A Return to the Commonplace

Always, on their generation’s breaking wave, men think to be immortal in the world, as though to leap from water and stand in air were simple for a man. But the farmer knows no work or act of his can keep him here. He remains in what he serves by vanishing in it, becoming what he never was. He will not be immortal in words. All his sentences serve as an art of the commonplace, to open the body of a woman or a field to take him in. His words all turn to leaves, answering the sun with mute quick reflections. Leaving their seed, his hands have had a million graves, from which wonders rose, bearing him no likeness. At summer’s height he is surrounded by green, his doing, standing for him, awake and orderly. In autumn all his monuments fall.

- Wendell Berry, The Farmer, Speaking of Monuments

Wendell Berry returned to the farm. While it is not practical, nor even possible for the multitudes of us to follow in his footsteps, the agrarian values he champions–sustainable agriculture, wise management of resources, frugality, pleasures of good food, meaningful work, local economy, and connection to place, profoundly make sense, as humanity more deeply suffers the consequences of overpopulation, detachment from the land, global consumer based economies, dependence on industry, and now technology.

Sharecropper, a micro farming installation happening in New York City during the summer of 2009, is my own personal response to Berry’s summon home. Home here in the literal sense, for the term of this work, is the largest urban area, in the most consumptive country on earth. I am an outsider, a visitor, like a tourist who at this moment has few ties, owns no land, is somewhat ignorant of local customs, and takes more from this community, save dollars spent, than gives in return.

This blank slate of sorts is an ideal, though challenging circumstance from which to launch an artistic, practical and philosophical, exploration into how growing, cooking and eating beautiful food together, from within a community might change us. I can only dream right now, of possibilities, as the journey will not be mine alone. Yet however this unfolds, here in the beginning, and wherever it leads, Sharecropper is an act of hope.