Fallow Thinking (Let it be)

Fallow thinking (let i be)

In 1919, the year women gained the right to vote in Sweden, Elisabeth Tamm, first female owner of the Fogelstad estate and co-founder of the Fogelstad Citizen’s School for women (1925-1954), asked textile artist Maja Fjæstad to design a carpet for the library at Fogelstad: a fallow field.

Here, on fallow ground, the Swedish women’s movement gathered, exchanged knowledge, and collaborated to transform the estate into a hybrid space of experimental teaching, micro-political role-play, and slow organic farming.

Leaving arable land to fallow by postponing re-cultivation restores soil fertility. This long known regenerative practice frustrates capitalist paradigms of fast economic return: fallowing temporalities lingers along the straight lines of production. In large scale industrial monocrop farming, fallow is a waste-of-time land.

When Elisabeth Tamm commissioned the fallow carpet, industrialized and chemical warfare of WWI had turned farmlands into battlefields. How to rethink, rebuild, restore the earth? In environmentalist manifest Peace with the Earth (1940) Elisabeth Tamm and radical pacifist Elin Wägner argues that earth should not be owned, as ownership leads to exploitation and exhaustion. Earth should be cared for.

With this presentation, I wish to explore how fallow practices unfolded within and from the Fogelstad community and ask how their commitment to make peace with the earth, to maintenance and the idle pleasures of noticing, might help unsettle dominant narratives of development and growth today.

Please come closer. Threads of water. Threads of soil. Threads of worm-weavings wiggling into a zone of loose ends. Unplanned, unguarded, unsown, rich.