Tiago, Maria, Andreas et Fransini

Re :Farm the City est un projet de jardinage urbain, qui mêle le savoir horticole et technologique en construisant de petits modules autonomes, entièrement contrôlés par ordinateur. Faire partie d’un groupe Re:Farm permet donc d’apprendre aussi bien comment il faut arroser les carottes, que comment on fabrique une carte-mère.

Ils sont trois à venir de Barcelone dans le cadre du festival Mal au Pixel pour présenter leur projet et proposer un atelier, qui a lieu à la galerie Mycroft à Paris.

Maria de Larratea, paysagiste, Tiago Henriques, programmeur, et Andreas Puck, architecte. Ce dernier doit s’installer à Paris cette année et sera responsable, avec Fransini, du groupe Refarm à venir dans la capitale.

Maud Granger Remy : How did it all started ?

Tiago Henriques: The project started last year during a seminar organized by Medialab in Madrid called Interactivos. There was an open call for interactive projects, that would be collaboratively developed. Refarm was one of the selected projects, and I joined the workshop. Andreas was working on another project, and that is how we met.

Andreas Puck: I was working on a “Food Computer”. We were instigating how to make organic memory and organic switch, using different fruits with different PH levels to build a binary system, with which you can start writing code.

Tiago : Since we were working in the same space, we shared knowledge. They were 40 people in the seminar, and 10 projects. We were each assigned to a project, but we were all collaborating. The reason why Nanni started the Refarm project is because he had a garden, and he went away for one month. When he came back, everything was dead. So he decided to build a system that could monitor the farm and allow you to leave it for a while.

M.: Are you more interested more in the garden or in the technology?

T.: The technical aspect became a solution for a problem. We did a lot of research on materials, to build the motherboard, and the irrigation system. I enjoy that.

M.: What about you Maria, when did you come in?

Maria de Larratea: I joined only in January of 2010. I heard of the project during a PechaKucha night in Barcelona. When you present a project with PechaKucha, you can show 20 images and talk for 20 seconds. That way you get to see, in one night, a lot of projects of all kind. That night in Barcelona was a Global Eco Forum, so all the projects were linked to the environment and ecology. I liked it so much that I contacted Nani (Hernani Dias, l’inventeur du concept Refarm) right away and joined the team. I’m a landscape architect and agriculture engineer, so exploring ways to bring nature to the city is what drew me to the Refarm project.

M.: So you guys don’t have the same kind of knowledge

Maria: When I arrived, they didn’t have earth! They were starting the Barcelona group, and they only had the technicalities lined up. But the aim is precisely to share the knowledge. We each have our specialty but we learn from each other.

M.: Did you get a training for all the computer related stuff?

Maria: Yes, I had a course on technology, I learned how to build a motherboard, and how to install the connections. I could learn more, Tiago was very patient already! Learning the programming language is easy, but then you need to practice. I think it’s wonderful to mix the technology and the natural cycle.

M.: Is the project spreading around the world?

Tiago: We now have bases in Barcelona, Lisbon, Buenos Aires, New York and Paris. The aim is to get people to meet in person, to help build a community. Forums are fine, but they’re boring and you waste time. The idea is to keep growing and spreading the knowledge.

M.: What’s your personal motivation?

Tiago: I like food, I like to eat, and I like to grow my own food. It’s amazing to be able to do it yourself, and it’s important too.

Maria: I grew up in the countryside near Barcelona, and then moved to the city. My cultural background is part country and part urban, and I miss having a garden and growing my food. For me, bringing nature back in the city is not just designing parks (which is what I do for a living), it means connecting people back to nature, the cycles, and the seasons. I like to think about Refarming the city as a positive global impact in the city with little production.

Andreas: For me, Refarming the city is about connecting people together. I like the human scale of it. It’s not like a big urbanist project. As an architect, I’m interested in the problems of the public park in the city (or lack thereof). In Refarming the city, the small scale level depends on the community finding the smallest space. Everything is at human scale: you can make it in your backyard.

Maria: I agree, when you are working on a big scale, you are creating nature (in the form of a park or a garden), but you’re never there to enjoy it, and you can’t even touch it. Refarming the city allows you to get in touch with people, and with nature. You get your hands dirty.

M.: What do you want to improve in the project?

Andreas: The software, of course, needs to be developed, to make it easier to use, with simple codes to water your farm. As far as the hardware goes, the prototypes of the watering system are all improvised. So it’s really a constant development of things and ideas: it’s a work in progress.

Tiago: We want to create more communities and have them meet every week to learn how to build the board from scratch.

Maria: We want to develop a database of all the regional recipes, and the local species. This information is really hard to get. It’s not public information. It’s more like a tacit knowledge. You can find people in the country, who know about the species and how to grow them, but you can hardly get the seeds for free. We try to get the seeds from local people, but in the long term, we would like to have a database to register the places to get the seeds and even exchange the seeds between farmers, since you can save the seeds from each of your production. But that needs to be taught too!

B.: What’s the next step?

Tiago: First, it’s to get people in the different cities to connect among themselves, and help develop the software by feeding the Wikipedia about the sensor, or the water pump through their own experiences.

Then we need to organize the earth supply. We had a workshop in Buenos Aires to learn how to make the compost. Now the wiki source explains how to build the compost step by step. Soon we’ll develop a software for the compost. But we are all working on the side, so writing software is going slowly.

Finally we would like to implement a geolocalisation tool that would allow finding the species growing in each area.

B.: A sort of “WikiSpecies”

Tiago: Yes exactly, this knowledge should be open and free.

Maria: Part of the philosophy of Refarm the city is to eat local, and support the production around you. Today, everything we eat is flying all over, because we can’t be satisfied with the things that our land produces. Knowing about the species that can grow in your own region is essential. I do a lot of research, I talk to the local people and I collect the information, which then needs to be entered in a database that anybody can access.

Internet is a perfect tool to help reconnect people together around food. To Refarm is to reform: people need to be educated about food and cooking. The culture of the countryside needs to be transmitted and reinterpreted.

Pour aller plus loin:  http://www.refarmthecity.org/