Recipes for Solo Sailors: Gianfranco Baruchello and the Agricola Cornelia S.P.A., 1973-81

In 1973, Italian artist Gianfranco Baruchello (b. 1924) retreated to the Roman countryside, where he founded a limited company called Agricola Cornelia S.p.A., whose purpose was land cultivation. Here the artist implemented a number of activities involving land clearing and food production, which he regarded as artistic work. Recently Baruchello’s farming endeavor has gained new attention. However, its implications and connection with the political and social transformations occurring in 1970s Italy have seldom been discussed. Likewise, his interest in food production and in the concept of food itself needs to be clarified and contextualized within his multifarious practice. This paper retraces the genesis of the Agricola Cornelia S.p.A. and the political tenets at its core. It discusses Baruchello’s designation of his company as an artwork, as well as his decision to keep it secret until it was dissolved. How he modified his initial project and conceptually developed it into the early 1980s is examined through the artist’s writings and the accounts of fellow art critics and intellectuals, such as Tommaso Trini, Gilbert Lescault, and Jean-François Lyotard. Finally, the paper focuses on the economical and ontological investigation of the notion of food that Baruchello implemented while the Agricola Cornelia S.p.A. was operative.