myvillages.org

Myvillages is an international collective, founded in 2003 by artists Kathrin Böhm (UK/DE), Wapke Feenstra (NL) and Antje Schiffers (DE). Myvillages focuses on the rural as a place for cultural production and investigates the relationship between the countryside and the city, challenging and criticising the urban as the dominant cultural sphere. Myvillages addresses the rural, but does not define it. They pay 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, in this way, also addresses the major ecological and economical problems of today, where a lot can be learned from the countryside. The three founders of Myvillages all come from a rural background. They 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 returned 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 way of making art around the rural. Myvillages is registered as STICHTING INTERNATIONAL FOUNDATION myvillages.org, in the Netherlands.