RESEARCH & PRODUCTION



Image: J.N. Le Conte, Detail of the Outline Map of Southern Sierra Nevada, Earth Systems Library, 1907
1. Imperfectly Surveyed
Ignacio Chapela & Amy Franceschini
2026 Spring Semester
University of California, Berkeley

Imperfectly Surveyed is a semester-long course that traverses the San Joaquin River from headwaters to the San Francisco Bay working with papermaking as a medium to engage river currents, sediment, histories and possible futures. During the semester, the course visits three locations to work in-situ with local partners. The course is also part of the ESPM program at UC Berkeley and launching three years of ongoing work to develop a series of paper, a suite of wooden boats and public programming. Imperfectly Surveyed includes lectures, workshops, archival research, mapping, oral history transmission, audio recording and writing.
Image: Returns…traversing the life route of the coho salmon, field trip with UC Berkeley Environmental Science, Policy & Management Class, sunrise at China Camp State Park, San Rafael, CA, 2024 
Image: Becoming nutrients (coho salmon lodging itself between rocks after spawning), field trip to China Camp State Park, San Rafael, CA 2024. Note: Pacific salmon are semelparous. They die after reproduction and become nutrients and food in the coastal ecosystems.
Image: Field trip to the Ink Wells, Lagunitas Creek (site for coho salmon spawning), Lagunitas, CA, 2024
Image: Field trip with UC Berkeley Environmental Science, Policy & Management Class, improvised salmon puppet with found flora, 2024
Image: Field trip with UC Berkeley Environmental Science, Policy & Management Class, Lagunitas Creek, Lagunitas, CA⁩⁦, 2024 
Image: Field trip with UC Berkeley Environmental Science, Policy & Management Class, tidal marsh at the San Francisco Bay National Estuarine Research Reserve, San Rafael, CA, 2024


Image: Pier 15, San Rafael Yacht Harbor, 2025



2. Prelude To A Boat (San Rafael Study)
Devon Bella & Amy Franceschini 
2026 Winter
San Rafael, Marin County, California

Situated along the San Rafael Canal, an engineered tidal waterway that once flowed as a creek, this field study weaves together research, poetics, and design. Through archival inquiry, material experimentation, and community listening, the San Rafael Study exlores the confluence where the built environment and the San Francisco Bay’s estuary meet in uneasy exchange. The study seeks to uncover how colonial histories and urban development have obscured the ecological knowledge of the local land/seascape and severed our deep connection to the Bay. Drawing on Futurefarmers’ sustained engagement with boats as moving laboratories for civic imagination, this study situates boat-making and small craft as ways to reimagine our shared relationship with the Bay from that of vulnerability to agency and metabolic resilience. 



Image: Room One Thousand, Speculative Ecologies Lab, printed matter, 2025


3. Guidebooks
San Joaquin River
San Rafael Canal

Physical sites and lines of inquiry are recorded and documented in a series of guidebooks, capturing observations, translations, methods, mediums, instructions, and so on. Alongside the vessel producing a layered resource, the books act as both field journals and creative atlas, interlinking ecologies and cultural fields serving as a resource for further research and experimentation.



Image: Futurefarmers, In The Belly, wooden, flat bottomed, canal boat with water reed roof, 2024


4. Becoming Estuarine (New Art Commission)
Futurefarmers
2027 March 10 to June 10
Marin Museum of Contemporary Art
San Rafael, California

Within Becoming Estuarine, the boat is conceived as both tool and metaphor–a way of translating research, poetics, and site-specific knowledge into form. Its design, materials, and methods remain open, emerging from currents, migrations, upwellings, turbidity, histories, and futures of the San Francisco Bay Estuary. The vessel is a prototype for experimentation, a modest craft that floats between inquiry and action, allowing us to inhabit, move with, listen to the estuary, and imagine new relationships with water. 








COLLABORATION & SUPPORT



People
Amy Franceschini
Artist/Futurefarmers

Devon Bella
Curator/Art + Climate Action

Ignacio Chapela
University of California, Berkeley

Michael Swaine
Artist/Futurefarmers

Marisha Farnsworth
O2 Artisans Aggregate

Drew Cameron
Combat Paper

Cyrus Vella
Field Research & Production


Organizations Marin Museum of Contemporary Art (MarinMOCA), San Rafael

Teiger Foundation, New York

College of Environmental Design 
University of California, Berkeley

Room One Thousand
University of California, Berkeley

Master of Design Department
University of California, Berkeley

Magnolia Editions/ Paper Studio
Renaissance Paper Research



© BECOMING ESTUARINE 2025

BECOMING ESTUARINE 




Becoming Estuarine (B.E.) is a multi-year, multi-layered artistic and curatorial project that explores the San Francisco Bay Estuary and its complex network of water systems. The project emerges from a desire to understand the Bay not only as a defining geographic feature but as a living system that connects the region.

Rooted in the idea that “the Bay” is both a cultural identifier and a shared ecosystem under pressure, B.E. asks what it means to live in relation to an estuary, an ever-shifting threshold between land and sea. Physical sites and conceptual lines of inquiry are guided by points of confluence where living and built systems meet: lost or restored wetlands, industrial shorelines, and urban canals that reveal layered histories of life, settlement, extraction, resilience, and renewal. Through artistic research, community engagement, and collaboration with scientists, stewards, local historians, and students, the project traces how these places embody the evolving relationship between culture and ecology in the Bay Area.

Culminating in a new artwork commissioned by the Marin Museum of Contemporary Art (MarinMOCA), B.E. is co-led by artist Amy Franceschini, Futurefarmers, and curator Devon Bella. The project envisions the estuary as a site of transformation where histories, environmental realities, and imaginaries intersect and are constantly becoming.