In 2020, the Traveling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills takes the form of the occupied farm and becomes a mobile character. The onset of the pandemic time found the Travelling Farm Museum team developing the Museum’s mobile installation – a roaming architecture on a bike nicknamed “the embryo” of the Travelling Farm Museum. Taking inspiration from the cargo bikes that were used to distribute baked goods in older periods. The emblematic door of the farmhouse became the starting point for creating this structure.
In the design process, Txell Blanco, reappropriates the notion of models in architecture by researching the Diorama methods and a miniature version of the farmhouse emerges on wheels. The mirror quality that adorns the surface of the structure serves both integrating in any environment aspects and her multi-functionality. Both the structure and her materials make Travelling Farm Museum not only able to reflect her surroundings but also project messages and moving images onto them.
The Museum takes decentralization, connection/communication/conversation, embedded creativity as the key principles of the participatory organization. Instead of creating a monumental building for the museum, the Museum operates with vehicles that symbolically and practically carry the idea and content along-with which people travel and meet each other.
The farm travels throughout the neighbourhood and listens to the stories of farmers, stories of eviction, survival and resilience. Despite the pandemic restrictions, we have managed to connect to many inhabitants. From June 2020, throughout the summer, the museum was on tour in the area of Leidsche Rijn, by transporting it’s collection of books, food and interactive newsletters, exchanging knowledge and food with the participants.
The with-corona or post-pandemic world under the unfolding effects of the climate crisis demands different ways of living and working (together). We believe that a key to those new ways lie in a hybrid of farming and art, agriculture and culture, taking place on a local as well as trans-local scale. We want to continue collecting the forgotten skills in our immediate surroundings in Utrecht and beyond, making them accessible through, listening, learning and teaching workshops, audio-video, tools, cooking, communal field trips through the city (streets, markets, public squares and parks) and in the rural (farms, natural and historical organizations).
