Agrilogistics is an installation that addresses the use of automation and image technologies in the context of industrial agriculture and horticulture. The installation transforms the interior of an old church, La Capella in Barcelona, by installing a greenhouse structure to host a film by the artist Gerard Ortín.

The film presents a sensory landscape in which light, form and movement bring the viewer from the hypnotic and kinetic world of the assembly line to the oneirism of vegetal, animal and machinic world. The installation expands the language of the film into the space: The shades and variations of light are amplified with a multi-coloured light installation which takes advantage of reflective surfaces. All the envelop is made with synthetic materials commonly used in the technified environments for vegetable production, in contrast with the stone walls of the old church; the regulated movement in green houses’ mechanized logistical systems is embodied by the spectator by being forced to circulate around the side to access the interior projection space.

In the film, image production and agro-industrial production are indistinguishable from each other. The proposal is about the production of images itself; about cameras that film cameras, about images that become amalgamations of data, about non-human actors that call into question the very notion of fiction and the collective. In the space, lights and shadows, transparencies and translucencies, reflections and contrasts multiply and manipulate the spectators’ sight to take the audience on a journey through the processes of plant and food production.

Agrilogistics is a collective place for experience and reflection. It is an open exhibition space, where the visitors are invited to reflect on other forms of collective places, namely the sites of food production and the sites of religion.

The installation works as a public cinema leading the spectators to enter a sort of green house and sit on top of compost bags for growing vegetables to watch an audiovisual piece. The green house is, in its turn, inside a church. The structure of the green house and that of the church have a similar typology; an elongated space covered by arches and a vault. However, each of the two constructions refers to two distanced systems of aesthetic and political production: the religious and the agro-industrial.

At the present, not only spaces for human encounters, like the exhibition spaces or the church, can be thought as collective places. Agro-industrial spaces, like automatized green houses where the presence of humans is reduced to the minimum, are collective places as far as they are indispensable infrastructures to make collective living possible. The space of the green-house, is a distant and unknown territory, often imagined at the border between the real and the fictional, yet an architecture on which we are completely dependent as society.

In Agrilogistics, the visitor faces these three forms of collective space, that of contemporary art, that of religion and that of food production, questioning the ecological and cultural impact of contemporary forms of collective living.