Peasant CV

  • Asunción Molinos Gordo

In Peasant CV, Asunción Molinos Gordo employs the aesthetics and language of professional resumes to highlight the skilled labour of peasant farmers in León, Spain. Through use of bureaucratic buzzwords, Gordo satirizes the rhetoric of state and NGO-led conservation practices that often de-value local knowledges. Gordo employs this language to foreground the expert knowledges gained through multigenerational working-class experience. The land-based knowledge of peasant farmers is often dismissed as archaic; this stigma further endangers a peasant way of life. With the ongoing expansion of industrial agriculture that privileges monopolies, monocrops, and global markets in Spain and beyond, small-scale farmers face threats to their lifeways. Not only does peasant farming provide employment to rural people, it also carries traditions of valuing biodiversity, using sustainable cultivation practices, maintaining culture, and building interconnected communities. The loss of peasant farming would also mean the loss of the life-preserving practices that come with it. 

The resumes in Peasant CV implicitly chart peasants’ struggles against exploitation, food insecurity, and ecological crisis in an industrial age. Gordo’s practice begs the questions: How can community-based knowledge and rural livelihoods be acknowledged and honoured? How can traditional conservation strategies be preserved through farming? What sustains dignified work? 

Aurora Cisneros Aller’s CV includes their name, place of birth, a thumbnail-sized portrait, and various skills and areas of expertise. The professional resume indicates that their occupation is “Peasant,” and reveals that they are an older woman in their 70s.
Heliodoro Santos Mejía’s CB includes their name, place of birth, a thumbnail-sized portrait, and various skills and areas of expertise. The professional resume indicates that their occupation is “Peasant,” and reveals that they are an older man in their 70s.
Asunción Molinos Gordo, Peasant CV, 2015. Courtesy the artist.



Asunción Molinos Gordo is a research-based artist influenced by disciplines such as anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies. The main focus of her work is contemporary peasantry. She has produced work reflecting on land usage, farmers’ strikes, bureaucracy on territory, transformation of rural labour, biotechnology and global food trade. Molinos Gordo won the Sharjah Biennial Prize 2015 with her project WAM (World Agriculture Museum) and represented Spain at the Havana Biennial, 2019.

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