In RECOMMONING, we are searching out a more open, collectively held world where, once again, land is held in common. A collaborative series with Dark Properties.
I say this often, but it’s always worth repeating: Gardening is a radical act. Any time we create alternative methods of sustaining ourselves, especially in direct collaboration with each other and the land, we are modeling the abundant future we long for.
Of course, this isn’t a new concept—and it’s interesting to note how social and political upheaval often instills within us a craving to “go back to the land,” so to speak. In a 1975 article, the NYTimes described back-to-the-landers as wanting to “live simply but well on the land, outside of economic institutions,” to “rely on their own resources and labor,” and to “‘Make Do with Less’—less machinery, less technology, less everything that comes from and depends on big business.” Sounds pretty good, right?
It’s easy to dream about starting an intentional community with friends, growing our own food, and taking care of each others’ kids. But then I think about how most of those 70s-era communes fell apart (or worse, devolved into cults). That’s because it’s hard work to go against societal norms, to manage shared resources, and to build the skills necessary to live in close relationship with the land, and with each other. It makes me wonder: How do we create intentional space for proximal, close-knit community without going full-on commune? Does a good model for this exist?
Fritz Haeg has been circling these ideas in his work for several decades. As an artist, he tends to produce collaborative projects that feel earthy and homey yet radical: Hosting salons in his geodesic dome in LA; putting a beaver pond in the courtyard of The Whitney; publicly installing front-yard food gardens all around the world; and, most recently, establishing Salmon Creek Farm, a “long-term living art project” and artist residency on Central Pomo land in present-day California that, in the ‘70s, was home to an actual commune.
To me, Fritz’s work is all about subverting institutional norms as a way to generate interconnection, abundance, and a better sense of the future world we could build. And, importantly, he sees “humble” and “domestic” pursuits—gardening, cooking, composting, weaving, chopping wood—as pathways for reprogramming our relationships, minds, and ways of living. As an avid gardener myself, and as someone who, like Fritz, also runs an artist residency out of my home, I find his approach both resonant and reassuring. While often challenging, the only way to develop sustainable, anti-capitalist ways of sharing space is to freely experiment, struggle, take notes, and iterate as we go.
Willa Köerner:
I wanted to start by asking you about Edible Estates, which was ahead of its time in many ways. Now, the environmental implications of turf lawns—and on the flip, the possibilities of transforming grass yards into diversified gardens—is starting to become mainstream knowledge. But I’d love to hear your reflections on that project, which is 20 years old at this point.
Fritz Haeg:
The Edible Estates project involved making gardens in 15 cities around the world, from Budapest, to Rome, to London, and all over the US. It was a public campaign to rebrand the idea of growing food publicly in your front yard. It ran from 2005 to 2013, when it culminated in an exhibition at the Walker Arts Center.
The project was intended as a provocation: What does it mean to put a food garden in a place where it goes against mainstream conventions? The book about it was literally called Attack in the Front Lawn. It was meant to take a seemingly benign, homespun thing—the modest vegetable garden—and make it assertive and powerful. It was about turning this sort of hippie or grandma activity into a force of authority and agency, and about sending the message that you could do it at your house, too.
WK:
How did you decide where to install the gardens, and who to work with in a given community?
FH:
In each city, we did an open call and interviewed candidates to find people who were already gardeners, and who had the right kind of visible front-yard space. Beyond that, each garden was totally different. Some of them were community gardens, like the one in London—which is still going to this day. The others were run by families, and most of those are gone now. Gardens exist as long as there are people around to take care of them. And that changes with time, of course. There were intentions for each garden to have a specific impact by being a noticeable presence in its community. We wanted each to spawn news stories, which they did: The project was featured on both ABC’s and CBS’s Evening News, and was in all kinds of newspapers, plus in all the art, culture, and design magazines. It struck a nerve, perhaps because it coincided with this moment around the 2008 financial collapse when people wanted to reconnect with their food sources.
Overall, Edible Estates was a huge part of my life. I recently ran into an old friend who I hadn’t seen in 15 years, and the remark she made about it—which touched me—was, “I loved how you opened the door for that kind of gardening, but didn’t need to stay there putting your stamp on it.” That’s what an art project is supposed to do, I think. Buckminster Fuller was very articulate about this idea of not needing to lead people down a path, but instead, just opening a door for them, or planting a seed.
WK:
There’s something similar happening right now with this increased interest in gardening. When the world feels extra hostile, we seem to return to this innate desire to connect with the land, the cycles of life, local community, and all these other things that are grounding—all of which we can access through gardening.
FH:
Yeah. I personally saw that when people’s desire to visit Salmon Creek Farm exploded during the pandemic. It was this immediate sense of people craving connection to a piece of land. Some of that was pretty superficial, and based on a reptilian-brain response to seeing a cabin in the woods on Instagram. But, some of it also stemmed from a very deep yearning, where people do innately want, even need, to connect with land.
When people are prepared for what it means to live in closer connection to the land—to make a fire when you’re cold, to embrace the messiness of having your hands in the dirt, and to using outhouses, for example—there is a deep connection that can occur. The people who are truly present and prepared, and who understand what it means to show up to this land in a real way, will have transformative experiences. We go through great lengths to make sure that everyone who’s coming here is ready for it. But certainly, there’s an eternal, universal human need for a connection to land. Whether people are ready for it or not is another story, I guess.
WK:
What led you to setting down a more permanent base on the property at Salmon Creek Farm?
FH:
Before I bought Salmon Creek Farm, I was very itinerant. I “lived” in LA for 15 years, but throughout that period I was constantly traveling for work. While I happily surrendered to that lifestyle for a while, it became harder and harder. I knew it wasn’t sustainable—personally or environmentally—and it was hard to sit with the contradiction between the life I had, the life I was searching for in my work. Traveling all the time also meant I couldn’t be physically present in my own garden, and I was disconnected from my own community.
I had this year-long series of projects at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis, where I grew up, and that was where I finally decided to wrap up the Edible Estates project. After that, I was looking for a complete break. I changed my email address, and I stopped traveling. I created space for myself to drop out completely for a while, and just focused all of my energy on finding and settling into this one piece of land. It was quite abrupt, but it was premeditated, and I was ready for it.
WK:
What was it like at Salmon Creek when you first moved in? I’m curious about the state of all the cabins and the land. Was it in a state of disrepair, or was it ready to go?
FH:
The cabins had been continuously occupied since they were built in the early ‘70s. So they were habitable, but it was pretty rough, and the pathways connecting the cabins had all been overgrown.
At the beginning, everyone who came to pitch in was from my extended community of friends and students. Until the pandemic, really, there was no money changing hands. People would just stay and help out, and things were very simple and rustic.
WK:
I know it used to be a commune. What aspects of that communal way of life have you tried to revive in the most recent iteration of Salmon Creek?
FH:
I’ve never intended it as a revival of the hippie commune, per se, which always had permanent residents who needed all of their domestic needs to be fulfilled by this place. As long as I’ve been here, I’ve tried to keep a porous flow of people coming and going.
Last summer we had a queer commune where people settled in for a few months, and it was a very social environment. Being here then was even more social than my life in cities ever was, and more intense in some senses. People need to be okay with being alone in a cabin in the woods, but also with the intensity of sociability that comes from closely sharing land and meals. It’s actually a fascinating social experiment.
WK:
How have you handled the garden aspect, amidst all of these different people coming and going throughout the season?
FH:
When I got here, the gardens that were feeding the farm in the ‘70s and ‘80s were long abandoned and overgrown. So I’ve pretty much started every garden that’s here in the last decade, working with whoever’s here. It’s been a long process of building the soil and getting things established.
2024 was our biggest food-gardening year yet. I started new raised beds, which did really well. It was one of those perfect growing seasons that you’ll never have again, with fresh beds, fresh soil, and no weeds. The whole summer I didn’t need to do anything except water and harvest, but overall, it’s my hope that whoever’s eating from the garden is helping with it. I think everyone living on the land should be engaged with every aspect of staying here, including where our food and firewood comes from, and where our waste is going. It’s important to understand how these things work, from both a practical and conceptual standpoint.
WK:
On your website, you say that one goal of Salmon Creek is to “create an independent, self-sustaining organization that can ensure its own future.” I’m curious about this mission because I run a creative residency at my house, too: The Strange Foundation. We have two cabins that we host residents in, and overall it’s been great—but it’s also very challenging to handle all the admin, programming, cleaning, and maintenance, on top of our other responsibilities. So, I’m dying to know: how will you make Salmon Creek self-sustaining?
FH:
I had a revelation a few years ago that everything couldn’t be contingent upon my own volunteer labor, because then, as soon as I pulled out, the whole thing would collapse. The place has functioned in a very scrappy, informal way for many years just because I have physically been here as the eccentric owner/artist who’s been consumed by it 24/7. For a long time I did this happily—but I know that for the place to continue, it has to become institutionalized in some way. There need to be mechanisms for things to happen without my direction.
Now we have a full-time resident caretaker, and we’re set up as a nonprofit arts organization with a board. This year we’ll be experimenting with how to make the programming financially sustainable. Last year we made it as accessible as possible, so the residency was free, and there was a stipend, and there were free meals—but we could only manage three weeks of programming like that. We had 500 applications for six of those residencies, and that just isn’t sustainable to run for a whole year.
So, next year we’ll probably offer two-month artist stays, simulating a commune skillshare where everyone is engaged with the land, and there’s a base fee to come, with some scholarships available. We’re still running the numbers to figure out how it can all work, but I’ve realized that to keep things going, our programs need to have a perceived monetary value. Skowhegan, the art school in Maine, is a great model. It’s something like $6,000 to be there for three months, which includes accommodations and meals, but you can also apply for financial support. So there’s a transparent value, and then people will either pay for it, or they’ll ask for help.
When people arrive at Salmon Creek Farm, they’re entering a place where everything is reciprocal. People are burning wood that someone else chopped. Others are eating food that someone else planted. So the hope is that they’re thinking, “Wow, someone did all this for my benefit. What am I doing for those who come after me?”
It comes back to thinking like an artist, and throwing out seeds, freely and abundantly. It’s this generative feeling of a gift that needs to be shared urgently, that you want to offer without a thought of how it might come back to you. It’s a very fragile thing.
WK:
This reminds me of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry, which explores the power of reciprocity and exchange outside of capitalist systems. But it’s interesting to consider alongside this need to establish a monetary value for something before people can fully understand its worth. It makes me think about how when we rent our cabins for a nightly fee, weirdly, those people often leave them cleaner, and seem more thankful, than the residents who get to stay in them for free.
FH:
I know, it’s totally true. It’s all related to how we’re programmed to perceive value. If something’s free, then the value does not seem to be as great.
I experimented with a free exchange last summer with the idea of, “give what you can, take what you need.” It barely worked. Some people asked, “How can I help?” But there are always the people who come with the mindset of, “How much can I take?” It’s a bummer, but it’s also the world we live in, and it’s how our brains are programmed to function in a capitalist society. So, how do we unravel a whole lifetime of that?
WK:
It’s hard to lay out the foundation of a reciprocal relationship, because it feels like something that shouldn’t need to be spoken. But because there aren’t always “rules” with non-monetary transactions, it can be difficult to communicate and uphold expectations. I’ve struggled with this at our residency: Finding the right balance where things feel reciprocal, but I’m not hunting people down to clean their own cabins and help out if they said they would. [Laughs]
FH:
Whatever you’re doing, whatever you’re giving—it has to be sustainable. If what I’m giving to the place has crossed a line and I’m becoming resentful of the people who are here, then I’ve given more than I can. These kinds of systems need to be give-and-take, because with people coming onto the land, it’s a very vulnerable exchange.
It’s interesting. In my 10-year span on the land, when things were the most rustic and rough and the stakes were lowest, everything was easiest. We’ve seen it with art museums or even schools, where there’s this escalation that happens as they build new buildings and expand, and then things spiral out of control financially. It reminds me to keep Salmon Creek’s operations simple, and to not have more staff than we really need. I want to preserve the feeling of things being unfinished or unresolved in a way that, when you enter the space, you can sense that everything’s not going to be done for you. You’re not going to be totally taken care of here. This is a place that requires actual engagement.
I have done a lot of residencies where you’re coddled and taken care of. All the meals are made, and you’re even paid to be there. While that’s amazing, we’re not that. I think we need more places in the world that try to create environments that show what true reciprocity looks like, and the actual labor it requires. These kinds of spaces do require a lot of failure, friction, and misunderstandings—because we don’t know how to do it. It’s fighting the reality of how we’re all engineered to think and work in a capitalist environment. So, it requires constant reconfiguring, and it’s never going to work perfectly. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t keep trying.
