How to land

Our inquiry into sensitivities shaped in and by places that lie outside current human-techno-urban imaginations started years ago. Foresta Collective has been a nomadic roaming body, investigating circles of ecological intimacy as a perma-artistic practice — exploring support structures for living more simply, engaging into learning experiences and aesthetic practices with other humans and more-than-humans, re-connecting to wilderness and sensuous knowledge, re-membering oral traditions and songs, learning more hands-on — through our Seasonal Academy, Woods in the City, as well as Foresta Kids. Trying to break through the boundaries of art-education-life and nature-culture, our formats have been roaming through liminal spaces, fields and forests across Europe, merging poetic and practical, direct and metaphorical approaches. Hosting projects, participating in projects, inviting people into live experiences, workshops, walks, embodied practices, cooking on fire sessions, crafting and making,… but staying uprooted, on the move, a rhizome, connecting territories, and searching for home. How to land?

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Confederacy of Villages commission

As part of our inquiry described above we are currently involved with the Confederacy of Villages commission, proposed by Fernando Garcia Dory and Inland as part of CPRC at the Royal Institute of Art. Description:

In order to overcome the unsustainability of current model of growth, we have to reinvent our relation with the others and the ecosystems that sustain us both on the material and imaginaries aspects. Art and cultural production are essential on this task, and for it, a path for its transition to other forms should be explored as well. Inland is looking at both questions, taking the city-countryside and the land use question as main angle to understand culture-nature relations in the present. It is not only working on the constitution of communities-of-practice in the spaces where its carrying its situated durational engagement, but also within diverse networks. They go from the World Alliance of Nomadic Indigenous Pastoralists, Lumbung towards Documenta 15, and also the Confederacy of Villages (CoV). CoV is formed by different like-minded projects that share a direct implication on agri-culture and rethinking art in that context. We would like to understand and define better what constitutes CoV´s perspective and how the network could inspire others and be extended. For that aim, participants will engage with Inland and similar cases of interest in their closest contexts, identified and selected together. Different research tools will be put in practice, and a prospective exercise will be carried to think on forms for strengthening the network, from gatherings, funding scheme, publishing etc - that could eventually be developed in the future. For this commission we will be studying a genealogy of socially engaged art, its specific relations with the rural, sustainable rural dynamization techniques, Social Ecology and alternative economies.

Experiments during the Commission

To share some experiments we have done together with a group of participants in this commission at CPRC, we will mention specifically collective writing exercises, where lived and fictional experiences meet, and CoVers, a kind of books that will contain material in words, images and other known and unknown media, as a way to approach issues connected with the rural life, political and economic aspects, questions around mindset, non-logocentric languages, and other inquiries. Some examples of CoVers (developed collectively within the commission):

CoVers collection: https://the-covers.hotglue.me

This is a collective library of potential books. These books could sit in the library of the Confederacy, or any village within the Confederacy. As yet, they take up no physical space. The members of the Confederacy have not been able to meet in person, so the practices and knowledge that the villages and venues will share together is still forming. Into this space we offer these titles, covers, statements, instructions that we have gathered together, in our formulation as a digital village, that has been assembling virtually through the year. It's an open library: maybe some of the books exist already, maybe the contents can be assembled from other texts, maybe the library never ends, and books always can be added.

All the books in the library come from conversations, discussions, phrases and ideas springing from research meetings with actors of the confederacy and in our own village meetings.

The library is a tool of speculation, a way of sense-making, sharing knowledges and a mode of assembly that recounts pastoral, rural, countryside knowledge through the lens of art and speculation.

How to use this library: Take a title and make it real.

If you want to join the collective writing experiment, think and feel into these questions, or invent your own, and send us your thoughts.

.What are your personal associations with the rural?

.Make visible the ecosystems that sustain the villages.

.How do we enter the village, or traverse between them?

.What do the villages produce, or reproduce?

.What is invisible about/in the village?

.What is the confederacy of villages working towards? What can it do that individual villages cannot? Why do the individual villages want to be part of it?

.The confederacy of villages functions with an alternative economy - describe this system of currency, production, remuneration,....

.What kind of village would you like to live in? Can you imagine and describe it in any form/medium of your choice?

.Where does the coordination of the confederacy happen? Is it different in every village?

.Who lives in the Villages and how do they spend their days?

.Who owns the land? Who walks the land?

.You are a sheep. Describe the shepherd.

.What buildings / structures are there? How are they used? Are they the property of people inhabiting them?

.Three villages meet in a room to discuss contemporary art. Write the dialogue between them.

.How does the cheese feel in the farmer’s cupboard?

.Is there anything that must be sourced from outside the Villages?

.Would you have a representative? Who would this be? How did you decide who or what this representative is?

.Pick any object, from your pocket, bag, drawer… How can is it a metaphor for an assembly?

Bibliography

“The Rural”, ed. MyVillages, MIT Press and Whitechapel , 2019
"Rurality Re-Imagined / Villagers, Farmers, Wanderers and Wild Things", ed. by Ben Stringer, Oro Editions 2018 
“Earth Beings” Marisol de la Cadena; Duke Press. 
”Learning to partner with a Life-Place” Peter Berg, Ecuador Dispatch #1, 2004
“ The AgroPoetic Reader” 2020
Learn to Act
Second Nature 1984
Design des territoires, Eterotopia 2020
MyVillages-Brezoi Report

Gathering to Share Knowledge 

autour de la table, loic touzé and alain michard
Blackmarket for Useful Knowledge and Non-Knowledge
open source ecology 
369 éditions
https://gauthierroussilhe.com/fr/projects
hyperville
Pompidou - Cosmopolis
Akoaki - Detroit
Atelier Van Lieshout Ville
Atelier Luma
InSituLab - Conserverie de territoire - october 2020
Eco-Nomadic School 
Common Ground
R-urban - Colombes 
http://h-a-y-s-t-a-c-k-s.net/



Disclaimer

Please note: the information on this page is an internal information within Foresta Collective, please don’t publish it in publicly open access. Thank you!