How to Imagine: A Narrative on Art and Agriculture

How to Imagine is an unusual meditation about the intersection of personal space - the imagination - with the natural spaces and forces that surround and nurture it. An artist and a writer collaborate here to examine the meanings, the images, and the fantasies implicit to digging into the earth. For a number of years Gianfranco Baruchello has operated a farm outside Rome, a farm which may be said to have produced paintings, films, photographs, and books, as well as the more common agricultural products. With his friend Henry Martin, Baruchello undertakes an investigation of that farm marked by the engaging wit and attention to detail of a natural raconteur. The narrative proceeds along its way to unravel many of the philosophical and formal assumptions that underlie contemporary art, and becomes a "testing [of] the power of art against the power if the much more potent social structures that stand adjacent to it." --- from book's cover