WAM (World Agriculture Museum)

Overview

In her practice, Asunción Molinos Gordo questions the categories that define ‘innovation’ in mainstream discourses. She employs installation, photography, video, sound and other media to examine the rural realm and understand the value and complexity of its cultural production and the burdens that keep it invisible and marginalised, often disregarded as folkloric or mythological.
WAM (World Agriculture Museum) (2010/2015) combines parody, fiction, theatre and fair-distribution data to challenge the production of history and knowledge. Located in an abandoned warehouse near Khalid Port, the work employs the trope of the cabinet of curiosities to explore current methods of farming and food production. Influenced by the eclectic Agricultural Museum of Cairo, WAM recreates the atmosphere of the old museum and its colonial aesthetic, updated with contemporary discourse on ‘agricultural progress’ and biotechnology. Understanding the museum as a theatre stage, Molinos Gordo displays a symbolic arrangement of images, raw data and opinion in an attempt to construct an incomplete scenario that reveals inconsistencies in the hegemonic narrative around food production and introduces the issues of today’s food crisis. WAM immerses the public in a spatiotemporal illusion – a museum of the future in which the truths of our present reveal their potential obsolescence and fragility.

This project was part of Sharjah Biennial 12