An exhibition of the research and cultivation project presented in this journal, enquiring small scale and non-extractive farming methods, is postponed due to the escalation of Covid-19 contamination. The exhibition was planned to open April 1, 2020, at the Project Arts Centre (PAC) in Dublin, Ireland.
The emergence of Covid-19 is not an isolated incident. Exploitive land use, large-scale animal production and monoculture farming causes great disturbances in the web of organic life, where the increased risk for epidemics is only one of several severe effects. Industrial food production and further multinational, corporative, and extractive activities in habitats is directly linked to outbreaks of dangerous diseases, of which the covid-19 is one of several examples. The epidemic viruses transmit from wildlife as natural habitats decline, as well as they emerge from large-scale animal production.
The distribution of this journal, together with the distribution of kale varieties that are farm-bred and thus have maintained their genetic diversity and capacity to adapt to shifted habitat conditions, will however take place as planned.
Archive Journal
— Issue n. 9
March – April 2020
Edited by Chiara Figone, Lívia Páldi
and Åsa Sonjasdotter
Contributions by Lívia Páldi, Åsa Sonjasdotter,
Elisabeth Tamm and Elin Wägner
Anyone who aims to understand why viruses are becoming more dangerous must investigate the industrial model of agriculture.
Rob Wallace
Åsa Sonjasdotter is an artist born in Helsingborg, Sweden, in 1966. She is living on the island of Ven, South Sweden, and in Berlin, Germany. Since 2018, Sonjasdotter is an artistic researcher at Valand Academy, The University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Since 2015, she is a founding member of The Neighbourhood Academy, a bottom up learning site and a branch of Prinzessinnengarten, an urban garden in Berlin, Germany. She has been professor at Tromsø Academy of Contemporary Art in Tromsø, Norway, an institution she took part of establishing in 2007. From 1996 to 2006 Sonjasdotter was a founding member of the Danish feminist art- and action group Kvinder på Værtshus (Women Down the Pub). Sonjasdotter has studied at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and at Trondheim Academy of Fine Art in Norway. She holds an MFA from the Department of Theory and Communication at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. From 2014 she is a research student at the Art Department, University of London.