The artistic practice of Wapke Feenstra and her collective Myvillages is dedicated to rural culture. She uses her own background as a Frisian farmer's daughter and experience as an international artist to work with rural communities worldwide and to build a rural knowledge reservoir. We talk about her way of working, criticism of the dominance of urban culture, and the need to make a more complex relationship between city and countryside visible. The fundamental questions that Feenstra raises with her projects are relevant for a more inclusive understanding of culture, but also for the major ecological and economic challenges of today, in which we have much to learn from and on the contemporary countryside.
Anke Bangma: In the book 'The Rural' that you made with Myvillages, you formulate the passionate mission behind your practice: “We want to question and frustrate the cultural hegemony of urban culture. This requires a de-urbanised and un-nostalgic attention to the rural, a commitment to accepting complexities similar to those which are acknowledged for the urban.” You call it a form of emancipation. Why is the urban perspective on culture so dominant? Where did you recognise that in your own practice?
Wapke Feenstra: As a farmer's daughter, it became clear to me as soon as I went to study in Nijmegen that rural culture had no value there. And later at the art academy they acted as if I came from a cultural desert. But of course it is not true that there was no culture in my Frisian village environment: things were made, there were parades with farm wagons, there was also a hippie culture in the 60s and 70s, there were women's cafés, there was eco-activism for the preservation of the Wadden Sea and we were against the export of Frisian seed potatoes to Chile. So there was all sorts of things, including forms of social criticism, experimental theatre and performance. When I first saw work by Adrian Piper (1), I was not surprised by the performances she did on the streets in New York. I was surprised that she was so smart to capture such performances with a camera. I realised that culture in the countryside does not so much take different forms, but that people in the arts were more aware of the importance of registration and the power of representation. That is the factor through which, in addition to the public seeing an event happening on the street, the larger story can emerge that also becomes part of the world of conceptual art.
AB: So for you the hierarchical relationship between city and countryside was not just a theme, but a lived experience?
WF: Yes, I also had that hierarchy projected onto me several times. There weren't many students who grew up on a farm at the time, but there was still no curiosity about farm life. Everyone assumed that I had made cultural progress by going to Nijmegen to study. But that city itself was also seen as a periphery. When I traveled to Amsterdam, they often asked me upon arrival in the capital 'did you have a good trip?' The other way around, that question would never be asked. That whole idea of center and periphery, from which such a question arises, is of course complete nonsense and will also destroy us socially and ecologically. That is why I am an advocate of what I call a 'stretched space', in which culture is stretched from the periphery and from the center. It is a joint process to show that there is a much more complex connection between city and countryside.
AB: That connection was central to your recent project 'Farmers side' at TENT, where you went in search of traces of rural culture in South Rotterdam. What motivated you to look at your own city after years of international projects?
WF: In 2017, I had worked with urban farmers in Jakarta and spoken to rural migrant workers in Guangzhou. There I wondered: What knowledge and culture do these people carry with them? In Guangzhou I had a moleskin with me as a way to start a conversation, and in that city of millions they could tell me all kinds of things about what lives underground in the Chinese countryside. In Jakarta I worked with women who were involved in subsidized urban farming. But they had hardly any memories of the countryside or knowledge about growing crops, because the rural migration there had taken place much longer ago. That made me curious about Rotterdam-Zuid, a relatively young part of my city where several generations of migrant workers have settled since the end of the 19th century. First from the Dutch countryside, then from Southern Europe, Morocco, Turkey and the Netherlands Antilles, and nowadays mainly from Eastern Europe. Because of all those rural migrants, this part of the city was given the derogatory nickname Boerenzij. As a farmer's daughter, I am of course also a rural migrant. I wanted to make a connection between my own background and the 'farmer side' of the city.
AB: How did you work?
WF: I went looking for subjective stories. That starts with telling who I am, because our lived experiences matter. I ask questions that are close to the everyday of a place—in this case, my place of residence. For me, art starts with making connections between people and places, and people and people. To start a conversation and to release stories, I asked my fellow Rotterdammers a simple question: Are you also from the countryside? In this way, I wanted to get an idea of the trans-local connections that are of course part of rural migration.
AB: You are also interested in what is specific to a local context. What did you notice here?
WF: This Boerenzij project made me realize even more clearly how, by asking people about their rural background, you ignore other things that usually dominate: by ignoring nationality, ethnicity, education and religion, different groups suddenly have something in common. The possibility of a shared space arises. But I also noticed how enormously diverse and fragmented that space is in Rotterdam. The rural migrants on the Boerenzij arrived at different times, come from very different countries of origin and keep their memories in different home languages. Also, not everyone wants to identify with the countryside. If you are a descendant of enslaved people who were forced to work on plantations, you do not want to identify with peasant culture. And of course, I did not come into contact with everyone equally naturally. Your own history, body and gender also play a role, so I could work more easily with a group of Moroccan women than with the Polish men in my street who work in the greenhouses and get into white vans at Maashaven every morning. People who had been farmers on the Boerenzij were attracted by the fact that I come from a farm myself.
AB: That was one of the biggest surprises for me: that there were still actual farms in Zuid until the 70s. That makes the image of Boerenzij even more layered: the histories of this part of the city as farmland and as a settlement for rural migrant workers intersect. Did you also succeed in bringing people from different groups together?
WF: This was partly successful; at informal kale dinners that I organised at my studio kitchen table, during screenings of the film I made of the Boerenzij project, and in the exhibition in TENT where I invited groups to join. But not all participants shared the need to come to the exhibition, and not all encounters were without friction. Look, I propose a horizontal encounter, around a shared space that I call the rural. That sounds innocent, but of course it is not, because I make this proposal in a context that is actually full of hierarchical relations. By asking a seemingly innocent question—"We live here on the Boerenzij, do you also come from a farming village?"—I open up that 'stretched space' that we just talked about. As a result, everyone has to stretch their own image of city and countryside, in order to be able to imagine a new shared space together. And I mean everyone, not some while others passively watch.
AB: I noticed that in your presentations you stay away from a meta-narrative about the people you worked with. You stay close to their micro-perspectives, you don’t use voice-over in your films, and you don’t use commentary in captions of photos or drawings. Are you trying to avoid a distinction between people who are watching and people who are being watched?
WF: In my own exhibitions, but also in those of others, I am very critical of the way representation is dealt with. In the art world there is a tendency to lecture people, especially peasants, to portray them as clumsy, camp or laughable. That is a form of 'othering' that I absolutely want to stay away from. That is why I even stopped making exhibitions for a while. When I became interested in the exhibition as a platform again, it was in a village, Zvizzchi in Russia, where I spent a year making a village portrait together with villagers and artists. I had processed our photos into photo garlands and they were going to be presented in the Moscow Biennale, but they asked me why we could not show them in the village as well. That made me think again about what an exhibition can mean, and how you can also talk about representation with people from outside the art world. For me it is crucial that all visitors, even if they have never been to an exhibition before, feel free to navigate through the space and form their own ideas and to comment on what they see, including what they think is missing. I am not interested in my exhibition presenting a complete picture and prescribing an interpretation. I am interested in raising questions, and it is precisely the showing of gaps that activates the imagination.
AB: So the objects you brought from the Boerenzij to TENT were emphatically not a representative representation of a place or group as you would find in an ethnographic museum, but rather a provisional working collection with which you put the viewer to work?
WF: Yes, with those fragments of rural culture that are present in the city of Rotterdam I want to offer an entry point to understand how much there is that we usually do not see, or that we usually do not value. Just as I experienced myself, rural migrants are expected to leave their rural culture and knowledge behind upon arrival in the city, because it would no longer have any use or value in the urban reality. I want to question that dynamic and initiate a process of new image formation.
AB: A research group of Esther Peeren, 'Rural Imaginations' (2), focuses on the stereotypical image of the countryside. They look at novels, films, magazines such as 'Buitenleven' and TV programmes such as 'Boer zoekt vrouw' (Farmer seeks wife). These always feature an idealised, timeless outdoor life that has little to do with farming life. It is a persistent misconception within the urban perspective to leave one hundred and fifty years of industrialisation of agriculture out of the picture. How do you ensure in your practice that you do not fall back on that cliché image?
WF: By working with farmers and looking at their perception of the countryside. With Myvillages we refuse to make 'I know better' work about farmers. Usually, seminars and exhibitions only present you with doom scenarios. Of course, I also believe that a change of course is needed in how we produce our food. But I want to hear from farmers why they do certain things and come to their decisions. I also do not believe that agricultural innovation will come from the arts. Design solutions are being proposed everywhere, from design academies to the recent exhibition 'Countryside, the Future' by Rem Koolhaas.(3) What is being devised at the academies is very innovative, but it concerns niches. Koolhaas sees an answer in his exhibition in large-scale technology in greenhouse construction. Of course, I find that interesting too, and in our pantry In Berlin we followed up on this by growing vegetables with LED lighting and by laying dry hydroponics for growing lettuce in the pond. But to come to real solutions, it is also necessary to see what it is like to work with this technology as a farmer. In Berlin, for example, I wanted to have six types of lettuce. But the grower we worked with explained that if he does not want to use pesticides, he has to check the lettuce every day. With each type of lettuce, he has to pay attention to different things, because they have different leaves and sometimes attract different insects. With so many different types of lettuce, that is not possible for one person. In the end, that grower's story is much more interesting and relevant than my preconceived idea.
AB: What you are actually saying is that we need to bring back the human perspective in our approach to the countryside. In his new book 'Het landschap, de mensen'(4), historian Auke van der Woud describes how that human perspective has been systematically ignored since the beginning of agricultural intensification in the Netherlands. Everything revolved around a materialistic focus on numbers, rationalization and maximization, not on farmers and farmer's wives. All principles that were rolled out across the countryside from the big cities as a policy. It is also interesting that he suggests that the primacy of that urban culture arose from the nature of the land itself. You had the Dutch polder country, where large-scale livestock farming and a high population density were possible. Cities, markets and a monetary economy emerged here. And until the reclamations of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, you had wild sandy soils in large parts of the Netherlands, where such yields were unthinkable, barter took place but poverty also reigned. Not those poor sandy soils, but the fertile polder soil formed the breeding ground for capitalism. And for the dominance of Holland on all fronts, also in the imagery - think of the famous Dutch painting. The power relationship between center and periphery is therefore closely linked to the ground under your feet.
WF: Yes, and the culture of a place is also determined by the way in which land itself is owned. There are polders where farms remained cooperatives or family property for a long time. On sandy soils where yields were meager or in the parts of the Netherlands where the expensively rented land was owned by the church or the nobility, it was difficult to farm profitably, so intensive livestock farming gained a foothold there much more quickly. This is how non-land-based agriculture came into being, which has also conquered the polders through the rampant agricultural policy. We all now know that non-circular agriculture is a major problem. So it really has to change. But what does that mean for rural culture? How are we going to tackle that culturally if we in the Netherlands have been putting the agricultural sector under constant pressure for so long to produce more and more for less money? The right to self-determination of our food producers is lower than ever and that contributes to a distorted relationship with the land. All over the world I see that whether you work your own land or work for a large landowner or an industrial mega-corporation gives you a different sense of responsibility, and therefore a different bond with the farmland.
In many of my projects I therefore look at the soil. As a farmer's daughter I grew up with the awareness of the type of soil and the place where you are. That started with drilling in the meadows of my birthplace and talking about the clay with my father; I still like to do soil drilling with farmers, because that's when the stories come out. When the first edition of the international art manifestation Manifesta took place in Rotterdam in 1996, I was a co-founder of the artist group NEsTWORK, with which we drew attention to the specific place where art is made. At that time, the nomadic artist was celebrated as the one with the most valuable cultural insights and metropolises were portrayed as the innovative cultural melting pots. But I thought, my father also knows a lot and as a farmer he always stayed in one place.
AB: So you are also concerned with the question of what knowledge is, or what knowledge has value?
WF: Exactly. Knowing whether land is too wet or too dry and how to deal with it also has value. There is knowledge that is connected to a specific place, and there is knowledge that you can easily transport. But in capitalism and the ever-increasing urbanization that goes with it, we only seem to be left with that transportable knowledge. Just like transportable culture. That culture must always be 'legible', because recognizability gives a huge advantage in value attribution. Before you know it, you have a traveling monoculture and the nomadic artist is constantly traveling but never leaves his own bubble. When I first spoke about 'local knowledge' in a lecture more than twenty years ago, no one took the combination of those two terms seriously. That is why I keep asking: What is locality? And how can local and traveling knowledge meet?
AB: You have also developed various formats with Myvillages that revolve around forms of knowledge exchange. In Berlin you organised the Vorratskammer, where you provided 8000 visitors to the Haus der Kulturen der Welt with food and drink in five days through collaboration with various local producers, and asked questions about food chains and the interdependence of city and countryside. In various places you realized International Village Shop. And you just started a new multi-year project, the Rural School of Economics. How do you arrive at those formats?
WF: All these formats are about creating a space. Actually, no different from 'Boerenzij'. If you want to research rural culture, that may seem very abstract. You have to find a simple question for each project, which offers an opening to different directions. The International Village Shop creates a space to make things together with rural people in a specific place. Handy objects that have local roots and address the specificities, dilemmas and economies that are on the table at that moment. We make a utilitarian or decorative object that can represent an aspect of that specific landscape or village as soon as it goes on a journey. And as soon as it is on the counter, it is actually a form of playing shop. That playing, and trying out things together hands-on, is of great value, and I learned that again through Myvillages. The things in the shop are for sale on site and through our exhibitions. Sometimes there is a scarcity or slow delivery, but of course we are mainly concerned with the social dynamics and the reason to send the stories behind our merchandise into the world.
The idea of a school and translocal knowledge exchange is not new to me. In 'House tree party' I already took people out to learn together through nature walks and semiotic observations. In 'Farmers & Ranchers' I brought together young ranchers from Friesland and Colorado to exchange knowledge on location, but also via an internet platform, about the daily farming business in such different places. I was involved in the Eco Nomadic School of which Myvillages was a co-founder, with Kathrin Böhm as the driving force. But the Rural School of Economics is a larger cultural network with a stronger transnational perspective, where we focus on non-language-based ways of learning. We work with rural communities where we have sometimes been before, and who are facing or have faced major economic, cultural or ecological challenges. There is much to learn from their cultural resilience and often strong intergenerational knowledge transfer. We involve village youth, farming families, artists, academics and migrant workers. In the Rural School of Economics, no one is the teacher or the student, we all know something and share it with each other.
From Myvillages, Kathrin will initially focus on economic changes and the digital space. I focus on the social economy, the image and the way in which value is assigned. We look critically at land use and the right of representation. In the Netherlands, I work together with the research group 'Rural Imaginations', with Chizu Sato from Wageningen University and with the Van Abbemuseum. We start with the cow and the meadow, to investigate how such a cliché image relates to the circular economy of the future, in which the landscape, but also the cow itself, will change. And so we will look across Europe in various rural places to see what is going on there. For the first time, we will also work together more remotely, partly because we cannot be everywhere ourselves due to Corona, but also because we want to develop new methods to share and visualize local knowledge. And together we test how this can be used trans-locally and could form a lasting cultural infrastructure.
AB: You stated at the launch of the Rural School of Economics that it is especially important now to learn from the countryside. If you know the enormous transformations the countryside has undergone since industrialization, you could conclude that if there are people anywhere who know what it is like to deal with radical change, they are in the countryside.
WF: It's just not seen that way.
