About the conceiver of the Farm & Distillery / Marcus Sendlinger:

The Farm is my own artistic project of cultural exchange to reflect together on issues such as recycling, art production, use of resources and other relevant issues of artists on an international level. As a 12-year-old I was already working in paper recycling companies on the assembly line like the one of my grandfather Theodor Sendlinger and for many years I have been dealing with the topic of recycling paint, producing my own raw materials such as color pigments from aluminum scrap and "creating art on site" to avoid pointless shipments of crates and to reuse regional resources. When I took the route south via El Paso through Ciudad Juarez towards Chihuahua in 2019, I was pursued by a kilometer-long sea of plastic encircling the city of Ciudad Juarez. When I arrived in Chihuahua Mexico, I therefore only used things I had collected from the streets of the city, such as car parts from, among other things, car accidents, junked lumber, street signs, license plates for my abstract sculpture. We live in a time of debates about climate change and scarcity of resources and the resulting intra-societal and global conflicts and crises that result. In my own picture series "LUCKY SEVEN" I put the general use of resources in society and in art up for debate without becoming partisan. In "LUCKY SEVEN" I was also inspired by the conflict between the "last generation" and their fight against fossil fuels versus the not yet existing possibility of society to completely abandon the products of the oil industry as in mobility (outside big cities) or in others enable production chains. The pictures deal with the conflicts between different social groups and yet form a unit in themselves. Current global issues are implemented with current contemporary materials that I include in the images as elements, i.e. packaging from international car parts / manufacturers of the combustion and electrical industries as well as text passages from debates, as well as car paints, 1 and 2 components, gold pigments / paint from Bronze, aluminium, petroleum tones, neon colors like "cold rays". The acrylic/oil/varnish/paper paintings have titles such as "Starter Motor" or "Defensa del Petróleos" which derive from collaged packaging fragments from international car parts or car magazines, in combination with painting and forms created using stencils from car parts such as cylinder head gaskets. The "LUCKY SEVEN" series takes its name from a gambling hall in Wedding. The seven often stands for happiness, or spirituality or even for the days of the week as a recurring "hustle" of every individual in our society. The game parlor name as a simple metaphor that in history and also today mankind manages to slip past the absolute catastrophe and that only with a lot of luck. The future is uncertain and can quickly turn tragic, as shown by the Russian Federation's invasion of Ukraine, which has developed into a horrific war, and just as the still unstable situation in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Kosovo can easily turn into a severe conflict again or e.g. the recent happenings in Israel show the long lasting conflict between the people from Israel and Palestine which turned into a war- like situation.
For many years I have been making pigments from scrap aluminum or iron for my abstract paintings myself, dismantling vehicles and transforming them into abstract sculptures or using vehicle parts as templates for pictorial forms and collaging “cultural finds” into my locally created drawings on my travels like along the Mexican-US American border in 2019 and 2020, which ended with an exhibition in Chihuahua Mexico and Mexico City, first with a space-filling abstract sculpture consisting of car parts collected from car accidents and street signs from the streets of Chihuahua ("Phantom Ride", Distanz Verlag, Berlin, 2020) and in CDMX with a wall-filling series of paper works ibid. I have always been concerned with the question of what resources should be sacrificed for art? For me, a sculpture that is produced on site, i.e. regional recyclable material transformed into art as a confrontation with a place and its society, was much more authentic than transporting a large object with climate-damaging container shipping from another place in the world to the exhibition site.