Contested Landscapes is dedicated to different rural regions—their landscapes, their producers, and their work. The paths of the family of the artist Sandra Schäfer and those of the famous German photographer August Sander cross in the Westerwald, a rural area in Germany shaped by farming and mining.
A hundred years ago, the photographer August Sander captured his series of peasants there including the artist's relatives. Schäfer's "homecoming" is represented in the book by three works dealing with the changes of the landscape, its farming, and Sander's photographs, as well as amateur ones from Schäfer's family. Contributions from Schäfer's interlocutors reflect on how these ghosts from the past appear in her work. Further artists and architects research rural cultivation in Thuringia, southern Sweden, Lebanon's Bekaa Valley, Syria, and southern Colombia. In different ways, they deal with the issues of agriculture, feminism, and global economy. The book therefore also takes up the pressing question of how agricultural production could be rethought within capitalism.
Sandra Schäfer (born 1970 in Altenkirchen) is a German artist and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich. In her artistic work she deals with the production of urban and geopolitical space, history, and visual politics. Her works are often based on long-term research concerned with the process of unpacking and re-reading documents, images, and spatial narratives.
