Zbigniew Oksiuta
Your Personal Biosphere
2009
I was born in a small village in the Eastern part of Poland, on my grandfather’s farm. It was a piece of land about 60 meters wide and 500 meters long. Additionally, we had 3 hectares fields, forests and meadows (all together 6 hectares). There were 8 of us living in that farm: my grand parents, my parents and 4 children.
Nearly all agriculture and breeding production was made for our own use. We made our own bread, butter and cheese. We cultivated flax and my grandmother wove her own materials.
It was a universal, autonomous system. It was a plant, workshop, and laboratory, all at the same time. All we needed was cultivated on the spot: cereal, vegetables and garden produce seated of trees. On this farm, people and animals were living together.
Today’s modern agricultural farms produce only a small variety of
products.
Necessary agriculture products are now cultivated everywhere on the
globe.
Argentinean apples travel over oceans to the European tables that have
apple trees with decaying apples under it as a background. We can
imagine at what cost to the environment this is taking place.
I see my home farm as a flat bioreactor, airing fertile humus slice flooded by the sun’s rays. As if it was a huge Petri-dish.
I am working on the idea to scroll this flat ground to the sphere and shrink it to the minimal size of a few square meters, or more, to the size of cocoons, or clothe encapsulating my body.
Can you imagine being in the transparent sphere made not from black humus, but from transparent polymer? In this maximally condensed introversive garden a variety of organisms, similar to the plants, animals and people on my grandfather’s farm, would be living together.
Warm-blooded flowers that heat the sphere are growing there. Gene
fabricators, equipped with universal sets of DNA, “produce” things and
tools that are needed on the spot. In the bladders life boils. These
are bioreactors producing plant and animal proteins. Maybe the
cultivation of plant and animal products for our consumption could
occur within these new systems, without victimizing living
organisms.
This space will be born with you, as it will be part of your body. It
will grow, develop and bloom with you. It is beautiful, when you are
young, but it will not survive thousand years as the stone would. It
will become old like the owner and eventually dry, wrinkle...