Artists Kathrin Bohm and Wapke Feenstra, from myvillages.org, will introduce their organisation and Bibliobox, a travelling archive of documentation and information, set up by myvillages.org in 2005. Together with Adrian Plant of Shrewsbury Museums Service and mediamaker, they will present the ideas behind Why We Left the Village and Came Back and invite participants to discuss how the commission might be developed for Shropshire.
A selection of artits films and videos from the Bibliobox were shown everyday at the Old Market Hall Cinema in Shrewsbury, from 10.00 to 14.00.
We selected the three village projects by the three myvillages.org members Kathrin Böhm, ANtje Schiffers and Wapke Feenstra to showcase in the three exhibition spaces associated with the mediamaker arts programme:
Belmont Art Centre
Music Hall Gallery
Shrewsbury Museum & Art Gallery
myvillages.org is an international artist initiative set up by Kathrin Böhm (Ger/UK), Wapke Feenstra (NL) and Antje Schiffers(Ger). It is an informal framework for ideas and new art projects that address the rural environment as a space for contemporary cultural production and debate.
Their individual practices are involved with site-specific and participatory art forms, and they often use local narratives, facts and resources as the starting point for their work. Their common interest in the rural also comes from the fact, that they all grew up in very small villages, which they left at start of adult life. The exhibition displays at Belmont, Music Hall and Shrewsbury Museum all show projects that have been developed and realised in their home villages and are part of the ourvillages series.
Höfer Goods
Kathrin is also part of the art and architecture collective public works who work with informal everyday structures and they produce physical and conceptual structures that support and initiate those networks. In 2004 they realised a project called Park Products for the Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens, London, which established a new social space for the Park based on the principles of a local informal economy.
For Höfer Goods Kathrin used a similar idea, and she invited the woman from her home village Höfen, to develop new product ideas that would make use of the resources available in the village, including narratives, materials and skills. Höfer Goods is a long-term project to produce new items and objects over the coming years, which will be launched annually as part of the village fete.
The project went public in October 2006 together with an exhibition containing almost 200 photographs collected from all the households which showed village life throughout the last 100 years.
The display here shows the first two Höfer Goods amongst selected objects from the museum collection.
I like being a farmer and want to stay one
The art work in this gallery is by Antje Schiffers, who started her project I like being a farmer and want to stay one in 2002 by revisiting her home village Heiligendorf. Antje’s work often uses simple exchange rules to gather cultural information and production.
For I like being a farmer and want to stay one Antje asked the nine remaining farmers in her village to make a video about themselves. What does it mean to be a farmer today? What is the image they have of themselves? Which ideas do they want to tell and share?
In return Antje offered to paint each farmer’s farm in oil, and would spend a week on the farm to produce the painting.
The display shows one of the videos and a photograph of one of the paintings in the farmhouse’s corridor. The quotes on the walls are from other videos.
Antje will continue the project throughout 2007/08 and if you know a farmer in Shropshire who might be interested in getting involved, please let us know!
Collections:
What does Shropshire sound like?
Wapke Feenstra has set up the Bibliobox for myvillages.org.
She’s generally interested in collections, either of images, items, spaces, routes, narratives etc. She is using websites, the book format or physical containers to facilitate her different collections. Wapke doesn’t see her collections as archives to be locked away, but as a living archive that grows by being used and offers a new meeting space for showing and discussing ideas.
The Bibliobox is both, a website and a travelling box, and both contain collected documents from other artists and their projects in rural areas.
Wapke has selected some sound based pieces from the BBBox, a poetry based piece she did in regards to her home village, a music collection by Georgina Starr and a text based piece that describes the atmosphere of a country house in Denmark. Wapke is also starting a new collection, by asking:
What does Shropshire sound like?
Please feel free to add your sounds, ideas and comments to the installation!
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