Is that really Stalin rolling towards you? Yes, the man-sized cardboard figure in the little electric trolley on the world-famous, sloping gallery of New York’s Guggenheim Museum is Stalin. Why is Stalin in the Guggenheim? Because the Soviet leader reshaped large parts of the Soviet Union after the Second World War, and that’s exactly what the exhibition “Countryside, The Future” is about.
The exhibition “Countryside, The Future” at the Guggenheim Museum in New York aims to show the real country life: more futuristic and smarter than any big city. Rem Koolhaas, AMO (the research department of OMA) and many other participants examine the causes of radical change in the world’s rural regions.
Is that really Stalin rolling towards you? Yes, the man-sized cardboard figure in the little electric trolley on the world-famous, sloping gallery of New York’s Guggenheim Museum is Stalin. Why is Stalin in the Guggenheim? Because the Soviet leader reshaped large parts of the Soviet Union after the Second World War, and that is exactly what this exhibition is about: the reshaping of rural areas.
The exhibition “Countryside, The Future” covers a broad arc from the countryside to the landscape, agriculture and villages through world and human history. The path up the Guggenheim rotunda leads the visitor from the ancient Romans and Chinese to Marie Antoinette and her country houses to the conquest of the American prairies by white settlers; from Hitler’s highways to Chile after Pinochet, from nuclear fusion to the mammoths in Siberia, which can now be bred because the soil freed from permafrost releases their DNA – but unfortunately also releases toxic methane gases. The spiral-shaped gallery is filled with photos, maps, tapestries, video projections, paintings, explanatory panels and screens, and it doesn’t help the overview that some of the information panels are placed on the floor and can only be read in the opposite direction.
read in the opposite direction.
The exhibition, which winds its way up six levels, was conceived by Rem Koolhaas, the Dutch architect, architectural philosopher, former journalist and screenwriter who now teaches at Harvard University, together with Samir Bantal, who runs AMO, and Troy Conrad Therrien from the Guggenheim Museum. Of course, numerous others were also involved: Architects from the Office for Metropolitan Architecture, founded by Koolhaas in Rotterdam, as well as students and academics from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, the University of Nairobi, Kenya, Wageningen University in the Netherlands, the Design Academy Eindhoven, Waseda University in Tokyo and the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing. This large number of collaborators alone may explain the wealth of material.
Koolhaas, who has already designed the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum in Las Vegas, became famous in the USA primarily through his 1978 book “Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan”. It is therefore somewhat ironic that a proven urbanist is now enthusiastic about country life. Koolhaas believes that it is not the city that has a future, but only the countryside, because that is where interesting changes are taking place. According to UN statistics from 2014, half of the world’s population lives in the countryside. In fact, 98 percent of the earth’s surface is non-urban. However, the exhibition organizers include a great deal: from the Sahara to the Himalayas to the Barrier Reef, from the university campus in Silicon Valley to the industrial park near The Hague.
The engine of the greatest change: technological progress
At the beginning of the museum ramp, visitors are greeted by a Swiss village near St. Moritz, where Koolhaas once spent his vacations. Here, the size of the medieval gates defines which vehicles can pass through. Today, wealthy city dwellers have moved in from Milan, and the doors of their new houses are based on the medieval design, but no longer on the dimensions. This is an example of how “gentrification” and technology are shaping the countryside – the rediscovery of the village as a place to live is based on technological progress.
The dramatic changes in the rise of Africa and China are also linked to the internet, a story that has remained untold to this day, says Koolhaas – at least from the perspective of city dwellers. To change this, the exhibition is packed with technical gimmicks: from the underwater drone and the movable tin toy to the high-tech tractor outside the door, which is controlled via a tablet, and, not quite so high-tech, Stalin on wheels. No wonder the “New York Times” is reminded of the aesthetics of a Soviet world exhibition pavilion.
Technical agriculture
The internet, robots and artificial intelligence have made it possible for people who are
who live alone and far away from the city to communicate and develop new social models. “We don’t have to fear technology,” says Koolhaas.
As the exhibition shows, in Tanzania, for example, banks are being replaced by a payment system using smartphones called M-Pesa; in China, farmers not only offer their products for sale via the Internet, but also sell and ship them.
The landscape in Africa, for example, is changing dramatically as a result of modern travel habits, where gorillas are now admired and photographed rather than hunted. In Qatar, technology (and oil money) has enabled the country to set up its own agriculture within a short space of time. For a long time, the only thing Qatar produced was camel fodder for races. Food was imported from the surrounding Arab states, above all Saudi Arabia. In 2008, however, the sheikhs cut off exports to the Gulf state. As a result, the Emir of Qatar switched to imports from Turkey and Morocco and also had 4,000 cows, including stables and milking machines, flown in. Today, Qatar can sell mozzarella to the US bases in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The new landscapes are also characterized by modern, tiny nano-robots. Vegetable and fruit cultivation in Holland, for example, is now computer-controlled and extremely effective: Dutch farmers are able to grow greenhouses the size of 23 soccer pitches. Some, on the other hand, are downsizing using pixel farming, where computer-controlled mini-drones nurture individual plants in tiny cells measured in square centimetres. The opposite is happening on farms in the USA, which have also been retrofitted; there, a single tractor can now cultivate a field that stretches as far as Canada.
The exhibition also lists how dictators repeatedly tried to reshape their country, often at the cost of thousands of lives. For example, after the Second World War, Stalin wanted to transform huge regions of the USSR – from Kazakhstan to Ukraine – to supply them with food. He sent a million students to the countryside, had “unreliable elements” deported to the gulags and rivers in Siberia diverted or even – in vain – turned back.
Following Stalin’s example, the Chinese party leader Mao also formed his “Great Leap Forward”, which cost the lives of up to 70 million Chinese. Libya’s ruler Muammar Gaddafi apparently also had similar megalomaniac ideas.
Koolhaas contrasts the Stalinist plans with the ideas of the German architect Herman Sörgel, who in the 1920s wanted to connect Africa with Europe to form the continent of “Alantropa” by lowering the level of the Mediterranean by a hundred meters and building dams at Gibraltar and Suez. This remained theory, as is further argued, unlike Hitler’s highway construction, which, true to the Nazi ideology of worshipping the country folk, was intended to raise life for the rural population to the level of city dwellers. This was followed by the Morgenthau Plan, a de-industrialization of Germany after the Second World War that was considered at short notice by the American Roosevelt administration and heavily exploited by Nazi propaganda. This would have been accompanied not only by a ban on tractors, but also a ban on weapons. At least there is no cardboard Hitler on wheels in the exhibition.
Immigration leaves its mark
Change in the countryside is often brought about by immigration. The exhibition aims to prove this with an Italian example: There are almost deserted Catholic villages there to which Muslims from the Middle East have moved, who are now taking over church services (for a fee), which are becoming too difficult for the ageing Catholics. This is revitalizing the country – the exhibition reports no problems.
More dramatic, however, according to another article, was the immigration to the west of America, where the land was supposedly given to the whites by divine will for colonization and an entire continent was conquered and “cleansed” of natives within less than a hundred years. And also turned the prairies into agricultural monocultures. However, these are fiercely defended by today’s inhabitants against the liberal city dwellers. However, you don’t see many country people in the pictures in the exhibition. There are hardly any olive-picking farmers, tomato planting migrants or shepherds tending sheep; one gets the impression that all agriculture is nowadays controlled from a cell phone in the office.
Some New York critics also take offense at this: they accuse Koolhaas of showing the country from the perspective of the naïve, astonished city dweller. The magazine “Metropolis” attested to Koolhaas’ neoliberal and at the same time sentimental view of the country. And: the show produced an overabundance of disorganized content without a common theme. The “New York Magazine” was even harsher: Koolhaas discovers people like himself all over the world and in history, and the exhibition is less an anthology of revelations than a childish wonder run amok.
