Summer 2025 Newsletter
Rural Relations Writing Club
Rural Relations Writing Club is a slow-growing series of writing workshops exploring rural life, memory, and imagination. We gather to write, drawing from memory, imagination, and rural practice. Open to anyone curious about rural storytelling in all its forms—no writing experience needed. Each session centres on a theme: kinship, grief, or harvest. Initiated and organised by Ioana from Seasonal Neighbours in collaboration with Myvillages.
Every first Wednesday of the month and 🥣 Dinner included
in Rotterdam Zuid (5 min from Maashaven/Rotterdam)
8 spots each session & sign up here: writing.rural.relations@gmail.com
SOON => Rural Relations Writing Club in Ghent
Rural Relations Writing Club will host a free workshop for The Scope of Stories: Tracing Vernacular Landscapes exhibition at BLANCO space, curated by Jonathan De Maeyer. The session takes place on Saturday, 24 May, 11:00–13:00.
Aarden in de Polder – The Power of (Re)Rooting
A long-term collaboration with Casco Art Institute
We are pleased to announce our ongoing work with Casco Art Institute on The Power of (Re)Rooting through long-term living experiences and shorter visits, aiming to reframe what rurality and connectedness can mean in 2025.
The pilot programme Aarden in de Polder—which literally means “grounding in the polder”—has begun and is part of the Rural School of Economics. Thanks to support from Vriendenloterij/Doen and the Mondriaan Fund, we are now exploring the polders. The programme includes contributions from Gele Hailu, Zburazh Art Coop, and Zoe Crevoisier (interning at Myvillages from Montpellier Contemporain École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts), alongside other indigenous and migrated human and other-than-human species. From 27 September onward, elements of Aarden in de Polder will be shown during Wapke Feenstra's solo exhibition at Casco Art Institute in Utrecht.
During our April 2025 field trip, we viewed scans of a butterfly brain at Wageningen University & Research (WUR). Inez Dekker and Wapke Feenstra invited network creatives including Indra Gleizde, Meta Knol, Charles Esche, and Marianne Takou (Casco Art Institute) to join. Together with the Animal Production Systems Group, Knowledge, Technology and Innovation group, Lab of Entomology, and CropMix, we learned that the greatest diversity of insects and animals exists at the meeting points between different crops. It demonstrated how resilience emerges through experimentation with edges.
is home to Alanus University, where Kathrin teaches art in the economics department. After her first three years, Kathrin is organising the two-day interdisciplinary and interspecies Unfreeze Your Brain Mini-Festival, together with her colleague Bianca Orboi, and many local and national initiatives, researchers, enterprise, cultural workers, land stewards and activists. Art meets Business meets Future.
The programme revolves around three strands: art, economy and rurality. Contributors include , artist and shamanic practitioner Annabelle Wimmer Bakic, Katharina Reuter (Chair of the German Sustainable Business Association), author Nadège Kusanika, biodiversity specialist Philipp Unterweger, (Un)Sustainability speaker Lavinia Muth, cradle to cradle farmer Roberto Tinoco, and of course Wapke Feenstra from Myvillages.
You can find the full programme is HERE. The event is in German.
INTRODUCING:
Long-term collaborators and allies at the Rural School of Economics
Since 2012, Alina Dzeravianka has been a friend of Myvillages. A vital cultural translator in Zvizzchi (Kaluga region), she is now based in Brest, Belarus, working as a freelance curator and lecturer at the European Humanities University (Vilnius, Lithuania). Alina introduced us to many cultural workers in Belarus. Together with Sveta Husakova, she co-founded the Zburazh Art Coop. The group was guests last year in Rotterdam, and we hope to host them again in autumn 2025 in our Livingroom Rural School of Economics at Casco Art Institute, during the (Re)Rooting in the Polder programme.
In 2019, we met Anastasia Kamienska, a curator from Tver and our anchor in the Pushkino village project with local youth. We plan to include her poem about the village in our next newsletter. Learn more about our joint project Roam here: Pushkino
PUBLICATIONS
Potato Eating Book – Turkey
This art book, made by Wapke Feenstra and visitors to last year’s potato lunch at the Uçhisar Women’s Cooperative, documents potato growing and eating in Cappadocia. The 66-page book, printed in Istanbul, features 75+ potato recipes, a silkscreen cover by Dilara Sezgin, and a text by Kevser Güler. Preorder a copy by sending your address.
Torte and Bratwurst – In Search of Emancipatory Ruralities
This publication, following an open call for rural images and ideas, includes our text As If It Was a Farm, a reflection on imagining ourselves as a generationally minded, land-connected arts organisation.
Editors: Teresa Weißert and Alina Grombert from Kompost Ensemble
Design: Tessa Darimont
Read more
HAYSTACKS //|\ HEUHAUFEN //|\ SWYLJE
The 2025 hay season begins soon, and with it events where hay is made, and haystacks become spaces for dialogue about land use and access to land, agricultural traditions and realities, and rural knowledge in the urban. Haystacks are to a degree romantic, yet practical markers of seasonal farming—and excellent meeting places.
2025 Dates:
· 29.05. Swylje Dinner, Lakenvelder Boerderij Boterhuispolder
· 31.05. P2P re-learning scything session, Höfen
· 07.06. Scything for Business Students, Alanus University, Alfter
· 14.06. Haystack Performance at Unfreeze Your Brain, Alfter
· 28.06. Lammas Land Community Haystack, East London
Following HAYSTACKS //|\ HEUHAUFEN //|\ SWYLJE at Künstlerhaus Stuttgart in 2024, we are working with Tamarind Rosetti and Stephen Wright on a small publication about haystacks.
Research Updates
Ida Bomm is compiling an extended Myvillages bibliography. If you’ve cited us in your research, or know someone who has, let us know :-)
Company Drinks @ Universität Wien / AdK Berlin
Art historian Christoph Chwatal included Company Drinks in the new multi-year project Site Complexes: Models of Responsive Practices for the 21st Century. The project launched with a workshop and public panel with Elke Krasny at Depot,Vienna.
Announcement:
New Partnership: Arcade Gallery + Company Drinks
Arcade, led by Christian Mooney, is launching a South London space this autumn, partnering with Company Drinks. The gallery’s kitchen will feature a permanent honesty fridge aka participatory sculpture stocked with BAD Cola and other community drinks from Barking and Dagenham. Christian says: “This collaboration merges artistic experimentation with social enterprise. It’s about art, yes—but also about the communities it serves and the conversations it ignites.”
Planetarian Gardeners Workshop at Terrra Brezoi, 2024, report and photos: Indra Gleizde