Myvillages

Myvillages is rooted in and organised by the emancipatory and cultural dimensions and dynamics of the rural.

It was founded as an international and trans-local art collective in 2003 by the three artists Kathrin Böhm (UK/DE), Wapke Feenstra (NL), and Antje Schiffers (DE).

Among the first artist collectives to develop a sustained perspective on the evolution and contemporary relevance of rurality, Myvillages is best understood not as a series of isolated projects, but as an evolving long-term organizational and relational architecture.

By drawing attention to the diversity of rural economies, communities, and localized ways of knowing, Myvillages demonstrates how the rural offers knowledge and living practices of cultural experimentation, social creativity, and ecological engagement.

The current collective also includes, to varying degrees, Indra Gleizde, Ioana Lupascu, Ida Bomm, Inez Dekker and Alina Dzeravianka.

Development

In the early 1990s, Kathrin, Wapke, and Antje had each begun, independently, to engage with the village and agriculture through critical artistic perspectives. Coming together as Myvillages in 2003, they formulated a shared perspective on 'the rural'. The emerging possibilities of the internet enabled them from the outset to build a multi-local network across different rural configurations. The initial co-productions grew directly from their home villages, working alongside local residents and drawing on the stories, resources, and skills specific to each place.

From 2007 onward, the collective gained increasing visibility within contemporary art institutions, allowing Myvillages to extend its practice to a wider range of international contexts while remaining committed to long-term community relationships. During this period, key publications including Images of Farming (2011), A Photographic Portrait of a Landscape (2012), and Company: Movements, Deals and Drinks (2015) situated their practice within feminist, economic, and decolonial frameworks.

In 2019, Myvillages was invited by curator Jane Scarth to participate in a lecture series and present the exhibition Setting the Table: Village Politics at the Whitechapel Gallery. This collaboration led to the landmark anthology The Rural (2019), edited by Kathrin Böhm and Wapke Feenstra as part of the Documents of Contemporary Art series co-published by Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press. Building on this momentum, Böhm and Feenstra established the Rural School of Economics in 2019, which grew into an international network linking villages, rural communities, and interest groups across several European locations.

Participating in documenta fifteen in 2022 was a key moment of "unlearning and learning" for Myvillages. The working principle of lumbung, introduced in the documenta context by the curatorial group ruangrupa, created “a new multi-local and global space for sharing practice and a new way of thinking things in the making.” This network continues beyond documenta fifteen as a decentralized international art ecosystem in which Myvillages remains involved.

Cultivating Continuity

Now, after more than two decades of building collective social architecture, Myvillages is actively engaging in a process of critical evaluation and developing intergenerational trajectory. As Kathrin Böhm and Wapke Feenstra wrote in their 2024 essay As if it was a farm: “We started Myvillages with the wish to have a field, and now after 20 years we want to prepare to pass it on - as if it was a farm.”

The Rural School of Economics is an expression of this ongoing practice, cultivating decentralized spaces for practice-sharing and creative collaboration across international networks. Rather than treating artistic production as a sequence of temporary projects, Myvillages has developed a form of social architecture in which relationships, exchanges, and initiatives unfold over extended periods and across multiple locations, connecting people, places, resources, and communities across Europe and beyond.

This website presents projects developed since 2019, when Myvillages, through the Rural School of Economics (RSOE), began working intergenerationally.

An archive of Myvillages’ projects since 2003 is available here.