OF FURROWS & LANDS IN HARPS as an extra-ordinary architectural structure, home to an experiemental instrument, a bakeoven, and a gathering table, and a public program that unfolds over three years time.
Three wooden structures meet in a cluster of past, present and future. One “silo” a baking oven and kitchen. A second “silo” serves as an open gathering space and a third “silo” hosts Hum Stone. The glass roof of each structure serves as portals for light to travel throughout the space.
The three spaces of the building come together as a multi-functional space and marvel, a bakehouse to host workshops, performances, beekeeping, seed saving, baking, leisure, practices that adapt ancient traditions as a means to carry lineages of thought and action into new forms.
Like the feral Don Quixote, we share his apprehensions of the coming tools. We pause, hesitate and ask questions of these new tools - who makes them, for whom, by whom and the conditions under which they are made. We ask how these new technologies will shape us. While we can never forecast all of the outcomes of our invented tools, we can take our time in making them and we can create spaces to reflect on the tools we have made and choose what tools we need for the future.
In Norse mythology, the cosmos was turned by the one who turns the mill and through whom the timing of the seasons was ordered.
The centerpiece of this project is an unconventional, sound making instrument made from hand carved millstones. In one of the three adjoined rooms, a 5-foot, millstone sits upon a rotating table. A series of lines and dashes rotating out from the center are carved into the stone creating the “common” (or mothership) score for each composer to engage with. Under the table is a series of hanging arms, pipes and hooks that can be “programmed” in various ways by the composers/musicians.
Futurefarmers worked closely with the composers/instrument builders, a stone carver, a team of engineers and a machinist to invent and tune this playable sculpture. The millstone summons age old myths and Futurefarmers’ transformation of its use invites new ones.
The centerpiece of this project is an unconventional, sound making instrument made from hand carved millstones. In one of the three adjoined rooms, a 5-foot, millstone sits upon a rotating table. A series of lines and dashes rotating out from the center are carved into the stone creating the “common” (or mothership) score for each composer to engage with. Under the table is a series of hanging arms, pipes and hooks that can be “programmed” in various ways by the composers/musicians.
Futurefarmers worked closely with the composers/instrument builders, a stone carver, a team of engineers and a machinist to invent and tune this playable sculpture. The millstone summons age old myths and Futurefarmers’ transformation of its use invites new ones.
Over the course of three years a seasonal program will unfold. Three composers have been commissioned to create a score and perform Hum Stone. Each composer begins with a 2 1/2 foot, blank millstone. They are invited to design a pattern that is carved into the face and edges of the stone. In Fall 2021, each millstone is placed on a 5’ diameter, circle of earth and covered by a glass enclosure. The earth surrounding the millstones is sown with heritage grains provided by local farmer, Don Lewis. These three small pods dot the landscape around the main architectural structure – laying in wait to be played.
Each Autumn, one composer will install their 3-foot millstone upon the mother stone and “program” the understory of the table and enact a public performance.
Lead Artist
Futurefarmers
Amy Franceshini
Lode Vranken
Michael Swaine
Lead Architect
Lode Vranken
Futurefarmers
Amy Franceshini
Lode Vranken
Michael Swaine
Lead Architect
Lode Vranken
Composers
Walter Kitindu
Guillermo Galindo
Annea Lockwood
Walter Kitindu
Guillermo Galindo
Annea Lockwood
Curator
Tara Anne Dalbow
Futurefarmers
Futurefarmers is a group of diverse practitioners aligned through an open practice of making work that is relevant to the time and place surrounding them. Since 1995, their design studio serves as a platform to support art projects, an artist in residence program and their research interests. Futurefarmers use various media to create work that has the potential to destabilize logics of "certainty". They deconstruct food policies, public transportation, rural farming networks to visualize and understand their intrinsic logics. Through this disassembly they find new narratives and reconfigurations that propose alternatives to the principles that once dominated these systems. Their work often provides a playful entry point and tools for participants to gain insight into deeper fields of inquiry – not only to imagine, but to participate in and initiate change in the places we live.
Futurefarmers create temporary schools, tours, large-scale exhibitions and public artworks. In 2008, they created a proposal to the City of San Francisco to adopt an urban agriculture program based on the historic Victory Garden programs. This work was exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in 2007 and in the following year a pilot program was adopted by the city of San Francisco that resulted in a large demonstration garden planted in front of city hall, new legislation to support urban agriculture and the formation of a Food Policy Council.
Collectively, their work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New York Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim, New York Hall of Sciences and the Walker Art Center. Founding member, Amy Franceschini is a 2009 recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship, Cultural Innovation Fund, Herb Alpert Award for Visual Arts and the Graham Foundation.
Lode Vranken
Lode has been practicing architecture internationally since 1993. He received his masters in a UN course on Human Settlements + Architectural Philosophy from the KU Leuven, Belgium and has taught as a NED delegate at The Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain and at the Asian Institute for Technology in Bangkok, Thailand.
Lode co-founded the research coalition, De Bouwerij in Belgium that focuses on social living structures for passive houses and zero energy construction. His research is focused on new concepts for small, self-sufficient living units; folding buildings, kinetic structures, rolling shelters all with zero carbon dioxide emission. He is also a partner of Dear Pigs in Belgium and member of The Ghent School for Metaphysics.
Walter Kitindu
Kitundu creates kinetic sculptures and sonic installations, develops public works, builds (and performs on) extraordinary musical instruments, while studying and documenting the natural world. He is the inventor of a family of Phonoharps, multi-stringed instruments made from record players that rely on the turntable’s sensitivity to vibration. Kitundu has created hand-built record players driven by the wind and rain, fire and earthquakes, birds, light, and the force of ocean waves.
Kitundu is a 2008 MacArthur Fellow and has performed and been in residence at art centers and science museums internationally. He has collaborated with the renowned Kronos Quartet, bassist Meshell Ndegeocello, the electronic music duo Matmos, and the legendary Marshall Allen of Sun Ra’s Arkestra - in venues from Carnegie Hall to a high school library in Egilstaadir, Iceland
Guillermo Galindo
Guillermo redefines the conventional boundaries of music and the practice of music composition. His broad interpretation of concepts such as musical form, time perception, music notation, sound as metaphorical language and his original use of sonic devices span through a wide spectrum of artistic works involving symphonic works, chamber acoustic composition, computer interaction, electro-acoustic music, opera, instrument building, three dimensional installation and live improvisation.
Galindo’s work has been performed and shown in documenta 14, on CNN, the BBC (London), The Nation Magazine (US), NPR City Arts and Lectures and All Things Considered, York Times, Swiss Radio (Switzerland) and many others.
Annea Lockwood
A composer and academic musician whose work often involves recordings of natural found sounds. During the 1960s she collaborated with sound poets, choreographers and visual artists, and also created a number of works
such as the Glass Concerts which initiated her lifelong fascination with timbre and newsound sources. In synchronous homage to Christian Barnard’s pioneering heart transplants, Lockwood began a series of Piano
Transplants (1969-82) in which defunct pianos were burned, drowned, beached, and planted in an English garde
THE BARNS ART CENTER 736 SOUTH DRIVE, HOPEWELL JUNCTION NY, 12533
