Coming Soon

The Combine Project is a study aimed at defining and mapping the territory of the Midwest through the lens of the agriculture machine. The American economy, from 1776 onward, was an agricultural one. As such, Milieu sets out to trace the history of agricultural production in the United States, from an economy propelled by enslaved laborers to an industrialized one, powered by Cyrus McCormick’s mechanical reaper, or combine, in 1831. The geomorphological consequences of mechanized agriculture were paramount, resulting in large-scale deforestation and the mass destruction of native prairie. The project will trace, through an infrastructural field study and analysis, the making of the Midwest.