Programme

Morning at La Bellone

09:30 – 10:00

Bucolic welcome

10:00 – 10:15

General introduction

10:15 – 10:45

Keynote by Pamina de Coulon

10:45 – 11:15

Creation of small groups

11:15 – 12:00

Sharing points of view, conversation with Phoebe Davies, Pamina de Coulon and Sam Trotman

12:00 – 12:15

Questions and conclusion

Going to Neder-Over-Heembeek by Waterbus

Your choice:

• Take the waterbus + walk from the Cruise Terminal to the Urban Farm (30 minutes walk)
• Go to the urban farm on your own.

13:00

Waterbus + sandwiches

13:38

Arrival of Waterbus + walk towards the Urban Farm

14:15

Arrival at Urban farm + coffee

Afternoon at the Urban Farm Le Début des Haricots

14:30

Introduction of artistic project by Zoë Palmer and Amy Franceschini

15:30

Open source forum - discussions and provocations

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.

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

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.

www.casadelleagriculturetulliaegino.com

Credits

A film by Alessandra Coppola

BE-IT / 2021 / 92’ / OV It / ST Fr 

Director, director of photography: Alessandra Coppola Sound, mix : Gianluigi Gallo Video Editing: Pierpaolo Filomeno Sound Editing : Alexandre Davidson Calibration : Miléna Trivier Original musical composition : Alice Perret

A production by Atelier Graphoui (Ellen Meiresonne) and Own Air srl (Italie) (Lorenzo & Alfredo Borrelli) with the support of the Centre du Cinéma et de l’Audiovisuel de la FWB, Apulia Film Fund (Italie) & MIBACT (Italie).

Screening with the support of RACC.

21:15

Aftertalk with Alessandra Coppola

Speakers

Pamina de Coulon (CH)

Pamina de Coulon 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 to articulate 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 essays 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/

Phoebe Davies (UK)

Welsh artist with an international career, Phoebe Davies’ 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. This initiative comes with questions of power dynamics, labour relations, gender issues, interdependent practices and meaning-making.

http://www.phoebedavies.co.uk/

Sam Trotman (UK), Scottish Sculpture Workshop (SSW)

The 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) creative 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 Trotman relies on ‘doing’ to build community. She 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 Trotman 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

Amy Franceschini (US/BE): Open Akker, Future Farmers

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 23rd September.

www.futurefarmers.com

Zoë Palmer (UK) : The Dreaming Field Lab'

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 22nd September, with a workshop and co-creation of a ritual for Feral.

www.zoelaureenpalmer.com

Alessandra Coppola (IT/BE)

La Restanza

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