On Para-Institutions: Fernando Garcia-Dory and Andrea Phillips in Conversation

As part of The Politics of Food programme of events, Fernando Garcia Dory will be in conversation with Andrea Phillips. Somewhere between a social movement and a start up with multinational extensions, INLAND is a project about an organisation examining the role of territories, geopolitics, culture and identity in the relationship between the city and the countryside today in Europe and its place in a global context. Artist, agroecologist and initiator of INLAND Fernando Garcia-Dory will be in conversation with Dr Andrea Phillips, PARSE Professor of Art and Head of Research at the Valand Academy, University of Gothenburg. Andrea lectures and publishes internationally on the economic and social construction of publics within contemporary art, the manipulation of forms of participation within artistic and civic value formation and the potential of forms of political, architectural and social reorganization within artistic and curatorial culture.

It began with a 3 years period, 2010-2013, taking Spain as a first case study, which included an international conference, training workshops for artists to work in the rural, and a artistic production stage in which 22 artists worked in the same number of villages. It was followed by exhibitions and and public fora that ignited an open debate about the place of rural spaces and art in society. Study groups and a publishing house have been also created by INLAND.

In this current phase, INLAND is one hand extending its methodology to other European contexts, such as the countryside in Italy, Finland, United Kingdom and especially the Netherlands. It is also advising the European Rural Development Network of the European Commission on the potential of art in rural development processes . On the other hand, in the micro-scale, it is recovering an abandoned village to form the organisation´s headquarters and “community of practice”, the project provides artists, farmers, intellectuals, rural development agents, policymakers, curators and art critics, amongst others from the rural and urban spheres, with an open platform to exchange knowledge and experiences and approach positions towards social change and our relation to agro-ecosystems.