Polycultures — Johanna Seelemann

2025 — Polycultures

Polycultures is a speculative agro-ecological investigation, unfolding in three phases — research, prototype, and proposal — first shown as part of Futures at the Grassi Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Leipzig. It explores what agricultural practice might become when viewed through lenses of more-than-human design, material byproducts, and speculative thinking.

Alongside its design proposals, the project is grounded in a body of interviews and conversations with practitioners in farming and food processing. These testimonies provided both knowledge and critique, shaping the prototypes and situating them in the context of current debates around land use, food systems, and ecological resilience. Polycultures therefore operates not only as a scenario for a future farm, but also as an educational platform that organizes, archives, and shares research across disciplines.

The work proposes a post-anthropocentric reimagining of cultivation: a self-governing forest garden that continues to produce food for human communities, yet no longer relies on human labor. Ecological intelligence (forest succession, permacultural diversity) is interwoven with robotics and closed-loop waste systems. The robotic agents are re-contextualised from existing experimental robotic systems into farming robots. Instead of being directed towards conventional agriculture, they are deployed to make alternative and sustainable forms of food cultivation possible.

Alongside the system itself, a collection of mundane objects is displayed: a bokashi tray, a urine-diverting toilet, a lamp and a shelf.

Concept And Design