AC Discussion | Rural Networks
On Friday, May 29th, we sat down with Grace Wong and Alex O’Hanlon for a virtual discussion about connections between climate change, rural spaces, and creative work.
Anchoring the conversation in an understanding of the important role rural spaces have historically played in shaping life for many in Nebraskans, our panelists unpacked what the rural can teach us about adaptation, resilience, and community. They emphasized the importance of connecting creative work that happens in remote locations, especially work rooted in the concepts of ecology and care, to broader regional, national, and international discussions when reckoning with the pressures of a changing climate. To punctuate the discussion, they talked about changes precipitated by COVID-19 and climate change that rural communities will likely confront in the near future.
Watch the full conversation below and share your thoughts in the comments section.
Transcription
Interviewer: Peter Fankhauser, Program Director at Amplify Arts
Interviewee 1: Alex O’Hanlon, Engagement Coordinator at One Omaha
Interviewee 2: Grace Wong, Special Operations and Logistics Strategist at Art Farm
Date of Interview: May 29, 2020
List of Acronyms: PF = Peter Fankhauser; AO = Alex O’Hanlon; GW = Grace Wong
[PF] Welcome everybody and thanks for joining us. This is an online edition of Amplify’s Alternate Currents conversation series. Alternate Currents is a program designed to bring national and international issues in the arts down to the local level with responses from people here in Omaha.
Today we're going to be talking about rural spaces as networked sites for creative production. That fits into the scope of our programming for this year in a broader sense because everything we're talking about is focused on issues around environmental security, climate security, and ecological justice.
In the interest of keeping our community safe and staying healthy, we're meeting virtually today with our panelists Grace Wong and Alex O'Hanlon. We're super grateful to have both of you here today. I thought we'd start out with some quick introductions to get the ball rolling and I'm happy to kick that off.
My name's Peter Fankhauser and I'm the Program Director at Amplify Arts. I'm a Nebraska native. I grew up in Omaha, mostly. I also spent summers on my grandparents farm in Humboldt, Nebraska, which is in the southeastern corner of the state--super rural. I've been at Amplify for about 3 years. Prior to that, I worked at a contemporary art space in New York called the New Museum for Contemporary Art and I was there for 10 years. Grace, kicking it over to you
[GW] Hi, I'm Grace. I am the Special Operations and Logistics Strategist at Art Farm here in Marquette, Nebraska and I've been at Art Farm since August, 2018 as a resident. I was born in Hong Kong and I would consider myself an international traveler, mostly in the urban realm. I was a practicing architect for 4 years but then I quit, decided that was total baloney, and decided to jump into being an artist making stuff. Now, here at Art Farm, I help out with all these crazy projects, help people find things, teach people how to use things, and work on crazy, big unimaginably-sized projects.
[AO] Yeah, I work at One Omaha as the Engagement Coordinator helping to support strong neighborhood groups. In the past, I worked at City Sprouts and still do a lot to support the Urban Agriculture Internship there. I'm also part of an organization called, The Free Farm Syndicate. We farm empty space in the city and then we make that produce available to folks, to whoever wants it. On Saturdays we have a Free Farm stand from 10:00am to noon at the Bancroft Street Market and that's been taking up a lot of my time this spring, just getting ready.
I've traveled a bit working on farms in Latin America and lived in Northern California for about 4 years. I still go back to those places and do an olive harvest, a persimmon harvest, and pomegranate harvest every fall. Even though I do a lot of what's considered rural work in urban spaces, I have also done some rural living and am really interested in this conversation about taking what are often considered more urban activities into rural spaces.
[PF] Alex, your sound cut out just a little bit at the very top of your intro. Would you mind repeating where you're from where you grew up?
[AO] Yeah, so I was born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska and I was just saying that I've always lived in this like 6 or 7 block radius of the Cathedral where I'm sitting right now--always in this Midtown area.
[PF] Perfect, thank you. We’re really excited to have this conversation with both of you and talk more about the idea of rural spaces as sites where creative production can flourish, rather than marginalized spaces that exclude progressive thinking. I thought we could start out by working to define some terms and find some parameters, specifically when we're talking about the “rural.” That definition has changed and slipped a lot over the past hundred years. Would both of you share your thoughts about how the definition of the rural has changed and how our perceptions of the rural have shifted along with those changing definitions?
[GW] Well, as I understand it, for institutional funders, the rural is defined as a small town. Otherwise, it doesn't seem to really exist. Here at Art Farm, it is a little bit hard to get funding because it is not really in one of the towns. It's just on a farm. For some reason, it kind of falls out of the cracks. If there were any like artistic or intellectual production in areas like this, it'd be pretty hard to function, unless you're Art Farm, which instead of having a capital-intensive model, has a labor-intensive model--we're working. I think that's definitely how we survive here. Like I mentioned in my introduction, as an artist who's kind of traveled mostly in urban areas, I didn't really understand the appeal of rural spaces because I thought they lacked convenience, as in one doesn't always have everything that they need in order to create.
The second thing, I didn’t think there would be a diverse pool of knowledge that comes from living around people coming from everywhere. My perception at the time was more like, “Well there's no stimulation there aren’t very many cultural events or programming happening like in Marquette.There's like a bar. The perception initially when I was in an urban setting, was that that's there's not much out here, but this started to change once I let go of my urban perception of time, of arbitrary deadlines from clients, productivity and this kind of impatience that has been created by technological convenience and the immediacy of everything.
I also let go of my definition of resources. I could buy everything in an urban setting but here in a rural setting. I adapted that mentality. What is broken can almost always be fixed and there's material potential in everything around us. In this rural space at Art Farm, I really learned to flow with nature's ever-changing schedule. I do things like maintain pickup trucks and tractors; I fix chainsaws from reckless residents who go crazy trying to chop down trees that are growing everywhere.
Last weekend with the thunderstorms, there was a flood and we discovered that there was a leak in our private well. At a moment's notice, emergencies happen and we have to drop everything and make sure that we have drinking water. So, I think that rural creativity is driven by an instinctual response to natural forces and the need to survive and be resilient. To me, it's about opening up my senses to listen to nature instead of blocking myself from it, like how I used to be able to navigate the streets without a smartphone or like how I can feel a storm is coming without looking at a weather app or something like that.
[PF] That's interesting--the idea of time you brought up, your relationship to time, and how that relationship has changed. A quick follow-up question: what do you think about how that relationship looks now as opposed to how it looked living in the city? Does it open up more space for creative production? Does it open up more space for conceptualization? Does it give you more time for meditation?
[GW] I definitely feel like there is a drastic difference. I trained as an architect where there's never enough time and there's always these deadlines and these impossible tasks. I always feel like I need the deadline to help me keep moving and squeeze out as much productivity and creativity as possible in order to meet the deadlines and meet the impossibility. Here, there's a lot more space in terms of time, if that makes any sense, to think things through a bit more and listen in a meditative way to stop letting the “I have to do this now” kind of mentality get into my head. It's moreI like I flow with my own internal work schedule the way that I do things and according to how the weather wants me to do things. Let it happen and it's okay if certain things have to be adjusted depending on the situation.
[PF] Like a more cyclical working model as opposed to a linear model where you've got ABCD on your to-do list. What do you think, Alex? How do you think about the rural?
[AO] I guess I think of reading books that were written more at the turn of the 19th into the 20th century and how the rural in those books is often described as vibrant. Now inmost of the media that I read, it's often about the rural being small towns that are dying.
I think of the rural as small towns and the spaces in between them. I think about connectivity and how a lot of small towns sprouted up because a railroad stopped there, or a cattle train went through there, or a highway used to go through that way, and how then when those types of routes change, towns tend to change. I thought of that because I was thinking about the feeling of self-sufficiency when you're living rural.
I was living in this space that was off-grid for a long time and there was so much that felt really cool about that and being able to say, “Well I know where this water is coming from. I know what's in it.” I didn't know exactly what was in it, but we had these giant water tanks installed pipes from the springs to the water tanks, and then from the water tanks down to the yurts and showers and gardens. That felt really really cool. Everything ran off of solar power, but at the same time, we had to drive these big trucks into town to get staple items and the pipes that we used to build everything. Having that road to town, and that ability to go to town, is what made us able to become self-sufficient.
A lot of times, the rural feels less connected because it's not an urban environment. Right now I'm on my porch and I'm really close to three different streets and an alleyway, whereas when I was living at the spot that I'm thinking of, we were at like the end of a dirt road. It was still that ability to be connected that allowed us the possibility of living in that context. I think about, moving forward, how different routes of connectivity can change how vibrant rural spaces can be.
[PF] And that idea of connectivity is one that I wanted to ask you both about, especially connecting ideas. Going down that path, the connection between ecological justice, creative practice, and rural spaces might not be the most obvious to some and I wondered if you could both talk about the intersections or overlaps that you see when connecting those three concepts?
[GW] I always thought that farming, in the traditional sense, was about figuring out how to cultivate land amidst ever-changing weather conditions and that the creativity aspect rises from problem-solving with what you have instead of with money or the nearby store, which is what urban areas are more likely to provide. I feel like this kind of creativity transfers to what we define within the realm of the arts, moreso the fields of design or sculpture or anything that has to do with the assembly of materials. The way in which one solves problems must constantly adapt to the unpredictability of whatever comes, whether it be tornados, floods, droughts, or pandemic. It's a form of resiliency that's built into at least what my perception of traditional farming is.
I think a reason why this relationship may now seem disjointed, is the fact that this traditional small farmer has been made nearly extinct by the agricultural business and industrialized farming practices. For example, here 50 years ago, there stood nine farm stands on this square mile where Art Farm sits right now. Today, there's only one. They basically all disappeared because of a mixture of things, but a lot of it has to do with government policies and mass-produced farming technology, which encouraged bigger farms to eat the smaller ones.
Around here, corn and soy are grown for export and despite being in the rural countryside, all of our food is delivered from somewhere else. I don't know how we get mangoes. So I guess the question that I have is, how can farmers return to roles of land stewardship instead of being submissive pawns of mega-corporations and what are creative ways in which to invigorate these rural areas?
[PF] Do you have thoughts about that, Alex? You've worked in small-scale agriculture for a long time.
[AO] It's hard to conceive of sometimes because my goal is always to grow as much food as possible for as many people as possible and to try, through doing that, to advocate for justice in the food system that we have. At the same time, we have the industrial food system behind us, so if a crop fails, we could still get potatoes at the store. I've never had a crop fail, so I don't have that fear in me, but I can only imagine that if you did have a crop fail, how even the memory of one season of a crop failure or drought would move you towards something that feels safer like pivot irrigation or using pesticides.
I feel like there’s this idea that we're doing in farming has to match the pace urban go-go-go.You only get like one chance really to plant. It depends on what you're growing, but with corn, which I understand is grown for export and animal feed most of the time, or for ethanol production, but if it fails in July, you can’t just replant. I think in a lot of a big agricultural production, you're working in tiny margins. You’ve got to make it in this system that, to me, feels more like the pressure of an urban environment. I think that for me, personally, living rurally, like Grace talked about, opened up time. A lot of it was related to living so far out. You're not gonna plan to do 7 things in a day. You think instead, “I'm still gonna run all over but get used to nobody looking over my shoulder to see if the project got done. I could spend all day conceiving of how this project should look.”
To your point, Grace, of constantly trying to adapt to weather patterns or what arises, to have the time to think about what could arise, helps design better so you don't have to shift in the moment because you designed for multiple different possibilities. That's something that when we think of time, time allows for more creative, thoughtful design but I feel like the pressures of the global industrial and urban culture are really put on these more rural contexts. Sometimes, it makes it harder to be rural than it is to be urban while trying to produce because you don't have all the resources of an urban environment but you still have the pressures. It’s not a solution but it's a problem! [Laughter]
[PF] Aside from industrial agriculture, do you see conversations around other climate-related issues happening in rural spaces and if so, do you see examples of how you see examples of creative projects or practices that either push those forward or pull them back?
[AO] I think about rural spaces in Northern California. A lot of them have experienced extensive fire damage in the past few years and now there's a lot of people coming together talking about how to tend the forest in a way that helps fires burn healthily, so that there's not a bunch of dead wood on the ground. The fire can sweep through quickly. It won't get so hot. It won't ruin the forest. That's something that would happen more regularly if forests were allowed to burn on a more regular basis. Now that you're on the land, how can you steward the land to make disasters less disastrous. Folks are having that conversation and following the lead of folks that have been tending the forest correctly in different ways for years. They’re teaching each other and talking about that.
At the same time, a lot of people I know are also talking about different types of buildings and natural building techniques with mud and more fire resistant materials and talking about different designs around that. They’re having those conversations and teaching each other how to do those things. I think it's been going on for a long time, but now more people are having those conversations more frequently and it's maybe about creativity but also meeting a dire need as well.
[PF] Have you seen some of those same conversations spring up, Grace around design, biomorphic architecture, or maybe a return to more ecologically sensitive forms of architecture?
[GW] When I talk with my peers, or when I talk with other residents here at Art Farm who are builders, architects, designers of different sorts, if you're talking outside the corporate or business of architecture, it's more about individual, personal projects or personal interests and turning those projects into businesses. I have friends who have interests in creating rammed earth or hempcrete or wattle and daub structures. I think that Art Farm has been a site for experimentation of these kind of alternative techniques or vernacular techniques of building that are perhaps more attuned with nature.
There is a building out here, which partially has degraded over the last 50 years or so, a mud hut created with Nebraska bricks, which are made by cutting blocks of turf with the roots of the prairie grass embedded in the clay and using that as brick. That's the kind of technology that people around here used, I believe for sod houses. So like that's the kind of thing that people are revisiting around here at Art Farm. That’s the kind of thing our artists are inspired by when they're thinking about creating new experimental structures and looking at what has been done and what resources there are here. There's ample amount of clay in the soil here.
Here at Art Farm, it's not like we have gotten rid of all the prairie grass. That's part of the resources that people can use as building materials. Even if you don't go to the hardware store, there is material here that we can use to build. Not only that, there's also like the abandoned barns--the classic signature of Art Farm is the collection of abandoned farm buildings that people are throwing away because they want all of their land to be used for growing corn or soy. All these buildings that were here are valuable resources for wood and very nice pieces of lumber that you can't buy at the store anymore because the trees were a lot older. There are some really beautiful pieces of wood that are not the same as the two-by-fours that you get at Home Depot or Menards.
We don't have to go to town to get material to be able to build something. We have a lot of it here around us. It's coronavirus season. Nobody wants to go to town but we don't have these bolts. So how do we make bolts? We use a lathe we thread the steel rods and make them ourselves. That's literally how we solve problems here right now.
[PF] That's an interesting segue into talking more about what creative work tied to land, place, and site can that teach us about adaptation or resilience, especially in times of crisis, whether it be our current crisis related to this pandemic or the climate crisis.
[GW] Well, we have a climate crisis but the [weather] has always been changing in rural spaces. To me, it seems like the changing climate is always a factor in creative work in rural spaces. The issue is that we are separating ourselves from nature because of modern conveniences and profit-centric business practices. It severely dilutes our need for community and I think, as Alex has said, it's like this this urban mentality or these urban pressures have leached into rural spaces. To me, the question of creative work in rural spaces maybe needs to be reframed because it has these urban pressures. I think ultimately the big problem is the broken relationship between nature and society and the compromises or conversations we need to have in order to repair it.How do we converse and compromise with nature to give up some of our conveniences in order to not create so much damage, which will negatively impact us in the long run.
[AO] To Grace’s last point about giving up some conveniences, I think about giving up some conveniences for other conveniences. So maybe you trade the convenience of a parking lot on a wetland for the convenience of having a wetland that filters water and helps to reduce flooding. It's true that figuring out what's convenient in the long requires creativity. I think that there's a lot of the same industrial urban mindset pressures in rural spaces. In an urban context, I hope that we don't lose the idea of gentle density and I hope we don't spread out more and more.
If folks do move rurally, that could be a great thing but I hope that we go into it with a mindset of reciprocity. A lot of space in our country isn't untended, or even unchanged by white folks. If you go out to a space in the middle of Nebraska, there's a chance that it has been farmed in the past. It's not that it wasn't you know tended by like Native Americans before. I don't think that these spaces are necessarily untouched, but they're touched in a different way.
I think in urban environments, a lot of times it's we don't have the ability to see nature working as much, or it's working harder against concrete and an influx of water rushing towards it. In more rural spaces where there is more unpaved area, we can use the observation of those spaces to kind of think about what reciprocity looks like--not just what that means but also, what does it literally look like? What does a thriving wetland look like, for example?
In Omaha, we have the Papio Creek system that runs through. It's so engineered for flood control and it's so narrow. I think that we could look at waterways in rural spaces as inspiration for what the Papio could look like in the future and use that as an opportunity to imagine how rural spaces should look if more folks move to those areas. We can also imagine how our urban spaces could look and how we can continue to have gentle density in our urban spaces while incorporating nature or more breathing space for plants and animals.
[GW] Having worked in architecture firms and design firms, I feel like there's, at least from that perspective, a lot of places have or would like to implement more responsive types of designs that maybe look back on what has been done in rural areas, for example, or that have more respect for what's already there. I think some of the constraints or some of where this kind of distortion of this initial intent fora more sustainable or more naturally respectful design gets compromised is when it interacts with whoever the client is or the bottom line, the deadlines, the and the budgeting.
Sometimes these intentions become severely diluted and the only thing to show for it is maybe maybe something on a piece of paper that says these sustainability checkboxes are marked and yeah, this is great, but in actuality it's not responding to the environment. I feel like there needs to be a different type of mentality as you, Alex have said about reframing what it means to be convenient. Instead of this short-term convenience, look at more long-term convenience. It would have to come from those with money in some of these cases because of this current system. Is it just that these are the people who are paying the money to solve these problems, or is there a way we can bypass this and use what we have somehow, outside of the system, to do something ourselves to solve these problems?
[PF] It's a good question that circles back to the discussion about time we had earlier and how time in rural spaces functions a little differently than in urban spaces. Maybe there’s potential for those relationships to become more porous. How do you think we disseminate information about work happening in rural or remote locations? What’s the best way to communicate the idea that there's a lot to learn from rural spaces in urban spaces?
[GW] I want to say that I think there definitely needs to be stronger communication between the rural and urban areas. I think, for example, Art Farm acts as a platform where urban creative people come in and interact with a rural environment. If they wish, they can interact with the rural residents as well. I don’t want to create any kind of hierarchy that implies rural or urban is better and Art Farm’s not necessarily trying to force a dialogue but rather presenting this link in which this kind of exchange could happen. I think those who are willing and open to the engagement will organically form relationships that hopefully will create some kind of positive change for both parties.
[AO] I feel similarly. I feel like probably one of the more likely ways that that information would be disseminated is by folks who live in urban spaces and go to rural spaces to spend some time. Again, I think we're talking about this idea of time and reframing time, which would help to reframe priorities, which would help to reframe what the goals are, and what convenience really means. This is one of the greatest things that we could take away from these sorts of rural spaces.
Iit does seem like urban ideas often are louder. Even if it is just like folks from urban spaces, like myself, going to rural spaces for a while and then coming back and sharing what I learned about my urban interpretation of what rural spaces can teach us, I think that's something. I think a lot of people would bring something different away. Like in most contexts in our society, we could all do better to listen to folks who are less heard in general.
I think that what we need to do, like I said, in every part of our society is like listen to people about their experiences. I think that could help us in this situation. Not just listening to folks about their experiences, but also letting folks with those experiences lead. I don't know how to set that up exactly but it's about getting more people to listen to different experiences but also have a different understanding of time. How do people have that understanding unless they go to experience it?
[PF] I wonder, reflecting on the past few months, if the way time has kind of shifted for a lot of people due to the pandemic offers of some opportunities or possibilities to reframe our expectations of time as it relates to consumer culture and convenience.
[GW] but I think that ultimately depends on what peoples’ experience in quarantine is like. I know some people who are either severely overworked because of the quarantine or who are experiencing some kind of insecurity, in one way or another. It seems like there will only be a certain population of people who will maybe have perhaps a different understanding of time but I don’t think that’s a universal experience.
[PF] Absolutely. That's a really important point to bring up. One last question to wrap up: how do you both envision the rural changing the next 20, 30, 40, 50 years?
[GW] I have no idea. It's already changed so much in the past couple months. How many people had the luxury of fleeing to a private rural area for retreat? This crisis, what does it mean for rural areas? What this pandemic has revealed is the vulnerability of cities to disasters. We've also already been seeing it for plenty of years all over the world. With the California fires, earthquakes, tsunamis, all these terrible tragedies where there's large concentrations of people makes them vulnerable.
I think in certain cases, there's a lot of advantages to living in a dense area and there's a lot of attractive qualities about it. I grew up in Los Angeles. The first time I drove into Los Angeles from the desert, I saw how vulnerable Los Angeles is to its harsh surroundings. It is a city that draws its water from three aqueducts coming from very far away places. It has those crazy fires that are increasing by the year and that earthquake is gonna happen. It seems like it's hanging in the balance, here on the edge at the tipping point. It seems like there's a lot of big cities that have these vulnerabilities. It would not surprise me if more people moved into rural places, as Alex has said. I think she's right and that we need to be mindful about what the reciprocity of that means. Yeah, I have no idea.
[PF] What about you, Alex? How do you see the context of the rural changing in the next 50 years?
[AO] I think that there's going to be massive investment and job creation creating electric high-speed rails across the country and I think that that is going to make it easier for folks to live rurally and invigorate some small towns. I think that people who move to those small towns are going to do so with a mindset to protect the spaces around them and I think there's going to be another massive investment to create a corridor of prairie up and down the Great Plains that is completely unbroken and there’s going to be smart agriculture around that protecting and improving the waterways. I think we're gonna dechannelize the rivers that don't need to be channelized and the water is going to be cleaner and we're gonna be able to enjoy it and I think that we're going to move towards a space where the rural and the urban can interact because people are going to be able to move more easily between them.
At the same time, as we move back into those rural spaces, we're going to be doing so in a way that highlights reciprocity and allows us to both use the natural resources and allow the natural resources to replenish themselves and exist in a way that works for them and not just for us.
[PF] I love all of those possibilities. Let's make it happen. Do either of you have things coming up that you'd like to talk about or plug before we sign off?
[AO] June 13th, I'm gonna be doing a tinctures and syrups class on Zoom class through City Sprouts.
[GW] I don't really have anything. We have Art Harvest every year sometime in October but who knows what that's gonna be like.
[PF] Is your residency cycle still active?
[GW] Yes, carefully, cautiously. Art Farm must adapt to do whatever comes so we follow the CDC and try to maintain social distancing but still be alert and be smart.
Otherwise, I'm working right now on a project called the Marionette Project, which is basically taking one of the 100-year old abandoned barns here at Art Farm and trying to build a giant steel superstructure outside of it and float it so that you can see. It's a very long-term project and definitely gonna be working with the weather on that one.
[PF] That sounds impressive. We’ll keep an eye out for progress. Thank you again both for being here and spending time with us. We really appreciate it. For those watching this discussion, please feel free to leave your thoughts and comments in the comments section of the post.
*This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Grace Wong is the Special Operations and Logistics Strategist at Art Farm. She graduated from UC Irvine with a Bachelors in Interdisciplinary Arts and a Masters of Architecture at Rhode Island School of Design. She began her career as a designer in professional architecture in 2013, and expanded into facilitating community-oriented construction projects since 2014. 2017 marked a pivotal point in her career when she transitioned out of the architectural office into developing artistic projects in remote areas such as Death Valley (California), Koh Lon (Thailand), Marquette (Nebraska), Sôca (Slovenia), and Mynämäki (Finland). Her design and construction work have been featured in the New York Times, Archdaily, Inhabitat, Metropolis Magazine, and she currently spearheads a number of projects repurposing discarded old farm buildings into studios, accommodations and facilities at the Art Farm Residency in rural Nebraska.
Alex O’Hanlon is a community leader who is committed to supporting resident-led projects that enhance their quality of life. She’s worked as a Garden Manager for City Sprouts South where she coordinated programs, workshops, and events. Currently she works as Engagement Coordinator at One Omaha. She holds a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy/History from UNO and travels to California every fall to harvest olives.