Living with my own Idea - Change your self
We kept exploring what it means to design on a situated context. For the second part of the seminar we get to work on what means to use bodies as context. You can expand your set of possibilities by working with others, realising that it won’t be a limitation but a requirement when designing from a 1PP. By embodying our own ideas, we were able to realise that by acknowledging your self will helps us to know what are we lacking. In order to follow my interests and try to have better understanding of them I decided to become a city farmer for one day. On the following video you'll get an idea of how was my day.
A day being a City Farmer
With the aid of my magic machine I went around the city of Barcelona planting food seeds and collecting some cuttings of plants. I decided to intentionally create an overlapping layout of videos to show how, compared to how peaceful farming is in rural areas, farming in a city was chaotic and stressful. It affected my experience and I wanted to represent better how this possible future could be. On the other hand I also got to connect more with nature even though I faced the limitations that a city offers. Which gave me some kind of hope thinking that it could even be possible to merge these two worlds.
When I started my day I tried to prepare a bag with the necessary things to farm. The thing is that when I got to a plant store to buy some seeds I realised that November is not a good season to plant many vegetables. This was the first problem I had to face. I ended up buying some radish seeds which were almost the only plant that would grow now. Also when I was about to plant the first seeds I realised that I didn't bring with me any shovel or anything similar. So trying to solve my problems with the things I had available I refused to buy a shovel and did it with my hands, as you can see on the video. At the beginning this made me feel gross and very uncomfortable, the soil was dry and hard and it was pretty difficult to dig in. But as time went by, I was feeling that I was getting closer to truly embody the role of a farmer. I was eating and taking notes with my dirty hands but it didn’t bother me anymore. This soil in my hands somehow kept me grounded to the experiment and made me realize that concrete is everywhere and how we are easily disconnected from mother earth and what it means to actually feed all of us in a city.
I remember a lot of things that Jonathan Michin was talking to us about in the previous weeks. And how hard it is to work the land. I also realised how important it is to keep track of everything that I was doing, so I dropped pins on every place I planted some seeds and also where I got cuttings. I'm also using an app called iNaturalist to identify the species that I've collected. In terms of finding plants to get a cutting, I've realised that most of the public plants on the streets are trees and I haven’t thought much about it before. I ended up getting cuttings from big pots on the terraces of restaurants and stores. What got me thinking about how wasted terraces are. Restaurants could have their own microfarms in order to produce their own food, and it would save us a lot of transportation. In my design spaces I was more focused on using all the potential that rooftops have in Barcelona to grow food, but thanks to this 1PP approach I thought of new ways of cultivating food.
I also found it very curious the moment I had when I got into a bus to get to Audrey. I told Angel that I was cheating, because I was going with the bus and not walking around to plant on every surface that I would see available. But when I said it out loud I realised why it would be cheating when a city farmer doesn’t exist and that I was creating the parameters of how it works by doing it. So if I'm a city farmer and in the city I take the bus, how would it be to have specific paths on the city with crops on the sides, and buses would be just like the basket for mushrooms, but the city farmers would go inside and cultivate in a more organic futuristic way.
I had some moments that I was feeling very hopeless and useless. Because even though I pinned the places where I planted the seeds I wasn't sure if they would remain safe and eventually grow. I started to don't think of the logical way of farming a city and tossed seeds on the streets. Trying to unlock other ways made me feel more dreamy and hopeful. For instance, what would happen with the seeds that I've tossed on the sewers? Would the seeds go somewhere else and maybe bring food to other people? Maybe not in the way of self-sufficiency that I thought, but what about if I'm just helping nature in a way to try to have more orchards and food for everyone?
Having the opportunity to watch and hear my classmates' experiments was such a source of inspiration. I feel like it opened new possibilities of collaboration with others that are not necessarily in my group. And also that there are obvious connections but others weren't that obvious and still I think it could be even more interesting to find this possible future hybrid project. This experience also helped me to highlight how fluid we are as a group and that we are very much looking forward to finding ways of collaboration, but that some of us don't have quite clear yet what are going to be our projects and that maybe that's holding us back to actually start collaborating. Hopefully this was just the little push that we needed.
