The exhibition "Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills 2022 Spring Collection" opens on the 28th of May at Casco, Utrecht, the Netherlands.
Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills (TFM) was established by Casco Art Institute and The Outsiders in 2020 after our joint initiative to enliven and common a dysfunctional farmhouse in Utrecht’s Leidsche Rijn with multiple self-initiated activities of caring, learning and sharing. Once a vast, peripheral farmland providing food to the region, Leidsche Rijn is now occupied by housing blocks and over forty-thousand human inhabitants. Deprived of its surrounding farmland, the farmhouse reactivated by The Outsiders, Casco and many other neighbours and friends was eventually sold to a private developer and repurposed as a restaurant.
Yet our commoning journey has continued, in the same way one of our initial questions – ‘’do we know where our food comes from?’’ – remains ever more relevant. Departing from the farmhouse, Casco Art Institute and The Outsiders started travelling in the region and actively explored the agricultural past and present. We started connecting with old and new farming initiatives across Leidsche Rijn, creating the possibility to un/learn and share forgotten skills of living together with nature. The Museum architecture is a mobile vehicle that merges into its environment as it travels. It is a tangible repository for a growing collection of objects, knowledge, skills, and stories. Above all, it is a repository for the TFM’s relationships between farmers, citizens, artists and non-human beings.
"Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills 2022 Spring Collection" is the first collection-exhibition of the museum held at Casco Art Institute. Here, we are metaphorically and literally spring cleaning – sorting out “things” stocked not only in the depot of TFM but also in the minds of many who were part of the journey of the museum. The exhibition “re-collects” what resources and relationships have been cultivated over two special years – coinciding with the pandemic – and shares these resources and relationships with a wider public.
The exhibition-collection presents cultural tools for resilient living in times of multifaceted crises with a focus on the commons, ecology, and heritage. Among the tools presented is a series of folding screens that function as a central weaver of re-collections. In East Asian cultural traditions, the folding screen often depicts nature and written literature. Serving multiple purposes, the folding screen may be used to exhibit, divide a room, or shelter against the wind. In the context of the TFM, the screen also re-presents what was seen and experienced in various farms or farm-related initiatives in the surroundings of Leidsche Rijn that the Museum travelled to – unfolding some of memory and stories from the journey.
The exhibition-collection also launches the Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills’ regular tour program that runs through August. Visitors are cordially invited to join the tour to experience and learn from the Museum. These tours allow us to get in touch with a territory beyond the urban grid, where ecological ways of living together are practiced.
