STUTTGART.- Shepherdology is the study of pastoralism in the expanded sense, considering pastoral care as a methodology for both material and metaphorical practice… an outlook which very much grasps the practice of INLAND Campo Adentro, who bring their work and engagement with pastoralism to the Künstlerhaus Stuttgart under that title. The collective’s involvement with this ancestral way of life, eschewing mere representation or cultural extractivism, is direct: they have their own flock of sheep and goats, whom they consider full-fledged members of the collective and with whom they follow the annual cycle of seasonal pastures from the valley to the mountains and into the park at heart of the city of Madrid, where they built a Forest Flock Classroom. The collective’s work with the Shepherd’s School which operates under its auspices – the only school of its kind in Europe to operate and function as an art project and to provide formal education in the herding, husbandry and seasonal migration of sheep, as well as cheesemaking –is very much a material practice, which transects with countless other agricultural and social realities, both in Spain and worldwide, as INLAND also functions as the coordinating agency of the World Alliance of Mobile Pastoralists and Nomadic Peoples. Yet the collective uses the tools, energies, networks and understandings of art to migrate those existential realities into different frames and conversations. Using a bare-bones yet tentacular, “mycelium-like” structure – reminiscent both of cheese fungi colonies found in the summer pastures’ mountain caves and of vernacular architecture, that expands in response to need – developed especially for Shepherdology to showcase documents and artefacts from the school, the collective will share the pastoral atmosphere, pedagogies and array of knowledges that defines its work.

Founded in 2004 by artist and agroecologist Fernando García-Dory, and later joined by bagpiper and shepherd Nel Cañedo, the Shepherds School provides training in new technologies to working shepherds and five-month training courses to young people from urban contexts interested in learning shepherding. Course content ranges from Zoology, Farming Policies, Mountain Ecology, Outdoors Skills and Veterinary Practices to Cheese Making. On-the-job training is based on tutoring from a professional shepherd with whom the student lives and shares everyday tasks and life. Over the past years, the project has overseen the redesign and refurbishment of four mountain cabins, two mountain dairies and milking rooms. Use of these facilities are offered to graduating students free of charge who elect to pursue the trade. Together with those infrastructures for summertime mountain pastures, the Shepherds School has a model farm in the valley for winter production with accommodation, a classroom and a library for students. The Shepherds School also hosts shepherds from different countries and regions, provides tutoring for post-graduate field researchers interested in pastoralist culture, as well as advocating on behalf of pastoralist organisations from across Europe and around the world.

INLAND Campo Adentro belongs to that rare species of collective art projects that fully operate at the 1:1 scale: founded in 2009, INLAND is a collective platform dedicated to pastoralism and agroecology as a form of life, whose multifaceted activities are understood through the prism of art. Cofounder Fernando García-Dory has said that INLAND is founded on a three-word manifesto: art, agriculture, territory. Triangulating those three terms in a variable geometry of activities – from education to the commercialization of farm produce, pastoralism to experimental architecture – allows INLAND to operate as a kind of para-institution, acting as the coordinating agency of the World Alliance of Mobile Pastoralists and Nomadic Peoples. The project’s dual artistic and agroecological dimensions were born of an analysis, shored up by data and information, of imminent eco-systemic collapse on a global scale. And indeed, the politics and aesthetics of data presentation and critique remain central to INLAND’s approach. But from the outset, INLAND has worked to develop positive, collective alternatives to hegemonic models of agriculture, and to hone the experimental tools needed to carry them forward. For their intervention at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, INLAND has chosen to focus on the politics and pedagogies of pastoralism, showcasing the work of the Shepherds School, and integral component of the collective’s work. This involves, perhaps above all else, paying particular heed to the seasonal rhythms of sheep herding – that is, to the lived experience and practice of pastoralism in often remote rural areas, attending to the flock all year round.