Petroleum does a long journey from the deep layers of sedimentary rock in the earth to the production system of industrialised agriculture. It is extracted by the same machinery that then transports it halfway across the world, transforming liquid crude oil into fuel, fertiliser and pesticide, to finally take its final ‘state’ in the form of profit from the sale of the food produced with its help.
Uprooting is an attempt to demonstrate the correlations within the complex production system of agriculture and its impact on the environment and society, by blending the perspectives of social, natural and environmental sciences. On the one hand, the exhibiting artists expressively convey the complex economic discourse by means of visual arts, imbuing their works with their own research, personal experiences, or activism. On the other hand, some of the works also present a potential local alternative to the globalised system of industrial agriculture, involving agro-ecological farmers who shape their agricultural production in terms of ecological, social and economic sustainability. The title of the exhibition refers at once to the drastic environmental destruction caused by the economy and to the radical gesture against the unlivable system delineated by the works, but also to the manual labour performed by the farmers.
Petroleum ‘leaked’ into agricultural production in the seventies in the form of petroleum-based fertilisers and pesticides. The new technology was intended to compensate for the declining productivity of lands exhausted by intensive monocultural agriculture. However, although profitable in the short term, in the long term, this solution only exacerbated the problem it was originally designed to solve, as it further degraded soil structure and quality. Thus, over time, more and more energy was required to maintain the same yield. Petroleum, which had previously only powered tractors, combines and trucks, now also powered the fields, thus linking industrial agriculture to petroleum extraction for good. The resulting petroleum-based agriculture is significantly affected by the volatility of the price of crude oil on the stock exchange, which is reflected in the costs of production and transport and, ultimately, in the continuously increasing prices of foodstuffs in shops.
Some of the exhibited works focus on overall phenomena of industrial agriculture and the intertwining of capital and technology. By exploring the processes of production and transportation as well as the marketing strategies designed to mask them, these works shed light on the economic logic that seeks to perpetuate its own unsustainable system. Other works shed light on the damaging effects that intensive petroleum-based farming has on agricultural land and the environment. At the same time, such farmers are introduced who cultivate their land to produce food based on local resources while taking the functioning of natural ecosystems into account., Often facing serious challenges, these farmers strive to establish more sustainable farming practices without political support. Getting acquainted with these examples gives us the opportunity to rethink the way our current agricultural system works as well as our own relation to it, particularly in terms of sustainability and more harmonious cooperation with nature.