edited description + added participant pic

_data/rf2020/events.yml

@@ -212,15 +212,16 @@
   participants: [13]
 
 - id : 14
-  title_ : Agro Commune
+  title_ : "Imagining a decolonized rural future: Agro-Commune"
   lang_ : EN
   format: Talk
   ref : agro-commune
+  pic: /assets/img/rf2020/events/agro-commune.png
   date : 2020-09-19 00:00
   description: |
-    I wish to give a talk based on my current/past work. I often work with activist groups that aim for labor liberation and redress. I developed an anti-memorial for Asian diasporic womxn who were subjected to “war labor” during World War II. I explored themes of colonial labor, and gendered violence through sound recordings of protests and a temporary paper memorial that became a traveling exhibit. My most recent work, Agro Commune, proposed a hacking device against the extractive economy of floriculture in the Global South. I visited Dutch-owned flower farms in Kenya and collected archives from the internet to create an audiovisual component that was then presented with a 36' by 9' mural detailing a proposed agro-future. The project used an investigation lens to decipher geopolitical conditions, where architectural themes were taken to expose and respond to current gendered and racialized labor-power exploitation.
+    _What is the rural future in the era of postcolonial uprising? How do we dismantle modern industrial capital that extracts labor from disenfranchised black womxn workers?_ _Agro Commune_ is a para-fictional investigation where architecture is utilized as a lens to expose and respond to current geopolitical labor conditions. It began with the belief that architectural realities rarely start from a tabula rasa state. Rather, existing systems stand as a catalyst for new imaginations through disrupting and reconfiguring the present. The project imagines reparations for postcolonial states through farmland reform and renounces current global industries that thrive on the extraction of labor, capital and lands of others. 
 
-    Expanding on my past analysis of greenhouse colonies as sites of extractive economy, I will continue to visualize this agricultural utopia through model-based research. The 36’ by 9’ mural highlighted systems of rural development and ecological resilience. The visual mural detailed phases of geographical expansion, connecting local female farmers to a larger co-operative base. At the micro scale, the assembly process in the flower-factory (breed-grow-cut-pack-waste) is exposed and mediated through digital agricultural devices. At the macro scale, social farming and relational trade is implemented to form a regional Flower Cooperative that rejects the current plantation model. This is largely ONLY through current rise in make/shift smart agricultural technology developed in Sillicon Savannah based in Nairobi, Kenya. This is a project of utopian realism, and re-imagines labor operations as an architectural spectacle within the reality of global capitalism.
+    In sub-Saharan Africa, foreign corporations are vigorously irrigating vast rural areas for agro-industrial purposes, displacing local smallholders from their land to secure stable supplies for the rest of the western world. Since the global food crisis of 2007-2008, there has been an exponential growth in large-scale land acquisition in Africa. Western, Chinese, and Middle Eastern companies are leading a 21st-century land rush in African farmland where more than a forty million hectares are now under 99-year leases. Greenhouse colonies have become one of many architectural representations of unequal exchanges fostered by global capitalism. This workshop is based on research on the production system of Kenyan floriculture - and uses architectural language as a lens to investigate a speculative rural cooperative system for smallholder farmers. 
   participants: [14]
 
 - id : 15

_data/rf2020/participants.yml

@@ -39,6 +39,7 @@
   fullname : Oliver Bream McIntosh & FuPro Collective
   ref: oliver-bream-mc-intosh
   pronouns : he/him
+  pic: /assets/img/rf2020/participants/oliver-bream-mcintosh.png
   links : ['https://www.linkedin.com/in/oliver-bream-mcintosh-628558102/']
   bio: |
     Ollie was born in London and has lived, studied and worked in Canada, Brazil, Cuba, France, Belgium, and Italy. his academic endeavours began in Linguistics, but have since led him on an adventure across disciplines, taking in Anthropology, Political Economy, and Complex Systems, onto a Master’s in Sustainable Development, and then another in Economics. His work today calls on both a fluency in many cultures and languages, as well as on his previous studies, queerness, and a systems mindset. Currently balancing his time between a pro-bono role as a director of a social-arts enterprise in London, a research fellowship at a think tank in Rio, freelance foresight work focused on democratising cities, collaborator roles in a handful of global and local activist communities, and teaching an award-winning Futures Studies course at a UK university, he spends much of his time thinking and dancing at the nexus of pedagogy, participation and Futures.