Local Farm Museum of Contemporary Arts Maebashi, Gunma, Japan October 2016
Wapke Feenstra was invited to make a new commissioned work on local farms as part of the groupshow Foodscape; We are what we eat curated by Fumihiko Sumitomo.
Wapke Feenstra in cooperation with Mochizuki family, Watanabe family, Kaneko family, Hagiwara family. With the director and curator Fumihiko Sumitomo, curator and producer Jun Igarashi, and the staff of Arts Maebashi.
She portrayed six growers around Maebashi with stories, images and soil – her focus was on the family farms that sell their produce at the farmers markets. During farm-visits the daily work was photographed, they talked about the crops and former and future generations in their families. At the end a sample of the topsoil was collected and in the museum shown next to a big photo of the hands of the local farmers.
The special designed displays from wood and garden materials are a space for the farmers stories, objects and photographic images. Such as stones and rocks found in the land and scratched by a plow.