Barefoot in the 'weeds', Feral invites you for a 3-day programme to observe, mingle and think together about the mutations of art in public space. This year, we invite the rural around the table.
Signal becomes FERAL*
Interventions in public space / knowledges / tactics during 3 days in Brussels
21>23.09.2022
Barefoot in the grass, Feral invites you to observe the mutations of art in public space. Sensitive provocations, changes of perspective and a little dirt under your fingernails are on the programme.
The city has long been considered the space of artistic freedom par excellence, but the deprivation of space during the epidemic peaks and the threat of an uninhabitable land have accelerated the great rural revival. People left the city to take care of the land and experiment other possible ways of living.
Of course, artists were caught up in this movement. Some leave the city, others create new circulations. New forms and fruitful imaginaries are born from these contexts. Meanwhile, in the city and on its edges, eco-poetics and wilderness are also making their way. Artists and activists create works that are more in solidarity with neighbours, sparrows, eagles, fern and the forget-me-nots.
Is the traditional binary opposition between urban and rural about to be overcome? What if our relationship with nature was also being reinvented within the city?
On the agenda: knowledge and tactics (stories of experience, conversation and workshops), artistic interventions in public space (performances, screening, rituals, walks) with even a ride on the Waterbus on the canal.
We will share our stories
We will go to the borders of the city
We will exchange on alternative models
We will raise questions of privilege
We will question the gentrification of the countryside
We will learn from the soil
We will build new commons
We will confront the politics of food production, distribution and consumption by visiting the shelves of our local supermarket
We will plant seeds and
We will celebrate.
Starting from rue de Flandre (La Bellone) then moving towards the edges of the city, to the fields of Neder-over-Heembeek (Le Début des Haricots urban farm) and even beyond (Open Akker) in Dilbeek, in order to tread the different soils where new imaginaries are slowly aggregating.
With: Pamina de Coulon (CH), Phoebe Davies (UK), Sam Trotman (UK), Amy Franceschini / Future Farmers (BE-US), Zoë Palmer (UK), Alessandra Coppola (IT), Kinch for Super Terram (BE), Chloé Deligne (BE), Wapke Feenstra/ Myvillages (NL), Oscar Cassamajor & Valérie Maione (BE), La Semeuse / Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers (FR), Gosie Vervloessem (BE), Alicja Rogalska (PL), Bram Van Cauwenberghe & Amy Franceschini/Open Akker (BE), Common Dreams School/MOSSS (BE)
Let's gather, cross experiences, wander and explore, go for a getaway, let’s mingle.
DAY #1
Morning at La Bellone: sharing experiences and artistic practices
Afternoon at the urban farm Le Début des Haricots: collective reflections on the issues raised in the morning
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09:30 Welcome at La Bellone
10:00 Introduction by Marine Thévenet (CIFAS)
10:15 Keynote by Pamina de Coulon
10:45 Discussions in small groups
11:15 Discussions with Phoebe Davies, Pamina de Coulon and Sam Trotman.
12:00 Conclusion
12:15 Departure on foot towards the waterbus stop (Quai des Péniches 5)
13:00 Waterbus + sandwiches
13:38 Arrival of Waterbus + walk towards the Urban Farm
14:15 Arrival at Urban farm + coffee
14:30 Introduction of artistic project by Zoë Palmer and Amy Franceschini
15:30 Open source forum - discussions and provocations
17:30 Conclusions
18:15 Apero + Dinner (free)
19:30 Presentation of the film La Restanza by Alessandra Coppola
19:45 Film La Restanza in the open air
21:15 Aftertalk with Alessandra Coppola
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Pamina de Coulon (CH)
What: Knowledge and tactics, shared stories
When: 21.09 - 10:00 > 13:00
Language: French, English
Where: La Bellone
Pamina de Coulon (CH) left the big city she used to live in, to live nowhere really - driven by the great movement of writing residencies and tours, she followed her work and her outdoor desires. Then she finally settled in the countryside, without really realising it fully right away. Three years later, she realises that she has split everything: that her life in the country is made up of a lot of farming, peasant struggles and driving, while she returns to the city to pursue her work as a performer and take public transport. Things are of course murkier and multi-dimensional. Still, the invitation to Feral made her realise how her two different lives exist on top of each other, and this is what she will try toarticulate for us.
Pamina refers to the Alps and the Rhone River to define where she comes from and where she is. An author and performer, her main form of expression is the spoken word, which she articulates in spoken essay and creative non-fiction. She also grows flowers and potatoes, fights against nuclear power and patriarchal capitalism in general. She lives with a chronic illness that gives her a specific experience of both pain and the unquestioned validism of our Western societies, the fact that everything is organised around«fit» bodies.
(www.paminadecoulon.ch/)
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Phoebe Davies (UK – Wales)
What: Knowledge and tactics, shared stories
When: 21.09 - 10:00 > 13:00
Language: English
Where: La Bellone
Welsh artist with an international career, Phoebe Davies’s work ranges from performance to video, posters and sound installations. Her practice is inspired by the methodologies of athletics, speculative narrative and organic farming, her favourite subjects being the relationship between the body, the intimate and the political. After her sister took over the family farm in Wales, Phoebe returned to set up Fieldwork, a rural artist residency programme, bringing together the ethics and methods of organic farming and rural culture with a reflection on regenerative and healing practices in art practice. This initiative is not without raising questions of power dynamics, labour relations, gender issues, interdependent practices and meaning-making.
(http://www.phoebedavies.co.uk/)
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Sam Trotman / Scottish Sculpture Workshop (UK – Scotland)
What: Knowledge and tactics, shared stories
When: 21.09 – 10:00 > 13:00
Language: English
Where: La Bellone
Scottish Sculpture Workshop (SSW) in Scotland, deep in Aberdeenshire, is a hub, an aggregation point for local, national and international communities; the project brings together artists, technicians, craftspeople, thinkers, families and young people to (re)connect with the environment in all its diversity, through artist residencies with access to both tangible (ceramics, welding) and intangible (landscape, community, collective) making workshops. At SSW, new ways of being together are collectively experimented with, and through this, traditional learning methods and practices of creating and sharing art are expanded and disrupted. Sam relies on ‘doing’ to build community. Sam designed and ran the Education Department at Artsadmin in London, where she was able to support young artists in their artistic empowerment. She has also worked with Women for Refugees Women (UK), Bioarts Society (FI) and Fierce, the international queer festival in Birmingham (UK). In addition, she was one of the researchers on the European Reshape programme working on ethical governance models in the arts sector. It is with all this experience that Sam will come to share and exchange on contemporary artistic dynamics in rural areas and her political commitment to accompany change for more common and shared spaces.
(www.ssw.org.uk)
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Amy Franceschini / Future Farmers (US/BE)
What: Knowledge and tactics, shared stories
When: 21.09 – 14:30 > 15:30
Language: English
Where: Urban farm Le Début des Haricots
Amy Franceschini is an American artist and designer based in Ghent. Her work explores the apparent conflict between ‘humans’ and ‘nature’. Based on encounter, exchange and tactile forms of inquiry, her projects involve the public in imagining and initiating concrete change. She co-founded Futurefarmers in 1995 and Free Soil in 2004: Futurefarmers is an international group of artists, architects, anthropologists and farmers with a common interest in creating participatory frameworks that recalibrate our senses. They work in contexts where complex social structures are interwoven with urban infrastructure and the complexities of collective memories embedded in (and around) a site. Through processes of participatory research, critical reflection and sustained public programming, the hidden potentials of these scenographies can emerge. The process of negotiation between different groups of people and cultures underpins this work and the communities that co-create it. And this through formats as challenging as a local radio station perched in a hut in the Italian countryside. Amy will be presenting her practice and will also be present at Open Akker on Friday 23 September. (www.futurefarmers.com)
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Zoë Palmer (UK)
What: Knowledge & tactics, shared stories
When:21.09 – 14 :30 > 15 :30
Where: Urban farm Le Début des Haricots
In the summer of 2021, Zoë Palmer and Jennifer Farmer co-created Dreaming Field Lab’, a residency in rural Britain for women of the African diaspora. The lab questions the place of minorities in rural public space, the re-appropriation of connection to the land and celebration through ritual, in response to climate dradation. These safe, sensory and experiential communal spaces promote rest and joy.
Combining indigenous plant work, intersectional storytelling and ancestral wisdom, participants equip each other for self-reliance and well-being. «We honour the role our bodies have to play in our liberation.
Zoë Palmer is a writer, artist and environmentalist. Her immersive theatre creations such as Hjertelyd (Den Jyske Opera) and Camille’s Rainbow are performed internationally. She teaches narrative practices at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Zoë will continue the day after, Thursday 22 September, with a workshop and co-creation of a ritual for Feral.
(www.zoelaureenpalmer.com)
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Shall we talk about it - Discussions & provocations
What: Knowledges & tactics, conversations in small groups
When: 15 :30-17 :30
Where: Urban farm Le Début des Haricots
Language : English and French
Today we are witnessing a movement of artists and thinkers who are moving to the countryside as a life and artistic project. Often collective adventures, they bear witness to a desire to transform our relationship with the world. The different ways in which practices are shared during Feral shall—we hope—raise the political and societal questions that are at the heart of this opening of practices.
While we are at the turning point of a relationship with the world, the beginnings are not always so easy. That’s why on that afternoon, we would like to gather and discuss the issues raised and draw common threads to continue to imagine the new practices underway. In the form of open conversations, we will address the questions of the commons and the need for collectivity, the apprehension of rural gentrification, the convergence of struggles with other sectors.
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Alicja Rogalska (PL)
Pretend you’ve got no money
What : Artistic intervention in public space, performance. Secret visit of a supermarket with headphones.
When: Available from 20 September until 20 October by podcast www.cifas.be
Where: In your local supermarket.
Language : English and French
Designed to disrupt our daily shopping habits, the tour invites you to have a different kind of relationship with your local supermarket, treating it as a ready-made stage design for a meandering, playful and slightly choreographed narrative about the politics of food production, distribution and consumption.
Topics include Bourdieu's theory of class distinction, bread riots, the political neurology of disgust, the Great Irish Famine, the role of bananas in the Colombian Civil War, migrant farm labour, automation, climate change crops, the psychology of shopping habits and Mussolini's blockade on pasta.
Alicja Rogalska is a Polish-born interdisciplinary artist based in London and Berlin and trained in Warsaw and London. She is the daughter of peasants. She works mainly in specific contexts by creating situations: performances, walks and installations in collaboration with other people (folk singers from the Hungarian, Polish and Indonesian countryside, scriptwriters of Live Action Role Playing). Together they look for emancipatory ideas for the future. Alicja focuses on the social structures and political subtext of everyday life.
The French version with the voice of Noémie Zurletti, recorded at Radio Panik with Leslie Doumerc.
www.alicjarogalska.com
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Alessandra Coppola (IT/BE)
La Restanza
What: film screening and aftertalk
When: 21.09 - 20:00 > 21:30
Language: Italian, subtitled in French
Where: Urban Farm Le Début des Haricots
Possibility to have diner on site
In Castiglione d'Otranto, in the "quiet hour when the lions go to drink", small earthy hands give life to the delicious local varieties of Puglia. The film follows the setting up of a community mill and the different stages of this collective initiative with its encounters, doubts and moments of joy.
A group of thirty-year-old reject emigration as the only possible answer to the economic, ecological, social and political problems that afflict their territory. So they decide to stay and link their lives to the land, even if they do not own any. Organic farming, care for biodiversity, local economy, relationships and mended social fabric will be the tools they will use to shake up these seemingly unchangeable paradigms.
The film tells the story of their lives, their friendships, their difficulties and frustrations, of how Castiglione becomes the village of Restanza, of the art of creating a better elsewhere where one already is, of accepting the shadows of the past in order to build, on the ruins of the old, the foundations of a new world.
Agriculture, utopia, community: the Casa delle Agriculture, whose initiative the documentary recounts, was born in 2013 in Puglia, combining an agricultural approach, social justice, and reconsideration of the commons.
Alessandra Coppola, director, was born in Bari, Italy, where she began her training as a dancer and engineer in polytechnic. She is also a movement and performance researcher and teacher in various places and institutions, especially in Belgium.
www.casadelleagriculturetulliaegino.com
DAY #2
Departure from Sainctelette on the Waterbus.
Day at the urban farm Le Début des Haricots.
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09:30 Super Terram - Meeting point at Waterbus Stop, Quai des Péniches 5
10:00 Super Terram - Departure with waterbus
10:38 Super Terram - Arrival with waterbus + walk to the Urban Farm
11:15 Keynote by Chloé Deligne
11:50 Round Table with Wapke Feenstra, Oscar Cassamajor and Camille Gigot
13:00 Vegetarian lunch
14:15 Presentation of Radical Survival Toolkit/MOSS
14:30 Presentation of artwork by Alicja Rogalska
14:50 Susbcription to workshops
15:00 To chose: workshop with Wapke Feenstra // ritual with Zoë Palmer // performance by Gosie Vervloessem
17:15 Conclusion
17:45 Ending ritual by Zoë Palmer
18:30 Drinks
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Kinch for Super Terram (BE)
What: Knowledges & tactics, artistic intervention on a boat
When: 22.09 – 09:30 > 10:30
Language : French, English, Flemish
Where: Waterbus
In the summer of 2022, Studio1Bis for Super Terram has been collecting ‘soil stories’ of a diversity of actors engaging with various sites around SchaerbeekVorming (Moeraske, Stephenson, Buda, …). These stories aim to unfold previously hidden relationships between citizens, researchers, professionals and living soils in the Brussels context, as well as their relationship with soils elsewhere (e.g. soils from their childhoods or memories). We will share these stories during a boat trip passing by areas in the Northern fringe of Brussels, composting them with new narratives originating from conversations with the participants on the boat.
Super Terram is a co-creative research project that focuses on Brussels soils and the life contained within them. By looking at the soil with renewed eyes, they want to find new ways to rethink the city, with an increased sensitivity to our environment and in greater connection with what lives underground. Through experiments and actions of various kinds, they question our relationship to soil.
(bral.brussels/fr/artikel/superterram-la-recherche-du-monde-cach-sous-nos-pieds)
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Chloé Deligne (BE)
What: Knowledges & tactics ; historical approach and panorama of resilience places of the urban agriculture in Brussels.
When: 22.09 – 11:15 > 13:00
Language: French
Where: Urban farm Le Début des Haricots
For the Feral festival, Chloé Deligne will propose a journey through time and space in 'Brussels' in search of the interweaving of 'the city' and 'the countryside' since the late Middle Ages. This imaginary journey, carried out through maps and images from the past (or present), and perhaps one or other text, will lead us to revisit the binarity between rural and urban and to question the reasons for their meeting or stumbling block at different times in history.
Chloé Deligne (°1972) is a historian, ecologist and geographer. She is a researcher at the FNRS and a teacher at the ULB in Brussels. Her work is generally long-term and explores two major themes, which often intertwine: urban history and environmental history. Starting from the Brussels prism, she explores the transformations in the relationship between cities and water, between cities and pollution, and more recently between cities and food production. Her research is characterised by diachronicity and interdisciplinarity and, moreover, by the desire to build knowledge and actions with a variety of audiences by seeking to give historical depth to issues of political ecology. She has published several works devoted to the forces and issues at stake in the major transformations of Brussels (Bruxelles et sa rivière, 2003; L'expo 58, un tournant dans l'histoire de Bruxelles, 2009) or to the ecological dimensions of its history, notably through the publication of the book Terres des villes, Enquêtes potagères de Bruxelles aux premières saisons du 21e siècle.
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Wapke Feenstra / Myvillages (NL/UK)
What: Knowledge & tactics, theory and shared experience
When: 22.09 – 11:15 > 13:00
Language: English
Where: Urban farm Le Début des Haricots
The Rural School of Economics is an extension of Myvillages’ ongoing work to acknowledge and share rural knowledge in collaboration, like e.g. the Eco Nomadic School and collaborative peer-to-peer learning with farmers. As contemporary rural culture has the knowledge of how to adapt to a place and the ability to connect with the non-human, it should be no news that we can learn from the rurality in town. We do that by working in non-lingual and alternative learning sessions using pedagogics in transparent ways and test them by doing.
Our school constantly moves between rural places, and between everyday spaces and art spaces. The network of the RSoE includes village committees, farmers associations, regional scientists, international artists, museums and now CIFAS in Brussel.
It is time and urgent for rural culture to reclaim a role in the urban gaze that is dominant in art and culture and we want to contribute to the building of a collective future, with an interdependent rural and urban. The city of the future will benefit from other forms of knowledge, which will engender a revised set of values and alternative ways of seeing.
Wapke Feenstra is a co-founder of Myvillages (2003), an artist collective set up to advocate for a new understanding of the rural as a place of and for cultural production. They work with formats that are close to the everyday – a communal lunch, a slide show in the village hall, a walk across the fields, a market stall. Drawing as a method of learning and connecting Myvillages uses from the start. They have set up long-term and ongoing trans-local infrastructures to make connections between people and places, such as the International Village Shop and the Rural School of Economics. Feenstra lives and works in Rotterdam. Her recent commissions include the Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig, Times Museum in Guangzhou, OK_Video in Jakarta, Whitechapel Gallery in London, Potato Growers at the Istanbul Biennale 2019 and with Rural School of Economics she is now a part of an experimental network of knowledge production in Lumbung documenta fifteen in Kassel.
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Oscar Cassamajor & Valérie Maione / Back2SoilBasics (BE)
What: Knowledge & tactics, shared experience
When: 22.09 – 11:15 > 13:00
Language: French and English
Where: Urban farm Le Début des Haricots
Back2SoilBasics is a network of people guided by the power of mother nature.
We base our practices around earth regeneration through mind, soul and soil knowledge.
We share basic tools for permaculture in an urban context as a resilient practice made accessible.
We focus on people of colour, local communities or people with less access to nature.
Our approach is to create an open school session where each person is part of a valid information exchange.
The project is actively held by Valérie Maione (@bordelsansnom) & Oscar Cassamajor (@mcwoodstick)
Oscar Cassamajor is a Brussel based artist with Belgium and Hatian roots.
Their arts have sprong off with performance art to visual performance installation and theatre.
Visual engineering is a mental and physical space. Today their art practice is about forming a community and a netwerk of earth regenerative practices and socio-cultural skills. where their art becomes the tool to design, communicate and experiment in different educational approaches. Education becomes a medium to incubate Permanent Culture as a way to survive, sustain and live.
In this journey art became the art of living and co-living and the creation of its necessities.
Valerie (she/he) is a young holistic herbalist. He would like to develop his life via the healing and wellness path, as his grandmother, an indigenous Venezuelan, did before her. He wants to help himself first as a person with reduced mobility and then project his pure light and sparkling wisdom to others. Her goal is to pass on her love and work for nature: at only 22 years old, she has already worked in an organic farming field, worked for several esoteric herbalist shops on the internet or on markets, and gives energetic massages to those who ask for it in a framework of absolute benevolence. If he became a herbalist, it is above all to share the knowledge of medicinal plants that he considers universal, through their botanical recognition, their culture and their uses. She believes that "to help" is the verb that directs her life. She is an empath and knows how to relate to people in difficulty and wants to show them how it is possible to live ecologically and sustainably while having a difficult situation.
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Camille Gigot / La Semeuse, Laboratoires d’Aubervilliers (FR)
What: Knowledge & tactics, shared experience
When: 22.09 – 11:15 > 13:00
Language: French
Where : Urban farm Le Début des Haricots
In 2010, the artist-architect Marjetica Potrč, in collaboration with RozO Architects, started the research entitled La Semeuse ou le devenir indigène, linking plant biodiversity and the cultural diversity of the city of Aubervilliers. Today, La Semeuse is a garden shared between the inhabitants and Les Laboratoires d'Aubervilliers, a place of experimentation and creation. It is an organic project that federates links between humans and their space, to imagine together a more cheerful future and a future at all in the context of the city's development. Through an act such as gardening, a bearer of social values, more theoretical and artistic reflections on the future of life in the city and collective actions, La Semeuse aims to involve everyone so that every gesture towards urban space is perceived as a great decision to appropriate the territory and has great repercussions. Camille Gigot is currently the project coordinator and gardener.
http://www.leslaboratoires.org/article/les-ateliers/la-semeuse-lieu-de-r...
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Common Dreams School / MOSSS (BE)
Radical Survival Toolkit
What: Book launch
When: 22.09 – 14:15 > 14:30
Language: French
Where: Urban farm Le Début des Haricots
In 2020 - 2021, CIFAS invited the artist and environmental activist Maria Lucia Cruz Correia to create a Brussels edition of the Common Dreams School, an eco-pedagogical collective project led with the purpose of exploring, imagining, and creating alternatives to face climate change.
At the end of the process, the group expressed the desire to create a publication that would serve as documentation of the project as well as a toolkit accessible to others. That is how was born the Radical Survival Toolkit. This publication is a selection of tools and reflections from the Common Dreams School and elsewhere, as well as new writings related to the themes of the project. It offers open research on adapting to the unknown and instability, and questions itself through different forms about the possibilities of a more desirable world.
The MOSSS collective composed of Mélanie Ganino, Sarah Drapeau and Delphine Mertens was born from the creation of this publication. Supported by CIFAS and the Common Dreams School, they carried the publication project and will present it to you at Feral.
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15:00 > 17:00 Choice between 3 activities:
1. Gosie Vervloessem, alias The Sick Detective (BE)
The True Nature Of Brussels.
What: Performance
When : 22.09 – 15:00 > 17:00
Language : English
Where : Urban farm Le Début des Haricots
Gosie vervloessem, aka the Sick Detective, guides you through the botanological map of the magical pentagon to explore her very intimate relationship with some particular plants in Brussels. The garden of Eden, the horror garden gets plowed, a landscape of emotions surfaces and reveals the true nature of the swamp city.
Gosie Vervloessem’s artistic research focuses on the position of the researcher in times of multiple crises. Her work faces the challenges that arise within this role, and looks for new ways of producing knowledge. She focuses mainly on the concept of nature and tries to unravel the ideas that underpin this concept. In doing that, she identifies herself as a Sick Detective, a character that involves the vegetal kingdom as a possible ally in her research.
https://wpzimmer.be/en/artists/gosie-vervloessem/
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2. Zoë Palmer
Rest – dream - weave
What: Workshop
When: 22.09- 15 :00 > 17 :00
Language: English
Where: Urban farm Le Début des Haricots
In a world in which our dreams have been colonized, collectively venerating our dreams is a radical act. How can we create space for nature to dream through us? How can we work with plants to cultivate our inner dream gardens?
This workshop will incorporate meeting plants of the herb garden through a decolonized frame, guided herbal tea tasting (local herbs), daytime rest as well as dream sharing in small groups.
Portals for rest and repair
Exploring our ancestral ecologies, we will work in small groups, sharing stories of our ancestors and their connection to the land. We ask – who are the ancestors of this land? Who was historically afforded rest and leisure in rural landscapes, who has been excluded? To whom do we offer the gift of rest and nature connection? We extend these gifts to the more than human world. What are the ecosystems, the plants, animals, funghi that need our attention?
This workshop will culminate in the co-creation of a portal for rest and repair. As part of this practice, participants are invited to create an offering by mixing a mocktail from the menu of our decolonized apothecary.
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3. Wapke Feenstra (NL)
The Rural Undercurrent
What: workshop
When: 22.09 – 15:00 > 17:00
Language : English
Where : urban farm Le Début des Haricots
Every city – also Brussels - has an important rural undercurrent that is largely paved over, and with CIFAS I would like to dig within the city to make it recognisable and shareable in a long term exploration with citizens. The undercurrents lie within urban growing and local food initiatives, come from a not-distant agricultural Umland, live in the mind-set of residents whose families come from the countryside. For the workshop we make a start and methods of drawing like Plein Air, Trans-Local Drawing, Geological and Economic Drawing are introduced and some of them are explored in a learning-by-doing session.
It is time and urgent for rural culture to reclaim a role in the urban gaze that is dominant in art and culture and we want to contribute to the building of a collective future, with an interdependent rural and urban. The city of the future will benefit from other forms of knowledge, which will engender a revised set of values and alternative ways of seeing.
https://www.wapke.nl/
https://www.myvillages.org
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Zoë Palmer (UK)
What: workshop, ritual, co-creation
When: 22.09 throughout the day
Language: English
Where: Urban farm Le Début des Haricots
Throughout the day, participants are invited to co-create ‘weave between worlds’ a mandala using a combination of collected urban and rural foraged materials as well as wildflower seeds.
Our final act of the day will be the collective composting of this work – participants are invited to scoop up a bag and take it home to be spread in their local community. We will reflect on the value of moving away from hierarchy and colonial mindsets honouring multiple ways of knowing.
This ritual will culminate in a joyful sharing of home-made botanical mocktails as we raise a glass to the land, each other and our collective acts of co-creation.
DAY #3
To the field!
Afternoon in Open Akker, Dilbeek
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15:00 Meeting at South Station for a collective departure by bike or public transports
16:00 Arrival at Open Akker
16:00 > 19:38 Artistic intervention, walk and choreographies
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Compostella de Open Akker, Future Farmers (BE/US)
Open Akker, a small plot of (land) in Pajottenland - the land where Pieter Bruegel the Elder portrayed farmers in The Reapers and The Magpie on the Gallows.
A constellation of farmers, seeds, land, birds and trees flanked by a high-speed train and two roads next to a watermill has allowed the transformation of a wasteland into a 'new commons' - a collective farmland dedicated to the propagation and multiplication of farmers' seeds.
Open Akker was created in 2019 as part of Bruegel's Eye: Reconstructing the Landscape, an outdoor exhibition inviting artists and designers to look at the landscape through the eyes of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Open Akker was initiated by Futurefarmers as a sustainable public artwork that allows for a slow and reflective process of repair, resilience and reflection on our land use habits.
Compostella by Open Akker, Future Farmers (BE/US)
What: artistic intervention, walking and choreography
When: 23.09 - 16:00 - 19:38 sunset
Where: Open Akker. Sint-Anna-Pede in 1701 Dilbeek
Open Akker is at a turning point in its history and invites us to contribute.
The word Akker means ploughed land on which crops are grown. After two years of cultivating ancient cereals, first with a tractor, then with horses and finally with hand tools, it became clear that the soil was 'too poor' to continue production.
Now, on the occasion of Feral, Open Akker wants to enter into a gentler and more intimate relationship with the site, focused on healing the soil. Compost has its place in this new story.
For the occasion of Feral, Open Akker therefore proposes a Compostella - a series of movements and actions:
A walk
A fertilisation with compost on the ground
A moment to reflect/affirm the intention of our presence there
A moment to consult with our cohabitants (visible and non-visible neighbours)
A moment to reflect on the name of the project,
To find a new meaning for the word Akker or
To scramble the letters to form a new name
Or use our voice to call it.
In collaboration with Livia Cahn, Tijs Boelens/De Groentelaar, Didier Demorcy/Li Mestère and Amy Franceschini.
www.futurefarmers.com/openakker/
Feral is an action of Cifas, a place of experimentation and co-learning for live art in the city and its edges
General and artistic Direction : Marine Thévenet
Coordination : Charlotte David
Production : Mathilde Florica
Intern: Gaspard Catteau
Technical direction : Vincent Tandonnet
Artistic advise and writing : Anna Czapski
Production/Runner: Britt Roger Sas
Help production: Laura Oriol
Photographies: Bea Borgers
Moderation: Anna Rispoli
Facilitation: Jessica Champeaux et Flore Herman
Traces: Céline Estenne
Translation: Préférences SF
Catering: Apus et les Cocottes Volantes
Open air screening: Libération Films
Bike parking: Brik
With the presence of ARBA's Master 2 Urban Design students, under the direction of Alice Finichiu.
Cifas is a programme supported by COCOF and Actiris.
Feral Festival is a programme organised in co-production with La Bellone/Maison du Spectacle and in collaboration with the Urban Farm Le Début des Haricots. With the support of the City of Brussels and RACC.
Féral: se dit d’une plante ou d’un animal domestique redevenu·e sauvage, particulièrement après avoir échappé à la domestication ou la captivité. Se dit aussi pour les plantes qui poussent dans les interstices.
La Bellone + Ferme urbaine du début des haricots + Open Akker
