Visiting Artists: Futurefarmers

Futurefarmers is a group of diverse practitioners aligned through an interest in making work that is relevant to the time and place surrounding us. Founded in 1995, a design studio serves as a platform to support art projects and an artist in residence program. The group is made up of artists, designers, architects, anthropologists, writers, computer programmers and farmers with a common interest in creating frameworks for exchange that catalyze moments of "not knowing".

Futurefarmers work has been exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the New York Museum of Modern Art, Solomon R. Guggenheim, MAXXI in Rome, Italy, Sharjah Biennale, Taipei Biennale, Henie Onstad Museum, Oslo, New York Hall of Sciences and the Walker Art Center.

Visiting Futurefarmers:

Amy Franceschini is an artist and designer whose work facilitates encounter, exchange and tactile forms of inquiry by calling into question the "certainties" of a given time or place where a work is situated. An overarching theme in her work is a perceived conflict between "humans" and "nature". Her projects reveal the history and currents of contradictions related to this divide by challenging systems of exchange and the tools we use to "hunt" and "gather". Using this as a starting point, she creates relational objects that invoke action and inquiry; not only to imagine, but also to participate in and initiate change in the places we live.

Lode Vranken has been the lead architect and philosopher of Futurefarmers since 2008. Lode's fascination with installing situations of renewed socio-spacial dynamics began with a Transpolar Catapult built in Anchorage, Alaska and has manifest in various modalities since then. 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. He has been teaching since 2005 as a Ned delegate at The Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain and from 1993-94 at the Asian Institute for Technology in Bangkok, Thailand. Lode co-founded the architectural research coalition, De Bouwerij in Belgium that focuses on social living structures, passive housing, and zero-energy construction. He is also a partner of Dear Pigs in Belgium and member of the The Ghent School for Metaphysics.

Alexander Kozachek is an artist / designer living and working in Northampton, MA. He holds an MFA in Design from California College of the Arts. Recently he has been responding to and experiencing the wind and sky. Within this territory Kozachek explores everything from ecological issues and regulations in the sky to working on the creation of speculative data sets generated from interactions with the wind. In assessing the work, he often asks himself the question: does it fly?