ART BY
OLALEKAN JEYIFOUS
PROTO-FARM COMMUNITIES
What if, back in the 1980s, when climate science started offering warnings of where we were headed, we had begun to put far-reaching policies in place? The following works imagine a protopian, sustainable community in ’90s Brooklyn—a future that is, as Olalekan puts it, “decolonized, decarbonized, draped up, and dripped out.” These photomontages posit a variety of advanced green technologies for the production and dissemination of food, seeds, and freshwater, set within an alternate world in which the government combats climate change through a market-based system of “mobility credits” that curtail movement of the poor and working classes.
PFC CATWALK
Olalekan casts a fugitive network of farming societies that he refers to as the “Proto-Farm Communities of Upstate New York” (PFCs). These works build upon a vision of resilience and resistance that references the tradition of maroon communities, recast through the lens of an Afrofuturist, ecological, and solar-punk-meets-salvage-punk world brimming with Black joy.
PFC CANAL
SENECA SUNCRAFT ORCHARDS
PFC OYSTER FARM
PFC POULTRY FARM KIDS
PFC COMPOUND
SEED & WATER DRONE
BROOKLYN DEPOT