This child’s vlog recounting a trip to Baladna’s farm, park, and publicly viewable premises foregrounds the aesthetics the company adopts to appeal to the public. Life-size cow sculptures are spaced throughout the intensively-watered, green entrance. A train with compartments in the shape of cows with hollowed backs provides transportation and entertainment for children. Once inside, a museum-like aesthetic attempts to portray the company’s modern or postmodern project as historically grounded, even natural (as my previous post argued). Through an analysis of the aesthetic adopted by Baladna’s farm—as much as I could see through the lens of the child’s vlog—I will maintain that one issue with the company’s aesthetic lies in its appropriation of scale. Baladna invokes the family cow, the self-sufficient family farm, while operating at a national level of production and distribution with tens of thousands of cows and their attendant human and non-human infrastructures. I will connect this argument to the discourse of self-sufficiency that I see at play in this aesthetic, as it frames in individual scalar terms what effectively functions on the scale of the nation.
In “Derangements of Scale,” Timothy Clark posits that climate change forces us to confront the ways in which scale disrupts our common-sense ways of approaching the world. What might “have seemed justified, internally coherent, self-evident or progressive now [needs] to be reassessed in terms of hidden exclusions, disguised costs or as offering a merely imaginary or temporary closure” (Clark 8-9). Clark critiques the “individualist rhetoric” (9) inherent to the Hobbesian-Lockean liberal tradition that is concerned with the creation and defense of private property at the expense of natural resources (6). Similar rhetoric surfaces frequently in Baladna’s publications (see the end of the “Baladna Phase 1 and 2” video); the company’s appeals to the notion of self-sufficiency attempt to conjure up the ecologically “natural” development of subsistence agriculture and the family farm. This, as Clark might put it, is “deranged” by scalar effects that render it incongruous, non-progressive, and so on. While at the individual level, self-sufficiency is “justified,” at scale we need to consider the significant carbon emissions and ecological impacts of agriculture, which account for “one-fourth of total anthropogenic [greenhouse gas emissions]” (Roy and Sahoo). Both Baladna’s use of the discourse of self-sufficiency and its ensuing aesthetic are complicated by scalar issues, and we need to recognize this to begin to understand Baladna’s relationship to the environment.
In aesthetic terms, Baladna’s farm could not appeal more clearly to notions of self-sufficiency. Take, for instance, the display of antique, metal farming implements with a backdrop of simple stone, and a stack of firewood. These images allude to subsistence farming, to the lifestyles of “mountain men” and other settlers in the American West, among other things. In the vlog’s voice-over, Aimen (referring to the display of antique tools) says “these are some of the tools they use for farming” (3:33). Clearly, this juxtaposition is meant to associate the two farming practices and scales (individual and corporate), as evidenced by the child’s misapprehension or at least mischaracterization of the tools’ current (non-)use.
In addition, as a visitor looks at this display, a glass overlook to their left opens on an ultra-modern milking parlor that can process 100 cows every 10 minutes (3:42). The milking parlor, rather than utilizing “Old West” points of reference, is metallic, symmetrical, and industrial. In these two aesthetics there is not only a tension between the old and new, but also between the individual and the collective, the effects of which are unclear and rendered less visible by the (intentional) overlapping of the two in the company’s aesthetic presentation. The realm of nation (or at least corporation) appropriates and is “legitimated” by the historical and cultural connotations of the aesthetic of the family cow—the frugally self-sufficient—while continuing to operate on a drastically different scale, obscuring the company’s real impacts by misdirecting from the scale at which we should be looking for them.
Works Cited
Clark, “Derangements of Scale,” Ecocriticism on the Edge: The Anthropocene as a Threshold Concept, London, Bloomsbury, 2015.
Aimen, “Baladna Farm | Baladna Food Industries | Baladna Park, Alkhor, Qatar | First Dairy Farm of Qatar,” YouTube, uploaded by Q Familia, 9 February 2020, https://youtu.be/P_XDfGWCVck
“Baladna Phase 1 and 2,” YouTube, uploaded by Baladna Food Industries, 25 January 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnJFHvXrUaQ.
Roy, DK and Sahoo, Subhra. “Agrarian Carbon Footprint: A Global Issue,” EC Agriculture (2020): 14-20. March 24, 2020. https://www.ecronicon.com/eco20/pdf/ECAG-03-ECO-0005.pdf. Accessed November 20, 2020.
