The Kitchen School with César Redrado and Silvia Zayas | Activity
Visual Atlas of the History of the Digitization of Agriculture and workshop on guerilla memes to combat the most ferocious form of the food industry.
In this session, César Redrado will be presenting his Visual Atlas of the History of the Digitization of Agriculturewhich discusses how certain ways of imagining technology in the countryside are placed in circulation and reproduced through historical and contemporary images. This set of representations – from archives, comics, institutional reports, the media, social networks and film – reveals how agricultural digitalisation is often constructed out of apparently utopian visions that promise to meet challenges such as climate change, scarce resources, the lack of generational replacement and gender inequality.
However, these images are not neutral. Taken together, they show the consolidation of an idealized mindset that simplifies rural realities and hides the material conditions of agricultural work. This narrative draws on science fiction, hegemonic masculinity, the financialization of the sector and a relationship with nature based on control and domination, often characterized by technocratic, authoritarian aesthetics. In this context, digitization not only transforms farming practices, but also the narratives that legitimize them.
Faced with this, we propose a session combining presentation of the Visual Atlas with a guerilla communication proposal in collaboration with artist Silvia Zayas. We’ll run a workshop on memes and DIY meme creation to question ecofascism and the most aggressive narratives of today’s food industry. Through humor, provocation and visual culture, we’ll create devices able to circulate and go viral in a context dominated by the hegemony of advertising languages.
It will be a place to co-think, cut, paste, draw, hack, make collage and move our bodies, thinking about images as a symbolic battlefield. A place to imagine alternative narratives about agriculture: more situated, diverse and socially fair, to compete with the dominant visions of our food future. All this, accompanied by a shared organic snack as a place for meeting, conversation and collective enjoyment.
