Workshops at Degrowth conference

Myvillages is invited to give two workshop sessions at the 8th International Degrowth conference in The Hague. Next to that, RSoE hosts a conference-permanent “Draw a Farm” drawing booth which is part of an ongoing series of drawings made in workshops and exhibitions worldwide. The visitors and students are encouraged to make and add their drawing and vision by drawing a farm by exploring the question ‘Draw a farm for me and say where it is’. Wapke’s workshop explores non-linguistic learning by using imagination, memory, the senses, and drawing in her workshop ‘Trans-Local Drawings and Rural Places’. Through activating and uncovering your rural mindsets, we tried to record impressions of your (inner) landscapes in a relaxed environment. We shared rural imaginations and/or vitalised memories with others through creating visible traces on paper. Crucial part of crafting a different economic reality also means finding other ways to how (economic) knowledge is created. Therefore, in the workshop initiated by Inez, we tried out practices that can help us find other ways of perceiving, imagining and thinking that further aligns our participation with the world and economy in which we are embedded. As such, we looked beyond thinking in independent objects, reification and reduction models, and instead helped each other to see how our economies can be recognized as created by 'conversation' and not as big things at all. Instead of asking “why” questions, we centralized the question: what do you have to teach me?

Trying out these different methods and exercises, we started exploring different ways how we can reassess knowledge by transferring act, observation, and moving that may convert into (possible) visualisations of new shared experiences. Based on meeting and doing things together, these interactions emphasized non-linguistic learning.

Throughout the Rural School of Economics we try to decolonise and decentralise systems of cultural production by creating non-linguistic knowledge and mental spaces that act through commoning and co-design. As such, in these workshop, we tried to foster self-determination methods and strategies for (rural) economies as relative and creative activities.