- Territory (3)Cultivation (3)People (1)Governance (3)
Plot Dialogues is an ongoing harvest born out of a research project initiated during an MA at the Center for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths. This archive is a mixture of found content, books, laws, articles, recipes, field work drawings and video stills of several ejidos* predominantly in Chiapas, Mexico. The research material lives inside a cultivation plot where items can be in dialogue with one another. Here structures of land governance, communal land holding, cultivation and local stories can co-exist in an alternate digital world outside their agrarian contexts. Plot Dialogues aims to hold and showcase the inseparable relationship of social and biological life. This continuous biological-social commoning are the details that work to shelter knowledge. The multi-scalar dialogue from soil to the hands of the woman who tends her traspatio,* complicates reducibility and instead argues that scenes of everydayness help form political opposition.
*communal land holding *cultivation area next to the home
Research and design by Andrea Macias-Yañez
Traspatio = cultivation area next to the home
Fogón = an outdoor wood-burning cooking area usually made of adobe
Leña = cut firewood that is used in the fogón
Ejido = communal land holding system
Parcela = a plot, a piece of land that a small-scale farmer cultivates on
Campesino/a = those who live in rural agrarian zones, who live through small scale farming and autoconsumption