BY ZACH MORTICE
All photos by Jose Ahedo.
Over the course of two years, the Spanish architect Jose Ahedo visited livestock farming landscapes in eight countries: Mongolia, China, Paraguay, Germany, India, Bolivia, New Zealand, and the Azores Islands in Portugal. He traveled 90,000 miles by plane, 9,000 miles by car, 23 miles by boat, nine miles by horse and camel, and?most excruciatingly for a vertigo sufferer like Ahedo?56 miles by hot air balloon. Documented through his photography and funded by a $100,000 Harvard Graduate School of Design Wheelwright Prize Fellowship, his travels kept him on the move for 103,000 miles.
Ahedo selected these disparate locations so that he could witness the extreme ?asymmetry,? he says, in how cultures in different places with different levels of development produce livestock. ?You have people that move on horses, and people that move in helicopters,? he says. And those are just two of the ways livestock farmers use mobility to make their living. A strong subtheme of his research is the multitude of ways farmers move themselves and their livestock. They establish circulation patterns every bit as attuned to their local ecological economy as the migratory habits of an animal. Each of these mobility patterns has intense landscape ramifications, whether it?s the floating aquaculture villages of southern China that require regular commutes between sea and land, or the movement of traditional Mongolian herders who range over vast distances on ...