Countryside: A Place to Live, Not to Leave

In the first version of Countryside, presented at the Guggenheim New York in 2020, we picked a number of sites all over the world, where the countryside was going through drastic changes and acute upheavals. Together, these zooms presented a global overview of crisis and potential that was unfolding outside our cities and therefore went largely unnoticed.

In this second iteration, we present “the Arc,” a contiguous band of “Countryside” that runs from South Africa through East Africa, via Qatar, Central Asia, all the way to Eastern China. It is an arc of landlocked rural areas, still inhabited largely in traditional ways, both in Africa and Central Asia, and where only the Middle East is undergoing rapid modernization.