Following Whom?
Sheep being moved between Austria and Italy (image by Alessandro Celli).
In my early twenties I spent a long summer in the Scottish Borders working in a burger van run by a local farmer. That summer I flitted across the Borders smelling faintly but inexorably of grease, chatting to whomever was driving the van. Our conversations would inevitably settle upon the farm’s day-to-day work. They bred a small number of pedigree sheep for shows and, given that I had grown up in the suburbs, this was sufficiently novel for me to take an interest. Over time, I picked up a passing knowledge of the physiological merits of various sheep breeds: which characteristics fetched the most money; which were the best mothers; which could lamb outside and which struggled. By the end of that summer, I considered myself an armchair expert.
As such, I’d been interested in Oltre Terra for some time, even before it opened at Oslo’s Nasjonalmuseet in May 2023. Developed by Formafantasma, the design studio co-founded by Simone Farresin and Andrea Trimarchi, the exhibition bills itself as an investigation into “the history, ecology and global dynamics of the extraction and production of wool”. Visitors who saw Formafantasma’s earlier work in Cambio – an exhibition that focused on trees, timber and the timber industry, first hosted at the Serpentine Galleries in 2020 – will recognise a family resemblance. Oltre Terra is to wool what Cambio was to timber: an expansive research programme into the ecosystems through which we extract materials, informed by collaborations and interviews with experts across a range of disciplines. In Cambio, this meant botanists, artists, policymakers on illegal logging, philosophers and manufacturers. In Oltre Terra, meanwhile, the cast of collaborators includes evolutionary biologists, shepherds, textile manufacturers and anthropologists. In some ways, the Nasjonalmuseet team suggests, Oltre Terra can be seen as a sequel.
Formafantasma’s Oltre Terra exhibition at Oslo’s Nasjonalmuseet (image by Gregorio Gonella).
The exhibition and its research, much like what it is dealing with, form a complex ecosystem, but the core philosophy driving the project is that it is not about “using wool”. Instead, it’s looking at how we used to live and make things with sheep, how this has changed in contemporary society, and what’s left to us when these close relationships mutate. This is why the project is called “oltre terra”, the Italian term for transhumance, which refers to the movement of humans and sheep to follow the best grazing pastures throughout the seasons. In light of this, it’s worth noting that while Nasjonalmuseet bills the show as Oltre Terra. Why Wool Matters, Formafantasma simply refers to the research programme as Oltre Terra. No doubt this is a practical move on the part of the museum, bending to the need to clearly signpost exhibitions and ensure they are appealing to visitors. But it also shows our tendency to think of sheep solely as a source of wool – at least within the context of design. “As an exhibition,” Farresin and Trimarchi write in their introduction to its catalogue, “Oltre Terra aims to redesign how materials, objects and technologies are presented in exhibitions as separated from other-than-human beings that equally contributed to their production.” It invites us to consider the other players involved in wool production – namely sheep – and offers a critique of the design field’s tendency to lean towards a material-only mindset.
Oltre Terra’s exhibition design takes its cue from dioramas, the dusty glass cases found in natural history museums that are dressed with fake foliage, taxidermy and waxy models suspended in time. In the case of Oltre Terra, the exhibits are laid out atop a large steel and glass grid, suggesting that the walls of the diorama have been pushed down and the viewer invited in. Seven models of different sheep sit among the exhibits and are surprisingly kitsch in their hyperrealism, rendered life-size in a plasticky looking resin. They sit above the paraphernalia that has evolved as these sheep have arisen: shearing scissors; a woollen flag; a printout of a sheep’s genome; a shepherd’s crook; a document outlining the standards of sheep care as set out by Animal Health Australia. The conventional diorama format is a “traditional image construction based on the differentiation between background and foreground (object and subject)”, Farresin and Trimarchi write. As such, it “fails to represent the complex entanglements between species and their mutual, in-becoming relation to the landscape”.
Oltre Terra, then, is an exhibition that explores humans’ relationship with sheep; how this has changed and developed throughout history; and how the rise of industrialisation affects how sheep live with humans in an ecosystem today. The studio posits that humans and sheep developed – along with the ecosystems they found themselves in – more mutually than we tend to assume. For Formafantasma, understanding the origin story of our relationship with sheep, as well as our use of wool, demands rethinking the ways we interact with the species.
A still from Tactile afferents, a film by visual artist Joanna Piotrowska and Formafantasma that was commissioned by Nasjonalmuseet for Oltre Terra. The film examines the way in which touch, gesture and proximity may mediate the relationship between species. The work asks questions around the potential to frame physical contact as a form of communication and power relation, as well as a mode of developing understanding between species (image by Joanna Piotrowska and Formafantasma).
In this respect, Oltre Terra feels a long way from my more practical conversations in the burger van. I don’t know whether the farmers ever felt that they were part of a complex entanglement between species, though I’d be interested to ask. There was however plenty that I learned, practically and philosophically, from Oltre Terra. Due to the sheer amount of water needed to wash wool to prepare it for manufacture, for example, the EU classes wool as having a greater environmental impact than synthetic textiles. I learned too that some sheep will “heft” to a piece of land, tying themselves to a particular area and passing this knowledge of boundaries down to subsequent generations. It is a behaviour that dictates how they are shepherded – an affecting concept of belonging to an ecosystem, but one which in turn is economically beneficial for shepherds since hefted flocks are easier to manage.
Throughout the conversation that follows – hosted with Trimarchi, Farresin, and Formafantasma studio members Gregorio Gonella and Alessandro Celli, who also worked on the project – you can see these dual strands of the practical and the conceptual at times combining, at times unravelling. Formafantasma has a philosophical desire to reframe how we think about our relationships with sheep, but also a practical bent towards working with these animals in a way that is both efficient and respectful. “[Oltre Terra begins] with the position of understanding sheep, while also embracing the economic and ethical implications of extracting material from living creatures,” write Farresin and Trimachi. For Formafantasma, understanding sheep better doesn’t exclude making use of the materials they produce. Rather it is a form of acknowledgement and respect for these animals and for the relationship we have – or might begin to have – with them.
Oltre Terra (image by Ina Wesenberg).
Evi Hall You describe the exhibition design of Oltre Terra as an open diorama, and you were interested in using this as a device to explore the amount of attention that museums and humans typically give – or don’t – to domesticated animals such as sheep. Why do you think we spend less time thinking about these kinds of animals?
Simone Farresin Hanne Eide [curator at the Nasjonalmuseet] came to us with this commission to research wool because she was interested in Cambio and its structure, where the main objective had been not to glorify the applications of a material, but instead to question the creation of certain modern ideologies through the production of things. How can you deconstruct what it means to produce an object? We have been fascinated by dioramas for a long time and we’re interested in what provocations we could create around the concept, because typically what you see within a diorama is what is considered wild and pristine. I think the reason why sheep have been overlooked is because, metaphorically, they sit on the other side of the glass, along with humans. They are the fruit of human invention. So we’re fascinated by this idea of a diorama as an illustration of what we perceive as nature. It’s a format that is very closely tied to natural history museums, but which portrays nature as being “still”, which is bizarre if you think about it – it implies a stable environment that humans rule over. So we wanted to use this typology that is traditionally used to present nature in museums, as well as exploring the typologies of how objects are presented in museums of applied arts. We wanted to create a hybrid of these two typologies in one environment.
“I think the reason why sheep have been overlooked is because, metaphorically, they sit on the other side of the glass, along with humans. They are the fruit of human invention.”
Evi Oltre Terra is conducted in the same spirit as Cambio and you applied similar research methods to both. How did you find the research process differed for Oltre Terra? You’re looking at fauna not flora – does presenting a natural material like a plant feel different to an animal?
Gregorio Gonella The research methods were similar to Cambio, which is interesting, because one of the fascinating parts of that show was digging into the idea of plants as living beings. This concept of seeing plants as living creatures is quite recent and only started developing at the beginning of the last century. Before that, plants were considered midway between living beings and stones, whereas with animals it’s clear that there is a stronger relationship with humans. However, particularly for domesticated animals, we found that there were commonalities of snobbery in how humans treat them. One of the highlights of the research was exploring the process of domestication and how this is perceived.
Elements from Formafantasma’s animal reproductions at model maker Ecofauna’s workshop in Prato, Italy (image by Gregorio Gonella).
Simone In Cambio, the exhibition concluded with a film, Quercus (2020), which was a collaboration with the philosopher Emanuele Coccia and this very anthropocentric attempt to give a voice to another creature [an oak forest in Virginia, USA, ed.]. At the same time, it was thinking about what it would mean for that creature to have a conversation with humans. During the development of Cambio, our understanding of ecology evolved to become much more complex – it evolved our concept of what it means to be a designer. I think there is this human condition to feel solitary within the universe, which is perhaps due to our lack of observation of the other creatures we share the Earth with. This sense of solitude has an existential dimension, but it’s also a way of seeing the world. That has led to this idea of a very user-centred design, where you think there is just “a user”. But of course, whenever you produce something, whether it is a system or an object, you are going to intersect with many different communities that are not only using the object, but who are also producing it, refining materials and so on. These communities aren’t only humans, they’re also made up of animals and other species. So when Hanne said “wool”, from the beginning that meant sheep in our minds, and we wanted to focus the exhibition on understanding our relationship with the animal. It’s bizarre how design is always presented as disjointed from the other creatures involved in its production. How can you talk about wool without talking about sheep? How can you not think that there is a process of design there too, and that the evolution of the animal and the evolution of techniques for working with wool are all bound up in one unified story?
Evi I felt like the leaping-off point for the exhibition was domestication, which is traditionally presented with the human as dominant: humans bred sheep to become the way they are. Through your research, however, you discovered there’s actually some ambiguity about how the process of domestication came about, with a suggestion that it may be more mutual.
“Did sheep stop naturally losing their fleece because humans invented shears and were cutting it off? Or was it the other way around? You could get either answer depending on how you look at it. ”
Alessandro Celli We started noticing that there are so many different perspectives; there is no single unified vision of domestication. If you look at the domestication of sheep, it’s the oldest domesticated animal after the dog. So this relationship has around 10,000 years of history behind it. In recent history, it’s obviously undoubtable: humans developed more intensive farming and started to engineer animals for exploitation. But throughout the rest of the previous 9,000 years or more, it’s not really clear who drove the domestication process. For instance, we were speaking to scientists, or anthropologists and other researchers, and some were saying, “You know, it was humans that got in touch with sheep and started grabbing them to keep in their village to start growing their own meat.” But others would tell us it was the other way around: that sheep got close to humans for protection and that’s how this bond was created. Despite the research, it’s still not clear how it started. There are points in time such as the development of scissors that became key case studies for us to understand what triggered wool as we know it today. Did sheep stop naturally losing their fleece because humans invented shears and were cutting it off? Or was it the other way around? You could get either answer depending on how you look at it.
Francis Juke’s Portrait of a Two-Year-Old Ewe, of the New Leicestershire Kind (1802) (image courtesy of the Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection).
Simone It’s bizarre, because even internally when we have to name this relationship, we still use the word “domestication”, even though we’re constantly questioning it. It’s interesting when we get critiques on this because some people interpret our position as if we are saying that animals contributed to or chose to be domesticated. Some people have seen this as a way to create excuses for brutality towards animals, but that’s not what we’re trying to say. We just want to say that relationships between humans and other species evolve. They can start off as loving and turn abusive. One moment when we started to really question these worldviews was when we were trying to find an evolutionary biologist who was an expert on sheep. We couldn’t find one. When we started speaking with other evolutionary biologists, it became clear that sheep have been disregarded [by the field] because they are domesticated. So we have a theory that sheep have become part of human invention, because the process of domestication is seen as different to the study of evolution. Think about Darwinism, which always starts with the observation of wild species in specific environments. We started to spot certain biases, and that’s what we wanted to deconstruct.
Evi What impact do you think these biases have? What are they obscuring?
Simone At one point we were discussing the difference between domestication and symbiosis. Symbiosis is a term you use when two animal species in an environment both benefit from living together. You could describe that as the beginning of the relationship between sheep and humans, where the sheep probably benefited from human presence, in terms of protection and maybe feeding on our leftovers. In turn, these animals provided heat with their fleece and presence. So [they’re offering] comfort, milk and meat. When this relationship started it created some form of bond, but when a human is involved in a relationship with another species, you typically don’t talk about symbiosis, you would talk about domestication. So this is clarifying a bias which sees an intelligent species deciding to domesticate another. We almost felt that there is an evolutionary pact, a genetic pact, between humans and sheep. There is a responsibility we have towards these animals. Another example featured in the exhibition is around textiles. We could argue that humans invented textile making, but the spinning of wool is very simple – you just need to roll wool in between your fingers and, because of its structure, it very quickly spins itself. Without the contributions of certain features of sheep, such as wool, we would have never colonised certain territories; we included a Viking sail made of wool as an example that even travelling came to exist because of wool.
Oltre Terra (image by Alessandro Celli)
Evi I’m interested in that tension. Andrea, you spoke at the opening about the fact that there are no cases in nature bar humans where one animal enslaves another – this is a uniquely human thing. But there are cases that suggest the relationship is more mutual. Do you think it’s impossible to move away from this privileged position of dominion or responsibility?
Andrea Trimarchi It’s a matter of how you narrate things. For me, what is interesting to note in both Oltre Terra and Cambio is that these are design exhibitions, but you don’t see objects. You see everything that lies behind the object. It’s about changing this narrative, so that you have a different understanding of these realities.
Simone I think these ideas are becoming more mainstream, but I should say that our view is a very Western position. I think that if we had other communities here at the table, they would be saying, “Hey, white man, we’ve been saying this for a very long time.” We’re aware that we always talk from this very Western position, within a capitalist system and so on. We’re not here claiming to not be within that system. But I think that putting out these narratives is a way to start looking at things differently.
“You start to question who’s leading whom? Is the landscape leading the animals? Are the animals leading the human? Or is the human leading the animals? It’s a conversation between a lot of different elements.”
Andrea It’s also a process of love. When we began work on Cambio, I started to fall in love with trees and notice trees, and the same goes with sheep. Now that we have been going through transhumance ourselves and meeting sheep, we have found cuteness and love in sheep. It’s now very difficult for us to order mutton or lamb, for instance. It’s reminiscent of the relationship we have with dogs. We love dogs so much that we don’t kill them, and while I think this idea of love may be a bit animistic, it’s something that should be nurtured much more.
Evi You mentioned transhumance and you explore this with the case study of sheep moving with shepherds to new pastures in the Alps, but within the exhibition you have other ideas of movement with sheep – the Viking sail, or the way that merino sheep were taken to Australia during British colonial rule. These could almost be seen as different forms of transhumance, playing out in different spheres. Did you feel from doing the research that there are better models of working with sheep? There’s a clear sense that colonialism and industrialisation have led to exploitative and unfair biases, but does transhumance feel like a better model?
Gregorio Transhumance was really important for the research, because it was a key moment in human history and the history of our relationships with these animals. And it’s not only with animals, because transhumance also explains this idea of ecology. When you’re doing transhumance in the Alps, you’re waiting for a glacier to melt so that the path opens. So you start to question who’s leading whom? Is the landscape leading the animals? Are the animals leading the human? Or is the human leading the animals? It’s a conversation between a lot of different elements. But the transhumance taking place today, at least in Europe, is mostly related to heritage and tourism. Contemporary capitalistic society and the modern structure of states and borders just don’t allow this system to exist anymore. So transhumance in Europe is something that more and more belongs to the past, but it’s important to understand how a more complex relationship with the elements in our environment was previously maintained. I think that the world is falling apart because we are not considerate of these relationships anymore.
Transhumance from Austria to Italy in Val Senales, South Tyrol, Italy (image by Alessandro Celli).
Alessandro European transhumance is becoming a heritage practice, but places such as Mongolia largely still practice nomadic pastoralism today. It’s very dependent on the location. In Italy, for instance, there are problems with the politics of land ownership and moving sheep across different areas, so it’s difficult to answer this question of whether transhumance is a better model. During one of our last visits to the Alps, we travelled along a drove road that was built for transhumance. It goes across the border and had almost become a ruin, overridden by modern infrastructure and transport corridors, but the freeway actually follows a very similar route.
Simone I never thought about the practice of taking sheep from Europe to Australia as a form of transhumance. For me, transhumance is really just the strict relationship between humans and sheep moving to different pastures in different seasons, according to the needs of the animal. When you take the sheep to another land, that’s different. So the practice of transhumance for us was interesting because it’s most likely that humans discovered territories because they were following the needs of sheep and following them in this process of finding pastures. So it comes back to this question of who is leading whom? So the work of the shepherd is also a form of mediation and there is a process of listening at play. In the Oltre Terra book, there is a wonderful text by Vinciane Despret [‘Cosmoecological Sheep and the Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet’ by Vinciane Despret and Michel Meuret (2023), ed.] in which she describes experiments where French farmers retrained to become shepherds for sheep who had been farmed indoors. Moving outdoors, both humans and sheep had to relearn what they were supposed to do. For instance, originally the sheep were scared of touching grass because they had never felt the texture before. Sheep are very sensitive to the tactility of the surface they walk over. Similarly, the shepherds had to relearn how to create a conversation with another species. It’s these various reasons why we named the exhibition after transhumance because it seems like transhumance could be a model for how to approach making things “together with”. It’s a form of understanding things together with something else. It’s not a form of imposition – it’s a mediation or dialogue.
Image by Gregorio Gonella.
Evi I remember that example really struck a chord. The shepherds had to learn what kind of routes the sheep would follow to graze well and the sheep, who were so used to being indoors, had to learn to be comfortable with the outdoors, and with humans and dogs. They adapted together with the shepherd to become a new flock with new behaviours.
Simone Maybe we’re romanticising, but it’s really about entering into a conversation that is much more in-depth with the other and listening to mutual needs. Think about the specific architecture that humans had to build to follow sheep. You don’t have a very specific typology – it’s a very erratic, humble vernacular – but these structures allowed humans to be with sheep. It’s a beautiful model to observe, because it’s providing answers on ways of living together. Modern humans have started to disregard these ideas because of efficiency. In Europe, we farm sheep only for meat and milk production, since the wool from European sheep is too coarse and itchy for making clothing by commercial standards. By contrast, Australia is focused on rearing sheep for wool production, hence you have this disruption of a system that was basically perfect in terms of efficiency. We have fragmented them into different industries.
“In Europe, we farm sheep only for meat and milk production, since the wool from European sheep is too coarse and itchy for making clothing by commercial standards.”
Evi At the heart of the exhibition you feature a CC-Tapis rug made using European wool – material that would usually be considered waste. It feels like you’re offering a way of working with these animals and using this material whilst still acknowledging the relationship. How difficult was it to make this rug into a fully realised object both politically and practically?
Gregorio An important aspect of how these research projects work is the people who help us. This can’t be overstated. The CC-Tapis rug was actually quite easy, but only because a lot of incredible people helped make it happen. It started with Anna Kauber, who is an Italian director who made a beautiful documentary about women shepherds in Italy [In Questo Mondo (2018), ed.]. We were in contact with her after watching the film and she connected us with people working with the kind of wool we were interested in. So it was easy because this network of people were willing to help. However, it would be very difficult to reproduce the rug ordinarily, because of the lack of infrastructure for collecting, sorting and washing that wool. The market for wool in Italy is basically nonexistent in this regard. There’s a textile industry in Italy, but it uses wool from Australia, so the fact that this carpet is unique speaks a lot to the market that we have completely neglected over time.
Bales of recycled woollen material at Manteco in Prato, Italy (image by Alessandro Celli).
Simone This idea of unwanted wool is an ambiguous description, since the wool we’re talking about, which we sourced from Italy, may be coarse in parts, but there’s good quality wool in there too. So the issue is that even if [European] farmers have sheep that could provide high-quality wool, it would be a struggle to get this to a stage where it could be used as a textile because of the lack of infrastructure to process it. There are very few centres for washing wool, which is one of the most important aspects of the process. Dirty wool contains bacteria and is considered a hazardous material by the EU, so it needs to be properly processed or disposed of. If the wool isn’t washed, you can’t move it. So moving wool becomes a cost and a complication.
Alessandro It’s insane how an entire supply chain was abandoned, but many people are trying to make it work again. There was one person we spoke to about the [Italian] wool he had in his huge warehouse, which he still had to sort and wash, which was going to take a lot of time and money. But he got really pissed off if we referred to it as waste. He was frustrated by the fact that, just because we don’t want this wool to be in contact with our skin, we don’t use it at all. There are so many other uses for this wool over clothing. I think that’s why there were lots of people who helped with this carpet, because for them it was a better option than just burning the material.
Andrea A rug is also very functional – the type of wool we used is great for this kind of application. It may not be comfortable to wear because it’s itchy, but you just have to think about alternative uses. CC-Tapis have been amazing because, by chance, they had just bought this machine with a robotic arm for wool tufting. So they used that to make this huge carpet.
Image by Gregorio Gonella.
Simone CC-Tapis generally produces carpets by hand in Nepal, so when we were looking into the fact that they bought this machine it suddenly made sense to say, “Well, if you’ve got this arm here in Italy, why not use it on local wool that is otherwise unwanted?”
Andrea For me, what’s important when we do a project like this is that it informs the other parts of the studio – these projects are essential for us to deepen our work in the commercial world. I think it’s very interesting that we can take this thinking and research that is free from any kind of commercial outcome and then translate it into the commercial side of the studio and more practical applications.
Simone The carpet is a way of applying this research and applying materials that are valuable. They’re valuable not just for symbolic reasons, but also because it is absurd to waste materials such as wool. It’s a perversion of an economic market that does not make sense. So dealing with this is a form of responsibility towards the animal, the environment, the farmers, and, honestly, it’s also a form of self respect. We have these animals, we eat their flesh, we drink their milk, so what do we do with their wool?
“For me, what’s important when we do a project like this is that it informs the other parts of the studio – these projects are essential for us to deepen our work in the commercial world.”
Evi I found the strand looking into breeding and genomics in the exhibition complex. How sheep are bred has allowed people to select beneficial traits for commerce and for the health of the animal, but how do you feel about the increasing technicalisation of breeding? In the publication it almost felt slightly hopeful or optimistic. Do you see it as a form of design?
Simone When we publish something in the catalogue, it doesn’t necessarily mean that we see that as correct. We don’t necessarily take any position in the catalogue towards the breeding of animals for wool production, although I’m not necessarily fully against it. What I find problematic is this attitude that any problem can be solved in a technocratic way. Everything becomes quantitative and numeric, and apparently objective, but it’s really not objective at all. I’m quite critical towards that, but not necessarily in relation to breeding.
Oltre Terra (image by Gregorio Gonella).
Gregorio I wouldn’t necessarily say that breeding is designing – I think they are two different things. It’s more the aim of the breeding that is the problem, because breeding is just a selection towards exaggerating some characteristic of the animal. In that respect, dog breeding is no different to sheep breeding. If you breed a dog that can’t breathe properly because its face is too squashed, then, of course, the aim of breeding is disturbing.
Simone I’m critical when these techniques and research are transformed exclusively into tools for exploitation and capital accumulation. I can’t give a specific answer, but I do find it disturbing when I look at a website like sheepgenetics.org.au and see this process of production having been engineered to such a specific degree. It’s the search for efficiency taken to an extent that is so absolute.
Andrea And it was very important to show this multiplicity through how the exhibition was set out. We have seven models of sheep breeds, and they’re the guiding animals throughout the exhibition. But these are only seven of the hundreds of sheep breeds that exist in the world. When we think about sheep, we typically imagine a classic, archetypal sheep with a white, fluffy fleece, small horns and that’s it. But really there are different breeds with different personalities that come with them. It was important for us to tell all these different stories of domestication.
Introduction Evi Hall
Nasjonalmuseet paid for Disegno’s travel and accommodation to visit Oltre Terra.
This article was originally published in Disegno #36. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.