Sjellik
In search of the forgotten cabbage + Mooswief, Maastricht
Artist in residence at the Jan van Eyck Academie under the name TravellingFarmMuseumOfForgottenSkills
2022
Travelling Farm Museum of Forgotten Skills
Travelling Farm Mueum of Forgotten Skills is a participatory, mobile museum where artists, citizens, and farmers share stories about their relationship to food and the landscape. Comprised of The Outsiders collective (Asia Komarova, Txell Blanco, Merel Zwarts, Maxim Yesodharan, and Leonardo Siqueira) in collaboration with Casco Art Institute, they operate vehicles that physically and symbolically convey ideas about food sovereignty, ecology, and relationality to different local publics. By visiting farms and food producers and connecting heritage skills to present challenges, they create tools for listening and dialogue that connect environmental care with art and critical pedagogies.
The Traveling Farm Museum’s latest iteration centers around the figure of the mooswief (Limburg dialect for “vegetable woman’’), an expression used to describe rural women who in the past would come to Maastricht to sell their goods at the weekly market. Today a monument to the mooswief presides over the city’s town square, and each year the statue is used to inaugurate the Carnival festive season. Just as Carnival celebrates the return of light and a renewed spring, the mooswief has come to symbolize fertility and a deep connection to the land. Shepherding her spirit along this journey is the memory and lore of a once ubiquitous but now largely disappeared local vegetable called the sjellik.
Formerly a wagon covered in mirrors to blend into the surrounding landscape, The Traveling Farm Museum now bears a kaleidoscopic image of the Maastricht city border and its neighboring farmlands. Accompanied by a soundscape of the countryside, The Outsiders move as mooswiefs through the public square, engaging those around them in a conversation about food, heritage, and the possibility for a common future.
Kale, rethinking landscape by Txell Blanco. Music by Maxim Yesodharan
Tribute to Mooswief, aprons, dogcar and tours. By Merel Zwarts, Asia Komarova and Txell Blanco
Searching for Sjellik, the forgotten cabbage by Txell Blanco.
Client:
Jan van Eyck academie
