fields of our fathers

Worm Farm Institute Art Dtour, 2016

Created for Wormfarm’s Fermentation Festival, Fields of Our Fathers began as an attempt to listen to the land—to understand its stories through the people who have tended it for generations. After spending time with farmers and landowners, Majeed became attuned to the invisible boundaries carried in the soil—histories shaped by inheritance, labor, and the quiet violence of ownership.

A 30-by-30-foot muslin cloth was laid across a resistant cornfield to capture its imprint. To do so, Majeed had to press the stalks flat, forcing their forms into the fabric with charcoal and graphite. The act became one of both reverence and harm—corn tearing through cloth, piercing his hands, drawing blood. When lifted into the air between two grain elevators loaned by local farmers, the muslin billowed and rippled like a flag—evoking “amber waves of grain.” What at first appeared as a patriotic gesture revealed itself as something else: a meditation on extraction, possession, and the enduring violence of colonization.

What remains is an imprint of resistance—a landscape flattened, marked, and claimed, yet still refusing silence.