For 26 years, Antje Schiffers and Thomas Sprenger have engaged in a barter trade with farmers: a painting of the farm in exchange for a film in which the farmers document and explain their work and farming practices. The paintings remain on the farms, while the films become part of the archive titled I like being a farmer and would like to stay one. 

For Trafó’s focus Rural-Urban Relations, Antje and Thomas selected nine films from the archive’s current collection of 44—films that establish a connection between the city and the countryside in various ways. The selection includes three films that were made in Hungary for the Common Affairs exhibition at the Ludwig Museum, in collaboration with Katalin Erdődi.

The proximity to the city can be a central theme because of the intense competition between different forms of land use; arable land can become prohibitively expensive if it is eligible for rezoning into residential or commercial land. Other films illustrate how proximity to the city enables direct marketing strategies.
Macedonian parents wish for their son to live in the city because making a living as a farmer is difficult. We see the dynamics of an agricultural operation involving a large landowner in Seville and his farm manager in Extremadura. 

We witness the dependency on the wholesale market in Budapest, a reflection on societal expectations placed on farmers, the demands tourists place on wine production, or simply a view of Bilbao through the windshield of a pickup truck on the way to check on the cattle.