Image: Biblioteca del Grano di Milano
The Biblioteca del Grano di Milano says its experimental agricultural field has become this year more than a cultivated plot: a place of thought, research and shared knowledge built around the relations among old cereal varieties, trees, fungi and human and non-human communities. In a summer newsletter, the Milan-based project describes a season shaped by ecological experimentation, participatory learning and cultural events that turn the field into an active site of collaboration rather than a single-purpose farm.
The field is presented as part of a wider approach to landscape and culture developed by Terzo Paesaggio, the organization behind the newsletter, which works in the area between Corvetto and Chiaravalle along the paleo-channel of the Vettabbia. The text stresses that looking at a grain field as a library means reading the network of relationships that runs through it: cereals, trees, green manure, wild growth, fungi, people and the communities that meet there. That framing places cultivation inside a broader inquiry into attention, care and shared forms of knowledge.
Among the most substantial projects cited is a participatory planting completed with Soulfood Forestfarms and accompanied by the performance 'Fusione' by Neunau. Over the course of a season, more than 700 new plants were introduced, including trees, shrubs, fruiting species, melliferous plants and edible wild species. According to the newsletter, the intervention contributed to an agroforestry system that now counts more than 1,000 plants. The project is described as an effort to imagine new forms of care for the margins and to welcome a landscape whose complexity resists simple categories of control.
Another strand focused on learning environments. Through 'Campus Learning Landscapes', architects, designers and artists under 35 occupied Padiglione Chiaravalle to co-imagine new landscapes of learning. The activities included field research, collective design, body-based practices, convivial moments and collective naps with Edoardo Mozzanega. The newsletter presents this as a space where practical experimentation and reflection were held together, with the site itself becoming part of the learning process.
Play and speculative design also ran through the season. In 'Giochi di luogo', a game-design workshop developed with Matteo Uguzzoni, participants explored play as a tool for entering into relation with places and reshaping them through imagination. The formats mentioned include role-playing games, LARP and worldbuilding practices, with the Biblioteca del Grano and Chiaravalle treated as material for constructing possible futures and collective narratives.
The newsletter also highlights an inquiry into fungi led with Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez, during which participants were invited to “become fungi” and consider mycelial systems as a model for multispecies cooperation and symbiotic alliance. Terzo Paesaggio links that experiment to a broader idea of horizontal networks connecting artists, researchers, practitioners, businesses, artisans and farmers. The same networked logic, the text says, also connects the Biblioteca del Grano to schools, research centers, cultural spaces and communities of intention.
Cultural programming has been part of that ecology as well. The newsletter says FOG, the performing arts festival of Triennale di Milano, again collaborated with Terzo Paesaggio this year, bringing improvisations by Ariella Vidach to the Biblioteca del Grano and the company Trickster-P to Padiglione Chiaravalle. It also notes a Piano City appearance in which Thomas Umbaca’s grand piano transformed the site into an open-air concert hall among blossoms and birdsong, with the performance 'Waiting for Music to Surprise Me Again' mixing piano, voice, electronics and improvisation.
