Seasonal Matters Rural Relations is a collage-style field guide assembled by interdisciplinary collective Seasonal Neighbours, archiving the human and non-human relationships of agricultural life that industrialisation is steadily erasing.
About This Book
What does it mean to work beside a farmer, a seasonal migrant worker, a crop, or a weather pattern? Seasonal Neighbours spent time in the countryside not as observers but as neighbours, and this book is the record of that proximity. Across sixteen contributions, Seasonal Matters Rural Relations moves between the theoretical and the sensory — from essays on metabolic change in horticulture and the robotisation of rural labour, to poems, picking songs, maps, and intercultural recipes using wild plants. It is a document of agricultural landscape in transition, attentive to the rhythms and rituals that industrial production methods tend to flatten. Essential reading for those working at the intersection of landscape, ecology, and artistic practice.
Key Features
- 304 pages of visual essays, graphic collages, poems, maps, short stories, musical scores, and intercultural recipes
- Contributions by Claire Chassot, Jonathan De Maeyer, Anastasia Eggers, Fernando Garcia-Dory (Inland), Ciel Grommen, Pia Jacques, Carolien Lubberhuizen, Ioana Lupascu, Sébastian Marot, Karolina Michalik, Yacinth Pos, Caroline Profanter, Maximiliaan Royakkers, Ines Marita Schaerer, Arnd Spahn, Mona Thijs and Ewoud Vermote
- Published by Onomatopee, 2024
What You'll Discover
- How artistic fieldwork and neighbourly participation can reframe the agricultural landscape as a site of cultural and ecological complexity
- The evolving metabolisms of horticulture — how plant, soil, and human rhythms shift under industrial pressure
- Stories of European labour migration and seasonal work, told through personal narrative and intercultural exchange
- How questions of robotisation, upscaling, domesticity, and new forms of rural citizenship are reshaping who belongs to the countryside
About the Author
Seasonal Neighbours is an interdisciplinary collective whose practice is built around extended proximity to farming communities, working side by side with farmers, seasonal workers, plants, and crops. Their fieldwork informs a body of work that spans visual art, research, and community engagement within rural contexts.
Specifications
- Format: Paperback
- Pages: 304
- Dimensions: 12.5 x 18.8 cm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9789083362182
- Publisher: Onomatopee
- Publication Date: [Details available upon request]
Perfect For: Landscape architects, rural ecologists, artists and researchers working in agrarian or environmental contexts, and readers drawn to the politics of land, labour, and cohabitation.