2025
In my ongoing project I am looking into the landscape and architecture of the systems of food production, in essence following the trail of fresh, all-year-around produce in my local supermarket in Sweden to its source, the wide covered greenhouses of the agribusinessin the Spanish Almeria region, around the town of El Ejido, which when spoken in Spanish sounds like “the chosen one”.
Driven by the idea of creating images of this new countryside, in opposite to whatagribusiness firms are trying to present to us with images of green pastures and wide-open fields. Instead, we see an area dubbed the “Sea of Plastic”, Europe’s biggest greenhouse area, or in other more poetic terms Europe’s garden. Ironically, it’s a semi-desert area with increased amount of droughts and hotter weather due to climate changes, while growing Northern Europe’s constant supply of tomatoes, cucumbers and every other produce one can think of in its stretched out growing season lasting around nine months.
The project is lead by notions of biodiversity loss, wilderness ideas, non-human life (non)importance, climate change impact and the seemingly unable way of modernsociety to live in tune with the Earth. Finding the right direction between the techno-future and the traditionalist small-scale cultivation seems as divided as any other today’s technological topic, and it’s most likely to be found in the balance of the two.