Activations presents the AgriForum Reader as a set of modules, 'activating' an evolving body of texts, drawing on key themes, highlighting texts, images and abstractions that both convey and complicate the agrarian. This section functions as an expanding repository of references, reading lists and visual vocabularies, its expansions spreading both vertically and horizontally, bringing forth new tangents, associations and marked points of encounter for all of us.

Each item in these modules could be thought of as a building block - something to grab, discard, taste, re-shape, break - that can contribute to the nature of enquiries presented in the forum.

As we move forward, we invite our participants to imagine for themselves forms of this disassembled 'Reader' that appeal and represent their individual and collective imaginations and impressions of the agrarian and their frictions with it.

Activations: The AgriForum Reader

Soil, seeds and stories

What is soil as an infrastructure? How does soil politics affect farming practices?
As a material medium for artist practices? What is inscribed in soil?
What are contemporary struggles and conflicts around soil?
How do we mobilise resources, ideas, people?

What relationships come to light when we speak of nature and farming?
How do we approach the question of natural resources?
How does food sovereignty tie into farming practices?
What alternative practices can we identify?

Modes of being: gender, resistance and the archival

What are the forms of resistance we witness today in the agrarian context?
What are the intersections with gender and caste that emerge?
What do programmes of agrarian reform address today?
What is the form of the collective that takes shape?

Producing art, mapping geographies of making

Questions about climate

How is the agrarian represented in art making?
What are the primary concerns being voiced in artistic practice around the agrarian?
What resistances do creative explorations around the agrarian articulate?
How do issues of artistic labour and production overlap with the agrarian?
How is agrarian defined as site within art?

How does ecological development and modernity get factored in?
How do we visualise the crisis situation in the agrarian?
What is human-animal conflict, and what does it illuminate?
How do we critique it? What questions do we ask of crises?
What are the ways in which we co-exist with unpredictability?

Foraging forward and the future

Displacement, occupation and identity

Is sustainability still viable as a discourse within the agrarian context?
How do we design a future for food and food production?
What can alternative practices, ideologies and knowledges teach us?

Where do matters of citizenship and nationhood intersect with the agrarian?
How does art and the agrarian address issues around land?
How are issues of migration and displacement foregrounded today?