HARD LABOR, SOFT SPACE
The Making of Radical Farms
A Bard Architecture Fellowship Exhibition by Stephanie Kyuyoung Lee
ON VIEW MAY 3 - MAY 12, 2024
HARD LABOR, SOFT SPACE
What does it mean to create an infrastructure of care; and systems of resilience within a capitalist landscape of production, extraction, and exploitation? “Hard Labor, Soft Space” is a research-based design investigation on the current surge of collective farms and radical food systems in and around the Hudson Valley. Against the backdrop of land distribution laws such as the Homestead Act (1862) and the Alien Land Law (1913) that have driven the current racial disparity in agricultural land ownership, this project reframes rurality as a site of radical reclamation.
This research forms a comparative genealogy of utopian agrarian projects starting with 19th and 20th Century Abolitionist movements in the United States to the current wave of BIPOC-led radical farms in Hudson Valley. In 1972, Liselotte and Oswald Mathias Ungers’ published “Communes in the New World: 1740-1972* a study on utopian commune living. This project is part-homage, and part-critique by addressing the erasure of racial history: in rural ideation, and explores future living strategies rooted in racial and social justice. Through counter-mapping, archiving and a dinner performance, this exhibit highlights alternative agrarian settlements and renounces models of industrial farming that thrive on the extraction of labor, capital, and lands of others.
VERSE Work/Shop is thrilled to momentarily switch-gears from our typical Talk Shop programs and host this pop-up exhibition by Bard Architectural Fellow, Stephanie Kyuyoung Lee, during the first two weekends of May. We look forward to being a destination that serves in showcasing programs of regional focus, such as incredible project that looks to give visibility to radical BIPOC- and queer-led farming collectives based throughout the Mahicantuck valley. Stephanie’s project chronicles the spaces, lands, infrastructures and practices of groups of farmers aiming to challenge the hegemony of settler/industrial farming and its attendant histories of race, property, labor, and coloniality. Her work uses architectural forms of representation to shed light on networks of resistance that have taken the rural as a site in which to construct other political, social and natural worlds.
Stephanie Kyuyoung Lee
Stephanie Kyuyoung Lee is the founder of the Office of Human Resources (OHR), a critical design studio based in New York. Her practice links socio and spatial thinking through the lens of race, land, and labor. Lee’s honors and awards include the Art Omi Architecture Residency (2023), the Art Center Residency through LMCC (2022), and the Future Architecture Fellowship (2020). Her work has been supported by several institutions such as the Architectural League, New York State Council on the Arts, and the Mellon Foundation. Her works have been featured in various exhibitions and publications, including the Haus der Architektur in Graz, Austria (2021), The Funambulist, PLAT, and Archifutures (dpr-barcelona, 2020). Currently, she teaches at Bard College as the 2022-2024 Architecture Fellow.
