Basel Social Club returns June 9–16, 2024, for its third edition in a new location and new format: a week-long event in the open air on farmland fields behind the residential neighborhood of Bruderholz, extending across approximately 50 hectares of land into Baselland – from the city border to the edge of the forest.
The 2024 edition brings together an exhibition by local and international artists, a program of performances and many culinary offerings. Artistic interventions are positioned throughout the fields, between the barns, and amongst the trees, responding to this year’s ecological emphasis. Landscape, agriculture, and farm animals are core elements of this year’s edition, with our host farmers as active participants.
As one of the most prominent American horticulturist of the 20th century, Luther Burbank was a figure of scientific and cultural consequence, who not only influenced Frida Kahlo’s conception of hybridity, but also promoted North American eugenics projects by serving as one of the main figures to advance the creation of patents for plant species—an innovation which has pervaded contemporary agricultural practices and has mainly affected third-world countries.
The work of Wendy Cabrera Rubio contrasts the preliminary botanical creations of Burbank with their corresponding native species in Latin America, and as a result, seeks to confront audiences with the exploitative practices that fed Burbank’s success—particularly his frequent scientific excursions to the south of the American continent to appropriate native seeds and patent them in his name for his own economic benefit.
In addition, Cabrera Rubio further explores the broader connections that link Burbank with Latin America and Europe, such as GMOs—a scientific innovation whose contemporary application embodies the hegemonic control of the Global North over the Global South. Though GMOs are prohibited in Europe, they play an important role within the Global North’s economic success and dominance internationally: for instance, GMO cotton from India is used to fabricate the euro, and the companies with the most GMO patents belong to countries in the Global North—such as the Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology company Bayer, who acquired Monsanto in 2018.
From this vantage point, Cabrera Rubio uses the medium of textiles to reflect on these histories and further refine her key interests regarding the performativity of historical and biographical materials, the discursive actualization of colonial narratives, and the relational emphasis between materiality and visual culture. The proposed project will be an immersive installation that combines popular and avant-garde theater formulas that confront the viewer with issues related to the legislative and religious coloniality of the Global South, particularly in Mexico.
PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:
Wendy Cabrera Rubio .