NOTE: This post is to introduce you to the 47th episode of François Matarasso’s and my monthly podcast, “A Culture of Possibility.” It will be available starting 20 December 2024. You can find it and all episodes at Stitcher, iTunes, and wherever you get your podcasts, along with miaaw.net‘s other podcasts by Owen Kelly, Sophie Hope, and many guests, focusing on cultural democracy and related topics. You can also listen on Soundcloud and find links to accompany the podcasts.
François is taking a break for medical treatment, and I know listeners join me in wishing him a complete and speedy recovery. In the meantime, I’ll be interviewing our guests solo.
Joining me for episode 47 is Clem Sandison, who lives in Glasgow, Scotland. Clem is a photographer, filmmaker, and organizer, among other things. She works with the Land Workers’ Alliance, “a grassroots union of farmers, foresters, and land-based workers,” and also the UK member of La Via Campesina, a global movement and solidarity network encompassing 200 million peasant farmers and farmers’ unions.
I’ve known Clem for a long time as both an artist and activist, and in thinking about guests to interview, I realized she’d be an excellent person to make the connection between culture and agriculture, which hasn’t much featured on this podcast. As I explained to Clem, it cast my mind back to “San Francisco in the 70s when there was a public service art jobs program (CETA, kind of like the MSC in the UK), and community gardens were one of the locations where people did their work. It was part of the same project in which people painted community murals, did circuses, and so on, and I really got a sense how connected this question is of how we live on the land, even in cities, and how we connect the land to our lives, our livelihoods, and our cultures. Our ideas about it make up such an important part of who we are as human beings and societies.”
I asked Clem to share something of her journey. How did she get to this work?
“I grew up in the countryside in Wales with my family in a very rural setting where there’s a lot of farming, but I was always drawn to art and culture and film and things like that. I was very excited to go to university in Glasgow, and I studied film and history of art. I loved the culture of the city and the people; it was very vibrant and it still is. So I had that arts framing, and was very much unsure what direction to go in. I was engaged with working in and with community. I ended up going down a community development route following my undergraduate degree. Since then all my work has used art as a lens or creativity or different cultural approaches. But it’s also been very much about, what are the needs of communities? How can we bring people together? Food has always been a central part of that for me, whether I was working in more of an arts practice, or working on skills sharing or training or community cooking. All kinds of food-related practices, although they could seem like different things, they’re integrated very well together.”
Clem described her current work and defined some of the terms I found on the websites linked here.
“This work is really about trying to increase the decision-making power of food producers within the food system,” she told me, “and challenge corporate control of our food system to ensure that we’re working in solidarity to prevent land grabs and create a more just and ethical and sustainable food system for all. My work is very much based in Scotland, so I work with our members in Scotland to advocate for the rights of small-scale farmers and growers and foresters, and to help with peer-to-peer learning and knowledge exchange. We are trying to build a strong movement that is very land-based and equitable, looking at food systems, at problems across the board, not just in terms of the food produced, but we also work around timber production and fiber and all aspects of the material needs we have that come from the land.”
She also explained food sovereignty, something I thought not all listeners might find familiar.
“Food sovereignty is something was that was developed as a framework by La Via Campesina (which means the way of the peasant in Spanish). The first gathering was in the 90s in Latin America, and it was very much advocating for the rights of food producers to have more of a role in deciding what kinds of food systems communities have. Food sovereignty is about the right of peoples to have culturally appropriate food that is produced in their local area, that is sustainable long-term, that won’t impact on future generations. It is challenging a model of food as a commodity which is traded on the global market that does not actually result in people having access to to good food. It’s a right to food framework.”
That made me think we could say “food democracy,” rhyming with the concepts of cultural democracy and the right to culture which are so central to this podcast.
To give us a deeper understanding of how this work unfolds day-to-day, Clem described the most local work she does.
“In my local neighborhood, a 10-minute walk from where I live, is my local park called Alexandra Park. Nine years ago, as a community, we planted a food forest. A community co-design process was used to create that space. It’s publicly accessible at all times; it’s an experiment in commoning. What would it mean if people were able to steward public land collectively? What does that look like? How can we produce more of our own food, not just in terms of allotments or private gardens, but a collective resource? What does that look like? It’s also a very beautiful space that I care for deeply, so I work on that project as well.”
Clem explained that the food forest is a very long-term commitment because the main crop is fruit trees. “It’s not as quick as growing some veg, but it has this legacy and this sense of looking to the future, which is really, really important, and being, as I said, a collective resource, but not just seen as a resource. We’re trying to get people out of the mindset of ‘What can this land provide for me?’ and thinking more about, what is the relationship long term that we have with the land, and how do we come into relationship?
“That’s where we use culture and art, as a tool to start to think more imaginatively about our relationship with the more than human world. The Food Forest is very much part of a wild landscape. It doesn’t have fences and boundaries and raised beds and lots of built infrastructure. Somebody could walk through it and not even realize that some of the trees and bushes are planted, because it’s trying to replicate a forest edge ecosystem, which is much more natural than some forms of gardening. That was always the ethos: this is a space as much for wildlife and for animals and insects and fungi and all the other organisms. What we’re trying to do through song and the work we do with people and cultural celebrations at different points in the seasons is reconnect people with those cycles of the earth. They might come first because they want to pick raspberries and eat some raspberries, but ultimately, they’re in relationship with their environment through doing that.”
Clem explained that they have community events at every point in the seasonal cycle, such as equinoxes and solstices, building new rituals, singing, sharing food. Many people volunteer to help on work days, caring for the space, doing craft projects, cooking and eating together. Local schools use the space as part of curriculum. People who come from different heritage cultures are drawn to different crops and have diverse ideas about the land, which adds to the project’s dynamism. Clem described Alexandra Park as “the main green space for quite a number of neighborhoods. It’s like the lungs of the city. We have three or four neighborhoods that surround it where it’s their main public green space.” She added that “I think the majority of people that attend our regular volunteer group are motivated by this feeling of dissatisfaction with their work lives. In particular, we have a lot of people that are doing zero hours contracts [where they are available for work but the employer has no commitment to provide a certain number of hours] or have quite bad work work conditions, and want to feel connected both to other people in their community and to some form of meaningful work and and contribution.”
On the podcast, Clem describes some really interesting projects in more detail, starting with work she did twenty years ago with a group of asylum seekers, using cooking to help newcomers and longtime residents become integral to the community and connect in soldarity. “When people are cooking and sharing food together,” she explained, “it’s the most powerful way to come together, because it’s such a nourishing and fulfilling practice. That was one of the main tools used within community to try and overcome some of the potential conflict or flash points that were being fueled by by right-wing agendas.”
She talks about the functions parks could play in building community, about recognizing the historical connection of this work to plantation systems and commodity crop monoculture sysems, how it’s linked to the history of capitalism, and given the large number of women involved, to challenging patriarchy and nurturing solidarity. And we discuss how the work of the organizations Clem is involved with focuses both on practical projects on the ground and policy-related work to affect the larger context, a dual focus I greatly admire. We even got into British history and impact of enclosing land holdings. Please tune in for a very interesting conversation!
Here’s a short film Clem made last year for the Landworkers’ Alliance.
I’ve posted Ruthie Foster’s wonderful version of this song before, but here’s the Lucinda Williams original, “Fruits of My Labor.”