Designer and artist Anastasia Eggers uses food as a medium to investigate ideas of identity, origin and geopolitics. Migrating Seasons, her rethink of farmers’ almanacs, is one of 16 projects in a new book exploring narratives for existing, disappearing and emerging relationships in the countryside by the Seasonal Neighbours collective.
Many people associate the words “design” and “designer” with commerce and consumer products like cars, furniture and fashion. The assumption is that design is concerned with making consumer goods attractive and desirable. And yet others believe that design’s purpose is to fix things that don’t work properly, which casts the designer in something of a saviour role. Of course, there are designers whose job is to do these things, but there are many others whose practice lies elsewhere.
Take the work of Anastasia Eggers, for example. Her work is research-driven and focuses on social, cultural and political conditions in the context of vulnerable ecologies. This means she approaches her subjects contextually, looking at the broad spectrum of environments in which they arise. Anastasia uses food as a medium to “broach ideas of identity, origin, and geopolitics” and her current focus is on the shifting of agricultural rhythms that “arise when our dependence on seasonal cycles is severed or when new dynamics surface due to geopolitical shifts or changes in market conditions”.
The kind of work that Anastasia does tends to be called “social design” although a better term might be “relational design” because it is an investigative, big-picture approach that is all about interrelationships between people, the land, seasons, politics, commerce and climate – human and non-human factors in some of the tightly interdependent systems that make up the living world.
Using a range of media to document her work from video and installation to text and images, Anastasia began her career working speculatively in an agricultural context designing, for example, an egg shop run by laying chickens and a city-as-farm run co-operatively by people and animals.
It is not easy to work relationally. There are so many factors involved that require specific in-depth knowledge sets and there are few road maps because, in design at least, this is still a relatively new field. It also often involves a lot of long-term research that requires funding.
Anastasia has worked cooperatively on a number of projects, with Philipp Kolmann, for example, on “Kitchen Bath” exhibited at Vienna Design Week 2020 that investigated the relationship between humans and their microbes (see Philip’s essay Is it Clean or is it Hygiene?).
More recently Anastasia has joined up with other practitioners in a loose, multidisciplinary collective calling themselves Seasonal Neighbours. Seasonal Neighbours is an EU-based collective of artists, designers, chefs, writers and architects “whose practices touch on aspects of seasonality, temporary cohabitation, agricultural practices, cultural memory, and practices of belonging” and focus on the material and social effects of changes in the contemporary European countryside associated with food production.
Seasonal Neighbours is an EU-based collective of artists, designers, chefs, writers and architects.
Anastasia’s work within the context of Seasonal Neighbours is called Migrating Seasons. It takes the traditional farmers’ almanac (seasonal advisory publications which became popular in the 19th century, such as the Dutch Enkhuizer Almanac, functioning as augmented calendars with information on sowing dates, moon phases, weather predictions, folklore and various other farm-related practices) as its starting and diverging point. Modern agricultural technology, global trade, population shifts and climate change have made much of the old almanac’s advice obsolete – along with a lot of agricultural traditions and folklore. Migrating Seasons is, in Anastasia’s words, “an attempt to redraw the farmers’ almanac according to the contemporary post-seasonal world, where the growing, harvesting, and consuming of food is no longer dependent on natural factors.”
Her new almanac calendar reflects factors such as the trans-European movement of workers and goods, international politics, labour rights, and energy supply. She highlights key temporal events relating to modern agriculture are highlighted on the timeline of the year, asking whether they could become the “subject of new celebrations and rituals that introduce the invisible realities behind our food system”.
Migrating Seasons is an “attempt to redraw the farmers’ almanac according to the contemporary post-seasonal world”.
Anastasia’s Migrating Seasons is one of 16 multidisciplinary projects from the Seasonal Neighbours collective featured in their new book Seasonal Matters Rural Relations: (Field)notes on rhythms, rituals and cohabitation. With contributions by: Claire Chassot, Jonathan De Maeyer, Anastasia Eggers, Fernando Garcia-Dory (Inland), Ciel Grommen, Pia Jacques, Carolien Lubberhuizen, Ioana Lupascu, Sébastian Marot, Karolina Michalik, Yacinth Pos, Caroline Profanter, Maximiliaan Royakkers, Ines Marita Schaerer, Arnd Spahn, Mona Thijs and Ewoud Vermote, the book “attempts to observe, record and archive narratives for the existing, disappearing and newly emerging relationships in the countryside” through a shared methodology of what they call “learning-by-doing” and “neighbouring” resulting in “predominantly site-specific interventions, rituals, audiovisual works and other forms, engaging us with places and their inhabitants.”
The book as a whole represents an interesting moment in the emerging field of relational, interdisciplinary practice which, when social and anthropological elements are involved, acknowledges the difficulty involved in trying to be an observer, make observations and draw conclusions in environments the practitioner is to a certain extent parachuting into – in this case, the lives of migrant agricultural workers – which feels at times problematic. And there is always that danger of romanticising the pastoral, both of which are rather deeply embedded in Western learning.
But perhaps this is part of the learning process design (and other practices) is going through. The transition from the role of supporting the consumer economy and the mindset that the world is a set of problems waiting for someone to come along with the “right” answers to something that is not only a lot more complex, but a lot more relational, more questioning, and hopefully more equitable and inclusive as well.
Seasonal Matters Rural Relations: (Field)notes on rhythms, rituals and cohabitation by Seasonal Neighbours, eds. Anastasia Eggers, Ils Huygens, graphic design by Bonsma & Reist, pub. 2024, Onomatopee, Eindhoven, NL.
