Myvillages

Myvillages is an international collective, founded in 2003 by artists Kathrin Böhm (UK/DE), Wapke Feenstra (NL) and Antje Schiffers (DE). The collective focuses on the rural as a place for cultural production. The collective’s founders come from a rural background, and they investigate the relationship between the countryside and the city, challenging the urban as the dominant sphere for cultural production.

Myvillages is registered as an International Foundation in the Netherlands.

Context and history

Myvillages addresses the rural without wanting to define it. The collective pays attention to its peculiarities, and what remains as rural, be it a practice, a mindset or a place. The ‘rural’ can manifest itself in the countryside and the city; the movement of rural knowledge and identities is connected to migration and the urbanisation of societies. Myvillages is interested in the less visible but existing rural undercurrents of places, and their meaning for those who live there.

The three founders of Myvillages are originally from small villages, which they left to study art in cities, to then stay in urban environments where the spaces for art making are more obvious. In 2001 they re-turned to their home villages to see and think them as places to work as artists, and slowly and in collaboration with many others created a network and critical thinking for a new art making in the rural and from within the rural.

Projects (selection)

Myvillages organizes and participates in co-operative projects in various villages and rural landscapes around the world, with a focus on central and eastern Europe. Many of the projects are trans-local and international, and stay close to the everyday practices in the places where they are organized: for instance a village shop, community lunches, walking across the fields, or a film screening in a village hall. In general, the collective’s projects range from small-scale informal presentations to long-term collaborative research projects and permanent new cultural infrastructures.

Several projects by Myvillages are trans-local in nature, and make connections between people and places: the International Village Shop, the Farm Drawings Collection, the Eco Nomadic School/Rural School of Economics and Company Drinks.

• The International Village Shop (2006-) is a growing network of temporary shops in which goods are made collectively with rural communities, and then traded across Myvillages’ rural and art world networks.

• The Farm Drawings (2003 -), a collection of drawings made during workshops, seminars and village hall meetings worldwide, where individuals sketch their memory of what a farm looks like.

• Company Drinks (2014-) began as Company: Movements, Deals and Drinks, an art project, exploring community making and commoning through collective and seasonal drinks production at the edge of Greater London.

• The Rural School of Economics (2021-) grew out of the Eco Nomadic School (2011-18) and is a multi-lingual travelling class-room that connects localised knowledge through informal and inter-generational learning.

• I Like Being a Farmer (2000 -) an ongoing bartering project by Antje, where farmers film their everyday work in return of an oil painting.
• Bibliobox (2003-2013), a mobile archive with documents about rural contemporary art practices.
• Former Farmland (2008 - 09), where Wapke makes the agricultural history of land visible through tours, walks, drawing and story-telling.
• The Pantry Project (2011), the year-long collection and preservation of food from 80 producers and growers in and around Berlin to feed a festival at the House of World Cultures.
• Farmers and Ranchers (2012-2015) Wapke brought togther young kettle farmers from Friesland NL and Colorado US to experience and learn from each other’s context in times of climate change.
• International Village Show (2015/16) a two year long exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Leipzig.
• Boerenzij – The Rural Side (2018/19) is a project about existing but invisible rural cultures of traditional and migrant communities in South Rotterdam.
• Rural Productive Forces

Reception

Projects by Myvillages have been presented and exhibited internationally, at events and venues including Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco (2008), Ars Electronica Festival, Linz (2008), Tate Britain, London (2010), TENT, Rotterdam (2011), Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2011), Fries Museum, Leeuwarden (2014), Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2015), Museum for Contemporary Art (GFZK), Leipzig (2015-16), Ludwig Múzeum, Budapest (2018), Whitechapel Gallery, London (2019), Victoria and Albert Museum, London (2019), and Kunsthalle Bratislava (2021).

Keynote presentations by Myvillages include the 2015 Re-Imagining Rurality Symposium at Westminster University.

Artefacts, objects and documentation resulting from the activities of Myvillages are included in public and museum collections, including Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Arts Maebashi Museum Collection, Maebashi; Kunstmuseum Thurgau; Kunstverein Springhornhof, Heiligendorf; Lawson Park Collection, Grizedale Arts; Fries Museum, Leeuwarden; PAV, Turino; and Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.

Grants and awards

Myvillages has received grants and support from various cultural funders, including Erasmus+ EU; the European Cultural Foundation, NL; Mondriaan Fund NL; Sigrid Rausing Trust UK;  Allianz Stiftung DE; and Kulturstiftung des Bundes DE amongst others. In 2014 Myvillages received the Create Art Award UK.

Publications and films

Publications by Myvillages

• Feenstra, Wapke (2021). Boerenzij = The rural side. Kevser Güler, TENT Rotterdam. Prinsenbeek: Jap Sam Books. ISBN 978-94-92852-33-5. OCLC 1252061257.
• The Rural. Documents of Contemporary Art. London: Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press. 2019. ISBN 978-0-262-53716-2. OCLC 1054375912.
• Learn to Act, Introducing The Eco Nomadic School, edited by Kathrin Böhm, Tom James and Doina Petrscu, published by Peprav, Paris, 2018 (English)
• International Village Show, edited by Kathrin Böhm, Wapke Feenstra and Antje Schiffers, Jovis Verlag, Berlin, 2016 (English / German)
• Tekenen in Vlassenbroek, A Schelde Riverscape, project book edited by Wapke Feenstra, essay by Ronald V.d. Sompel, Jap Sam Books Heinijngen, 2015 (Dutch / English)
• Company: Movements, Deals and Drinks, edited by Kathrin Böhm and Miranda Pope, Myvillages Series with Jap Sam Books, Heijningen, 2015 (English)
• A Photographic Portrait of a Landscape. New Dimensions in Landscape Philosophy, edited by Pietsie Feenstra and Wapke Feenstra, Myvillages Series with Jap Sam Books Heijningen, 2012 (English)
• Vorratskammer / Pantry. Kathrin Böhm, Wapke Feenstra, Antje Schiffers, Thomas Sprenger, Jap Sam Books, Heijningen and Argobooks Berlin, 2012 (German / English)
• Images of Farming. Edited by Wapke Feenstra and Antje Schiffers, Myvillages Series with Jap Sam Books Heijningen, 2011 (English)
• Ich bin gerne Bauer und möchte es auch gerne bleiben / I like being a farmer and I would like to stay one. Antje Schiffers and Thomas Sprenger, Argobooks Berlin, 2010 (English, Macedonian, Romanian, Dutch, German)
• De Beste Plek / The Best Place, project book edited by Wapke Feenstra, with an essay by Pietsie Feenstra, Jap Sam Books Heijningen, 2015 (Dutch / English)

Films (selection)

• Village Produce Films, an archive of films on the making of new goods for the International Village Shop, 2008 – ongoing:
• Foreign Pickers, 23 min, 2016
• Farmers & Ranchers: Growing Up in Changing Landscapes, 26min, 2014 Vorratskammer / Pantry, with Martin König, 45 min, 2012

Conferences and talks

• 2004 Village Convention, co-organised with General Public Agency, Ditchling Museum UK
• 2007 Rural Art Space, symposium, Shrewsbury Museum UK
• 2010 Images of Farming, symposium, Städtische Galerie Nordhorn DE
• 2014 Skafferi Prat, talks and workshop series, Bildmuseet Umea SE
• 2014 – ongoing, Haystacks, talks and workshop series, London UK
• 2015 Forms of Lending shape, event series, Hamburger Bahnhof Berlin DE
• 2016 Where Can Art Go, symposium, GfZK Leipzig DE
• 2019 The Rural: Contemporary Art and Spaces of Connection, together with Whitechapel Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery London and Wysing Arts Centre UK

External links

• Myvillages – official website
• International Village Shop
• Company Drinks
• Former Farmland
• Bibliobox
• Ich bin gerne Bauer
• International Village Shop
• Vorratskammer
• Farmers and ranchers
• International Village Show
• Boerenzij