Reflections on Veldwerk III: Investigating the rural

This text was published in the frame of the project presentations of Veldwerk III at La Bellone in Brussels (in collaboration with Cifas), and at Kunsthal Gent. 

When we imagine the environment where an artist residency might take place, we often envision a studio or theatre space in a bustling city. Just as often, the subject of their investigations are the dynamics of that same city itself. But what if, as artists, we leave these urban environments and their themes behind for a moment?

More recently, a growing number of organisations and collectives are asking themselves this question. Indeed, it has been central to the formation of Kunstenplatform PLAN B’s project Veldwerk [Fieldwork], in which each year they invite a group of artists to carry out artistic research in relation to rural space. Over the course of one year, these artists work on their own trajectory in a self-chosen location in between the cracks of dominant urban perspectives. 

In doing so, PLAN B aims to cultivate rooted practices by supporting  long term in-situ artistic work. In a cultural field where temporariness and nomadic existence are almost the norm, we want to offer makers a platform to occupy the time and space their practices deem necessary to truly explore a place through all seasons. To connect makers to each other, the group meets at regular intervals throughout the year. At each encounter,  an artist invites the others for a moment of exchange in a location relevant to their research at that moment.

Artist meeting of Barbara T’Jonck at cooperative farm and community project Welenhoeck in Herzele. © Leontien Allemeersch

A former mining village next to La Louvière, a nature reserve that grew on sand waste from the construction of the E19 highway, a satellite image of an Ypres valley in West Flanders,... The third edition of Veldwerk took us to extremely different places and landscapes. This begs the question: what exactly is this rural space we are talking about? In Belgium, ‘the city’ can no longer be neatly distinguished from ‘the village’. They seep into each other in what urban planner Francesco Indovina called the citta diffusà (1990), a diffuse urban-like network. Indeed, for Veldwerk, the rural is not a neatly bound destination you can visit, but rather a lens to look through.

By collectively and consciously adopting the peripheral perspective of the rural, through Veldwerk we tried to emphasise the importance of learning from these critical zones. May Abnet, Tim Theo Deceuninck, Ánima O. Cassamajor, Nina de Vroome and Barbara T'Jonck each found their own ways of dealing with this question during the third and final edition of Veldwerk. In this text, we look for where their very different trajectories intersect. 

Places comes first

Each of these trajectories started from a special place. For example, Nina de Vroome started out in the Bois-du-Luc former mining town near La Louvière. The filmmaker and author travelled there in search of the ideas and power structures exercised by the architecture of one of Belgium's oldest mining villages. By engaging with researchers from the local mining museum, a very enthusiastic guide and local residents, she learned about the place and how it affects its inhabitants. Her publication 'Terwijl de kompels suizen, spreken we pruikentijd' [While the mineworkers whiz, we speak wig time] is an exploration of the time and space surrounding this small mining village. Meanwhile, in a more abstract way, May Abnet’s investigation also departed from an examination of  rural landscapes. In her imagination, she visited the valley in the United States where her grandfather lived, and then via Google Earth she zoomed in on the Ypres language valley in West Flanders, which was to become the region’s Silicon Valley. The valley provokes ideas about digital surveillance and capitalist dealings with land.

Two bird eye perspectives: a model of the mining cité in Bois-du-Luc and a Google Earth image of the Ypres language valley in West Flanders. © May Abnet, Google Maps

In very different ways, the makers thus let place guide their research. Their time during Veldwerk consisted largely of listening to these places meaningfully. Their in-situ residencies teach us how places harbour important knowledge and how that hyperlocal knowledge is at the same time applicable to so many other places and situations both in Belgium and beyond. Instead of approaching a place with preconceived ideas and artistic baggage, they worked their way from the specificities of a place towards broader concepts.

This kind of interpretation of a residency provides a certain kind of ‘groundedness’ to the research. It is therefore striking how in these two investigations abstract systems become physical. Firstly, the idea of power becomes tangible while walking through the perpendicular streets of the miner's village that open onto the former director's house. Just as Nina reads the village, you can read a valley. May sees in the valley, the erosion of water in a landscape, a physical representation of how information flows in our society. Valleys, like technology hub Silicon Valley and its West Flanders counterpart, are the epicentres of information technology that powerfully shape flows of information, both natural and digital. The valley thus becomes a magnifying glass, knotting together our many contemporary relations to land. 

Environment sets tone and narrative

Focusing on rural environments, specific landscapes determine the tone of the work. These landscapes are still greatly underrepresented in the arts today. That does not only mean a misrepresentation of our environment, but also means that what is important in those landscapes does not take root in our thoughts and imagination. What phenomena and lessons do we miss if we continue to look away from the rural? 

A central notion here is obviously ecology. Ecology in Veldwerk is not an abstract topic of discussion or merely a passive victim in a narrative of climate catastrophe. During Veldwerk III, ecology became a central actor in this final series of  artistic investigations. Photographer Tim Theo Deceuninck has long been searching for how to decentralise his gaze in his own work. Using hollows in the landscape as a camera obscura, he explored how the landscape can portray itself. For example, while visiting the  Hoboken Polder and the canal area around it, he placed light-sensitive paper in the hollows of trees and sewer pipes. Through fragments of light coming into contact with the paper, the cavity captures itself. The photographic developing process is then completed with natural chemical products as much as possible. To this end, we picked water mint during an artist meeting as part of a harvesting ritual.

Left: One of Tim Theo’s ‘land cameras’, placed in the hollow of a tree. Right: Picking water mint in Hoboken Polder for the development of Tim Theo’s photos. © Leontien Allemeersch

In Ánima O. Cassamajor's trajectory too, ecology plays a  determining role. With the collective Back2SoilBasics, they looked for ways to make permaculture accessible to those it has historically excluded from it due to systems of oppression and marginalisation. Using the former Korenbeek school building in Molenbeek as a base, they created a play and food forest on the former playground, as well as workshops and visits to other farms and research sites. Thus, the specific needs of plant life not only determined the shape of the play and food forest, but also formed an engaged community of local residents and permaculture practitioners around it.  

Forms of togetherness

This togetherness around a place is a final important common aspect within the different trajectories of Veldwerk III. Ánima and Back2SoilBasics highlight a pressing question: which communities get to create and practise a meaningful relationship to ecology? Back2SoilBasics forms a space, prioritising people of colour and local residents to exchange around ecology and permaculture. This creates not only access to ecological knowledge and practices, but also meaningful forms of togetherness. 

Picking vegetables from the play and food forest during the artist meeting at Korenbeek. © Leontien Allemeersch