind our food system?
During the Seasonal Neighbours group exposition, a first two timelines/rituals were explored:
The Eggplant Relay
Every year during week 44 the "olympic fire" of the aubergine season is passed on from Westland (Netherlands) to Almería (Spain) to mark the switch of the seasons between Europe’s two biggest exporters of aubergines. Looking at how the season is directed by economic aspects, and what are the logistics making this switch possible, the project follows the aubergine season and its pathways and traces in Europe.
Bread and Salt*
On the occasion of the arrival of seasonal workers on Flevoland’s farms, locals reflect on their ideas on temporary habitation in the countryside by collecting objects that will be presented to the workers as a welcoming gift. The exhibition in Z33 was an in-between station for the objects that will be passed on to the workers at the beginning of the season in 2022.
*Bread and Salt (Bulgarian: хляб и сол / Polish: chlebem I solą / Russian: Хлеб-соль) is a welcoming ceremony in several cultures that is mostly know by its Slavic names. Guests are welcomed with bread and salt, bread representing wealth and prosperity, and salt is associated with friendship.
Biography Anastasia Eggers Made possible by a grant from the Creative Industries Fund NL.
CHŁOPI
Contributor: Karolina Michalik
How can I explore representations of “Polskość” (Polishness) through the lense of migratory seasonal labour in the European countryside?
In Poland, harvest festivals called Dożynki were celebrated as early as the 16th century. Originally a folkloric event, the rural communities celebrated a year of harsh labour on the field with dance, songs, and art; specifically the weaving of a wreath (a wieniec) in the form of a crown from local grain harvests.
Looking to the contemporary forms of these celebrations as a public representation of the modern Polish rural identity, I observed folklore being used as a colourful tool of political agency: enabling and maintaining a selective interpretation of the past and present based on nostalgic, religious and land-rooted patriotism. Contemporary versions of rural culture, including migratory seasonal work, are excluded from this narrative.
My goal is to create a wieniec, that will be qualified to enter the competition for The Most Beautiful Wieniec Dożynkowy at the annual Presidential Dożynki hosted in Warsaw. This creation process is an attempt to broaden the folkloric representations of contemporary Polish rural identity; a hybrid construct entangled between strong notions of tradition and locality, and Poland’s engagement within the complexities of the European agricultural system. By doing so, it also seeks to debate the role of traditional artefacts as democratic tools for representing multidirectional narratives of exchange between history, surroundings, and communities.
Exposition: Z33 (Hasselt, BE) - 30 January 2022 > 17 April 2022
At the Seasonal Neighbours group exhibition in Z33 I presented the metal skeleton of the wieniec that will enter in the Presidential Dożynki 2022. The “architecture of the body” is one of the voting criteria (0-5 points) which refers to the overall form of the wieniec. While adhering to the guidelines provided in the contest rulebook, the form of this wieniec symbolizes my interpretation of work in contemporary European agriculture.
Biography Karolina Michalik
Image of the Romanian house of our colleague’s aunt, as send by Facebook messenger.
Houses for a Seasonal Neighbourhood
Contributors: Maximiliaan Royakkers & Ciel Grommen
How to transform a Flemish suburban house into a residency for seasonal migrants?
How are/can rural conditions in western and eastern Europe (be) linked?
After picking strawberries in a greenhouse in Hoogstraten (BE) for two weeks, we decided to visit our former colleagues in their hometown Maneuti. The Romanian families proudly showed us their brand new houses that were built thanks to the money of their foreign labour. The houses, sampling bits and pieces of western suburban typologies in shape and lay-out, are inhabited in a peculiar way to us, out of tune with the lifestyle we would normally expect in such a lay-out.
To understand this contrast between the production of space and form, and the way of living, it helped us to look at the traditional houses in the Romanian countryside. There we learned that the house and the space around it unfold into overlapping places between public and private, inside and outside, allowing for a convivial coexistence with neighbours and livestock.
These observations lead us to question the built environment of the Flemish countryside and its typical housing typology, the fermette. By applying a logic of appropriation of form and space we will imagine a residence for migrant workers, inspired by our observations in Romania’s countryside and fed through conversations about the built environment and daily life in different Eastern European countries.
Exposition: Z33 (Hasselt, BE) - 30 January 2022 > 17 April 2022
For the Seasonal Neighbours group exhibition in Z33 our imaginations unravelled in a model of a prototypical street of the Flemish countryside. Over the course of the exhibition, conversations with different stakeholders (farmers, policy makers, seasonal labourers etc.) were condensed into a series of models; transforming, cutting and editing fermettes.
Many thanks to Steve and Leen from Hoezaerenbosh in Hoogstraten to give us a seasonal job and becoming our friends, to our colleagues Elena, Adrian, Cornel, Vasilis, Patrick, Marek, David, Ornella, ... to share so many stories and collegial moments and to host us in Romania, to Stebo and Samenlevingsopbouw to exchange their insights, and many more.
Showing the room and telling someone
Contributor: Jonathan De Maeyer
How do I react to a total surrender to work in the field, without a sense of time?
No one is more deeply rooted in the landscape than the farmer. He cultivates and inhabits the landscape on a very local level. It is precisely this position that makes him exceptionally strange. A distinction arose between those who inhabit the landscape and those who recognize and understand it. Everyone who lives in the countryside understands his living environment, but no one is as entwined with the landscape as the farmer. What place do seasonal workers have in this story? They inhabit and work a foreign landscape for a certain duration. What connotation do they have with the seasons?
Between the home and the workplace of seasonal workers, a linear figure emerges. Between a home, a house and work, there is an annual displacement. The home, the living facilities on the farms in Belgium belongs as a consequence to the work on the land. I am interested in the connection between the work in the field (and the incidental living on the farm) and the home far away. What's it like to have two residences? One that you are emotionally attached to and a second that has a purely practical function.
For a long time I have been following lines in the landscape. Visible lines form the appearance of a landscape. Invisible lines contribute to emotional or even political approaches to the environment. The invisible line I follow in Showing the room and telling someone is the line of communication that connects two landscapes through the phone conversations of seasonal workers and their home. Both at home and at work, they describe their environment and its state to each other.
The line that catches my attention, I try to document. The line itself is invisible, but it activates the environment. Into that activation I wanted to immerse myself. For me, this was a new way of approaching my subject. From the moment I decided to join the field, I suddenly found myself in the middle of the landscape that I usually observe from a safe distance. I try to understand the landscape by becoming part of it, by observing and documenting it from the inside.
During the Seasonal Neighbours exhibition at Z33, I used a visual diary to tell the story of the picker in the landscape. What is it like to spend months in function of the apple and pear harvest? What stereotypical, nostalgia-tinged images do we have in our heads of the - by now fiercely industrialized - fruit picking? What is it like to perform the job no one wants? How do I react to a total surrender to work in the field, without a sense of time?
Biography Jonathan De Maeyer
Text and photos: Jonathan De Maeyer
Pictures by Ode WindelsPlaylist van de pluk
Contributor: Mona Thijs
Playlist van de pluk (‘Playlist of the picking season’) is an investigation into the poetry of multilingualism and a search for music that is meaningful to seasonal workers during the picking process.
In the summer of 2020, I spent two weeks picking apples on the plantation of a fruit farm in Borgloon (BE), my hometown. I was touched by the multilingualism: on the one hand it moved me how language confusion sometimes led to poetry, on the other hand I was confronted with the prejudices that the lack of a common language brought. In addition, while picking, there was always music, crackling from a box, that transcended the language differences.
In the months that followed, I wondered:
Can I find a form that embraces the mother tongues of the seasonal workers?
A form that tells them their languages are welcome,
a form that tells them they are even needed to create layered stories?
So in the summer of 2021 I stopped at several fruit farms, using the House for Seasonal Neighbours (created in 2018 by Ciel Grommen and Maximiliaan Royakkers) as a mobile studio. Together with a Bulgarian and a Polish interpreter, I asked the seasonal workers what music was meaningful to them while working here in Belgium. Behind the music a field of stories and meanings emerged, which I want to process into new narratives in the form of radio shows. A space for multilingualism, in which I make audible the questions that I keep asking myself during the research process:
Where does poetry appear in the absence of a common language?
Is being able to relinquish your own language a privilege?
When does music become political?
What happens when you surrender to another language?
De radioshows are broadcastes on the local radio station of Wellen (radio VRW) on Saturday the 5th, the 12th and the 19th of March 2022, from 9 to 10 am.
Listen here online, as long as the exhibition ‘Our Invisible Hands’ in Z33 (Hasselt, BE) lasts (30 /1/ 2022 > 17 /4/ 2022)
Biography Mona ThijsThanks to Raymond Gemels (chairman of and technician at Radio VRW), Paul Thoelen (presenter and programmer at Radio VRW), Chris and Anja Groven (owners of fruit wholesale company Grofrubel), Christophe and Shirley (owners of fruit wholesale company Billen), Krista and Stefan (Massonet fruit company), Joanna Koziol (interpreter Polish-Dutch and Dutch-Polish during the discussion evenings in the fruit companies), Dimana Markovska (interpreter Bulgarian-Dutch and Dutch-Bulgarian during the discussion evenings in the fruit companies)