Protesting Farmers as Cultural Workers on Avenues for Daring – Using the Example of the Bavarian Village DARING Panel-Lecture with Screenings as part of TransCultural Exchange’s International Conference on Opportunities in the Arts: “Avenues for Daring”, March 7-9, 2025, Cambridge (Boston), Massachusetts, USA

10:00 Panel-Presentation

Conference Site: The Foundry, Cambridge (Boston), MA, USA

Abstract

The paper addresses the multifaceted nature of courage in the context of the conference theme Avenues for Daring with an example of courage from my immediate regional neighborhood, documented in images and on video: We are talking about the small village of the same name, DARING (pronounced Dahring), with 35 inhabitants in Berchtesgadener Land in the south-easternmost corner of Germany. No Farm, no Food, no Future can be read on tractor signs. Livelihoods have been at stake for years. Out of 5 farms, only one is still fully farmed.

Since January 2024, Daring's farmers have been protesting against the current disastrous agricultural policy in Germany in an organized alliance with thousands of farmers. They are doing this with determination and risky commitment and also with astonishing scenic-performative instruments: a thoroughly designed, moving street theater with columns of tractor engines, dramaturgically arranged on various street stages, controlled live via mobile telephony. The nationwide street theater includes moving soundscapes, light sculptures – elaborately choreographed by precise tractor positions and their lamp alignment, handmade signs on the front'guards' of the rolling tractors and much more.

From a cultural anthropological perspective, the farmers of our planet are elementary workers and maintainers of culture par excellence. In the context of a return to and reconsideration of cultura, which in its original meaning refers to the cultivation and care of arable land, farmers in many countries around the world are walking a risky tightrope that threatens their very existence. We all need a DARING DOING - a demand, inspiration and connection between life-sustaining culture and our art of living.