Öland’s Midland is a cultural heritage of nature types and species that have evolved together with human small-scale farming through millennia. Some parts of this mosaic are still spared of industrialised agriculture, and allow intricate ecosystems to be active. This project wants to use artistic process to explore ways of thinking and acting for animal and plant self-determination (co-creation) within an existing farm geography. The work proposes a material-aesthetic dialogue with post-anthropocene theory, and wants to reach and engage with the possibilities and challenges that living eating bodies, manure, soil, and inherited landscape present in that discourse. The landscape of Öland makes it possible for the project to utilize the historical experience of a continuous multi-species farming community, which still to some extent is alive.
The aim of the research is to think, act and imagine ways to foster our capacity to operate together with the many – domesticated, wild and in-betweens – that live on the field with us now, in a different way. The project hopes to establish a new habitat, a farm of sorts, which suggests and imagines a new order inside our age-old agricultural landscape.
Funded by the Swedish Research Council. (2025–2027)