Dash

Realized in close collaboration with Fondazione Prada, Dash emerges from Cao Fei’s long-term research into smart agriculture and the evolving relationship between humans, territory, and technology. The artist worked across China and Southeast Asia, observing the development of smart agriculture, where drones, algorithms, and automated systems redefine production processes and rural labor practices.

Through video, installation, virtual reality, and archival materials, Cao Fei constructs an immersive ecosystem in which the countryside becomes both a technological laboratory and a symbolic space. The project highlights the contradictions of this transformation: increased efficiency and reduced human labor, but also the gradual loss of traditional knowledge and the shifting cultural relationship to land.

Dash unfolds as an archaeology of the agricultural present, where multiple temporalities coexist: satellite systems and ritual practices, artificial intelligence and empirical knowledge, historical images and data flows. Agriculture thus appears as a field of tension between ecology, technology, and political imagination.

The installation reconstructs a contemporary “super farm”: granary, temple, digital devices, and working environments coexist within a single space, while video and VR also adopt the perspective of machines. The drone becomes a central and ambivalent figure, both technical tool and symbolic presence, ultimately integrated into quasi-ritual practices.

Archival materials and historical documents complete the exhibition, showing how modern agriculture has also been constructed through images, visual education, and ideological narratives. What emerges is a non-linear vision in which the future of the agricultural landscape is inseparable from its history.