Art and Agriculture
landscape vision and natural animal ceeping
 

The engagement of art with ecological questions is more old than 40 years. Since 1990 Insa Winkler did approach segments of this voluminous theme, special the keeping, the destroying and the repairing of the landscape - Moor, Chernobyl Zone, Military Zone, Wadden Sea and then the mass production of agriculture in the focus of the Acorn Pig and their species appropriate in the landscape.

`The domestic animal of human being incur into the machinery of the European agar industry. As an object of this intensive factory farming it becomes the danger of the landscape.´

A long consideration Insa Winkler’s with the relation of art and nature, the change and sustainability of landscape and in this context the four year during work on the Acorn Pig Project are finding its contemporary, anything but final completion in the mobile Installation of the Acorn Pig Cinema.

In advance of the film there have been preceding activities in almost all media, from the drawing, beyond the documentation, computer graphic, photos, sculptures up to performances about this project.

For this the artist made extraordinary charges and negotiate strong oppositions. Grounding association, interviews with farmers of conventional pig farming, studies of durability, acquisition, search for land, authorization to keep pigs outside, buying pigs and learning to keep them fattening with acorns. A daily occupation with the pigs was necessary and their monitoring and preparation for a race.

Insa Winkler is connecting with this action, after her understanding mass production, industrial meet production, the growing dependence of farming from the agar industry and therewith destroying of landscape with monoculture and fields for liquid manure, exemplary proposals to optimise human and animal life.

Her apparent recourse to old forms of living – keeping piglets in the acorn forests – like still in Spain and Italy – is not a romance, but meanwhile an exigent claim of the science to the biodiversity of landscape.

Thereby Insa Winkler stays an artist. Art as intervention include the argumentation with the bureaucracy, dialog with farmers, discussion with other artists just as developing a logo and a public relation – The Acorn Pig Cinema. The performance as the highlight and the documentation of the process for clarification.

translation of the text from Jürgen Weichardt, Oldenburg 2007