Gregor Sailer: Cockaigne

With Cockaigne, Austrian photographer Gregor Sailer directs his gaze toward the largely unseen machinery of contemporary food production. Drawing inspiration from the medieval legend of the “Land of Cockaigne” — a fantasy of limitless abundance — Sailer examines the very real systems, technologies, and infrastructures that underpin how food is produced, distributed, and controlled today. The book challenges readers to rethink ideas of nourishment, consumption, and collective responsibility.

Sailer’s images grant access to places rarely visible to the public: fertile food forests in the High Atlas contrasted with frozen northern food deserts; experimental facilities designed for life on Mars and the Moon; cutting-edge sites producing algae, insects, jellyfish, and cultivated meat; and sealed laboratories dedicated to viral and cellular research. Working with an analogue large-format camera, he precisely maps the intersections of human innovation, ecological constraints, and global power dynamics. Essays by food scientist David Julian McClements and art historian Lisa Ortner-Kreil complement the photographs, adding scientific insight and art-historical context that deepen the reading of Sailer's work.




Cockaigne lays bare the contradictions of a world driven by efficiency, growth, and sustainability, yet marked by new dependencies, ethical dilemmas, and forms of alienation. Oscillating between visual allure and critical distance, the project reveals how far our contemporary “Land of Cockaigne” has strayed from its utopian promise — and how pressing the question of the future of our food systems has become.

As David Julian McClements notes in his foreword Feeding the Future, the belief that we inhabit a world of endless, sustainable abundance proves to be as illusory as the medieval myth itself. In Cockaigne for the Eyes, Lisa Ortner-Kreil highlights Sailer's ability to distill immense complexity into striking images that can feel hopeful and poetic one moment, and deeply unsettling the next.


Gregor Sailer (b. 1980) is an Austrian photographic artist whose work has been widely exhibited, awarded, and published internationally. His photographs are held in major public collections including the Albertina and Belvedere Museum in Vienna, the Centre National des Arts Plastiques in Paris, the German Architecture Museum in Frankfurt, Fotomuseum Winterthur, the New York Public Library, Fondazione MAST in Bologna, and the Museum der Moderne Salzburg. Following The Potemkin Village, Closed Cities, The Polar Silk Road, and Unseen Places, Cockaigne marks his fifth publication with Kehrer Verlag.