Artist-led building: farming organic knowing

This article presents a writing collaboration between an ethnographer and two artists. It was developed from a one-week residency at Kultivator, which is an artist-led project situated on an organic farm on the Swedish island of Öland. The writing is informed by classical pragmatist philosophy and gives focus to the organic trope of human-environment continuity. Drawing on the writing experiment the article argues that Kultivator is not simply doing organic farming; but building a farm to think-with organically. Kultivator is presented as a way of knowing continuity; and a way of doing organic philosophy also. As such the article suggests this artist-led practice has capacity to stretch artistic practice and its discourse beyond human collaboration. The research contributes an experiential account of artist-led practice in a rural context. Rather than focusing on artworks or ‘buildings’ this collaboration asks us to consider the way we ‘build’ our participatory process of living together and the role artistic knowledge can have in doing so.