The text is an overworked and extended version of the initial concept for the Werkleitz festival 2025 exhibition Planetary Peasants by Daniel Herrmann, artistic director of Werkleitz and Alexander Klose. It was written for and published in The Laboratory Planet No. 6, May 2024.
Spring 2025 marks the 500th anniversary of the German Peasants’ War. According to Marxist historiography it was the first revolution on German soil, the “climax of the early bourgeois revolution, [and] one of the greatest class battles in the age of feudalism”. … Other types of revolutions have reshaped the world since, though, namely socio-technological ones. … Parallel to political and socio-economical turns, a potentially even more profound revolutionary dynamic has transformed things around the globe, on all political sides: the development of modern agronomy and the mechanization, industrialization and “chemicalization” of agriculture. […]
The rendering of an “agricultural biological chemistry” and the development of the first artificial phosphate fertilizer by the chemist Justus von Liebig (1803-1873) in the 1840s, who taught and lived in Gießen in the state of Hesse-Darmstadt and later in Munich, were a pillar of the emerging chemical industries of Germany and other nations. When the new “Badische Anilin und Soda Fabrik” (BASF) Ammonia Synthesis Factory Merseburg opened in 1916 (…), its production was directed towards ammunition for the ongoing war (replacing the saltpetre from Chile that was no longer accessible because of the British Naval Blockade) and towards artificial fertilizers for an intensified agriculture.
The invention and large-scale deployment of artificial fertilizers, together with the mechanization and industrialization of work, instigated by far the most profound changes in agriculture since its invention. Following tractor tracks and artificial fertilizer traces of phosphor, potash and nitrogen leads us to regions around the globe and across political borders. The same machines were put to work, the same substances used, even in the strictly politically divided countries on both sides of the “iron curtain”. The tracks and traces of agriculture’s industrialization lead to fields of maximized productivity, as well as to exhausted and eroded soils and to areas of excessive accumulation akin to the dead zones that result from the over-nitrification of runoff water close to ocean estuaries around the globe. Today’s planetary condition is to a significant degree defined by such—human-made, intended or unintended—migration of organic and inorganic substances linked to agricultural activities: plants and animals, but also, and mainly, chemical compounds such as CO2 or ammonium-nitrates and their accumulation in the Earth’s ecosystems. …
full text of the article can be downloaded here.
an overview and documentation of the exhibition Planetary Peasants can be accessed here.