When we think of automation, we often associate it with factories, logistics, and self-driving cars. Yet Marshall McLuhan reminds us that agriculture was the first technology humans invented to secure food. It is the original site of production, where climate, labor, resources, and land are deeply intertwined.
It is precisely in agriculture that some of the defining tensions of our time become most visible: on the one hand, the promise of efficiency, precision, and control; on the other, the diminishing human presence, growing dependence on technological infrastructure, and the transformation of agricultural labor into data management. This is the terrain artist Cao Fei has been exploring over the past three years through research conducted across China and Southeast Asia.
It is from this close observation that Dash, the project she is now presenting at Fondazione Prada, emerged. The exhibition grows out of an investigation into the development of smart agriculture: drones, automated irrigation, mechanized harvesting, sensors, software, and new cultivation protocols. Yet the aim is not simply to catalogue these technologies. Rather, it is to understand what happens when our relationship with the land is mediated by screens, algorithms, and remote-control systems.
The question running through the entire project is as simple to pose as it is difficult to untangle: who will work, and how, in the agriculture of the future? Cao Fei places this question at the center of the exhibition, with striking clarity.
Recalling a visit to a super farm in China in 2023, she says: “I noticed that there were virtually no humans in the fields.” In their place were hovering drones, automated vehicles, and systems for irrigation and harvesting. “That sci-fi future was already there. It was already present.”
The exhibition does not simply describe this transformation in technical terms. In Dash, agritech is not treated merely as a matter of productivity; it is shown to reshape food trade, logistics, global markets, and the organization of land itself.
As the artist points out, one of the exhibition’s most incisive themes is the friction between innovation and ritual: “During her research in Southeast Asia, the artist saw Vietnamese farmers lighting incense for drones, Cambodian women tying auspicious red ribbons to devices, and communities continuing to project expectations, fears, and forms of symbolic protection onto machines.”
“No matter how advanced technology becomes, people still need a way to cope with their unease.”
On the ground floor, amid a barn, a temple, a workstation, and virtual reality environments, the agricultural landscape appears as a hybrid space where automation coexists with archaic forms of devotion and memory. Upstairs, documents, books, interviews, and archival materials deepen this journey, showing that agricultural modernization is not a recent phenomenon but the result of a long political and cultural process.
- Show:
- Cao Fei: Dash
- When:
- April 9 to September 28, 2026
- Where:
- Prada Foundation, Milan