Fernando García-Dory

Spain
Social Practice
Chamberlain Award, 2016
www.fernandogarciadory.com

Artist Statement

My work engages specifically with the relationship between culture and nature now, as manifested in multiple contexts, from landscape and the rural, to desires and expectations concerned with identity, through to (global) crisis, utopia, and the potential for social change. I studied Fine Arts and Rural Sociology, and am now preparing my PhD on Agroecology. I am interested in the harmonic complexity of biological forms and processes, and in my work I look at connections and cooperation, from microorganisms to social systems, and from traditional art languages, such as drawing, to collaborative agroecological projects, actions, and cooperatives.

While At Headlands

As part of the ongoing project INLAND, we will be working on the genealogy of relations with the land in California, intentional communities, and food as tool for social change and how it manifests today. INLAND, started in 2009, is a project about an organization that engages territories, culture, and social change. During its first stage (2010-2013) and taking Spain as initial case study, INLAND comprised an international conference, artistic production with 22 artists in residence in the same number of villages across the country, and nationwide exhibitions and presentations.
This was followed by a period of reflection and evaluation, launching study groups in Netherlands and Spain, and series of publications. Today INLAND functions as a collective and works as a para-institution to open space for land-based collaborations, economies and communities-of-practice as a substrate for post-Contemporary Art cultural forms. Appearing in different forms in different countries, whilst dissolving individual agency in the collective, INLAND Europa publishes books, produces shows, and makes cheese. It also advises as a consultant for the European Union Commission on the use of art for rural development policies, facilitates shepherds movements, and is recovering an abandoned village in an undisclosed location for collective artistic and agricultural production.