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Juchart 2049

How much land does a person need to be self-sufficient? This question was already up for debate in the Weiertal after the First World War and takes on new urgency with the changing climate.

Against the background of the agricultural and settlement policies of the time, the reclamation of unused land and the industrialization of agriculture, the local marshland was drained. In the early 1920s, the architects Robert Rittmeyer and Walter Furrer built the Weiertal settlement. Due to the food shortage at the time, each family was given one Juchart of arable land to provide for itself. This corresponds to the area that a team of oxen can plow in one day. With his installation Juchart 2049, Uriel Orlow updates the concern of self-sufficiency for the near future. To do this, he has marked out in the garden the variably defined area – 33 × 33 meters in the temperate zone – that is necessary today for a plant-based diet, depending on the terrain and climate. The markings he uses have their origins in official surveying. The claim to ownership, which is often only possible for privileged people, thus conveyed contrasts with the common resource of land and food production for the entire world population.

In the exhibition space, two digital drawings further relate historically and geographically defined land masses to time, work and to each other. When viewed, the question of how resources are handled and distributed inevitably arises.