field_RESEARCH
2017-ongoing
Milkscape is a long term research on the silvopastoral landscape of milk production, characterized by pastures and hay fields bordered by woodland, emerging from the open-air cattle and sheep breeding. It is a landscape that is slowly shaped, day after day, by grazing, by the bodies, the steps and the time of the cows, as well as by the seasonal cycles of grass growth and haymaking.
Pastoralism is a tradition that still endures in a time of economic, social and climatic change, and which is slowly fading away. While in 2017, the village herd still numbered 150 cows, today only 35 remain! Fortunately, thanks to a project funded by the European Union, there is another herd, owned by the Muntean family, comprising another 60 cows and calves. And my friend Cristina, with Florica, Rosita, and Ema!
In this context, particular attention is paid to the relationship with animals, in order to reinhabit a distance, and to preserve a political and ecological imaginary of coexistence. The research is developing by going to pasture with the cows and with the last local cowherds. (A day with the ciurda. Aestethics Lesson.)
Within Ascari’s practice, artistic research is conceived as a process of knowledge, a way of learning through experience, and through the body, by engaging with the pastures and the woods, the meadow, the animals, the villagers, the rain, the wind. In this sense, walking, exploring and immersing oneself in the landscape are aesthetic practices: essential and poetic gestures of sensory encounter with the place, in order to reappropriate a slower perception of time and vision, at cow pace; to recover a dimension of staying rather than doing; to reconnect with the weather and with the circular flow of energy, the biological rhythm of life, in the intertwining of human, animal, plant, and fungal forms that co-create the common habitat we inhabit.
The attempt of the research is to shift the point of view from that of the “human consumer” toward a more situated and conscious understanding of the ecological processes of which we are part, opening up a reimagining of the relationship between humans and the environment from an ecosophical and interspecific perspective.
