A digital artistic research platform for rural biographies, transgenerational and cross-continental storytelling
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Fields and rural environments till this day shape many biographies, for instance through family ties or in form of memories in the experience of migration. Elsewhere, they continue to make up the foundation of most people’s livelihoods. In how far can stories of such rural biographies inspire new perspectives on the present?
Beginning from this question, the multi-disciplinary and transgenerational project Field Narratives aims to collect and share narrative perspectives which originate from or reflect on rural spaces – with their colonial continuities, their gendered and social divisions.
Since 2020, Field Narratives has been working with the genres of film, drawing, performance, creative writing, artistic and curatorial activism. The group has developed a practice of hosting participatory workshops that are centered around what they call “agro-centric” conversations. These public exchanges deliberately put to the fore personal and historic connections which participants bring in relation to the rural. While exchanging about personal accounts, fragments of theory or poems, a memory shared by one participant may find unexpected parallels to contributions from completely different parts of the world. Such interconnections constitute beginnings of new understandings of today’s rural space, transgressing narrow and identarian concepts of the countryside which are on the rise in many places.
Building on these collaborations, the group also tests long-term archival and storytelling strategies to engage with a set of themes over several years. The aim is to produce and weave together individual works in a in a meaningful and sustainable way that puts care ethics to practice as well as possible. Combining practices like documentary and fictional videos, drawings, academic and poetic writing, the results are presented in the framework of exhibitions as well as on this online platform.
Origins of Field Narratives
Field Narratives emerged out of a workshop at the New Alphabet School on #Caring in collaboration with the Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung and the HKW (June 2020). The workshop “Agro-Centric Thinking: A Pathway to a Collective Biographical Imagination?” was part of an online program, co-curated by Sascia Bailer and facilitated by hn. lyonga & Andreas Doepke; Lene Markusen was a participant. The group formed out of its shared interest in rural spaces, art, and social change. The collective has since contributed with workshops, presentations and installations to the programming of Gropius Bau (Berlin), HKW (Berlin), M.1 Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung (Hohenlockstedt), Talking Objects Lab (Berlin), and Bärenzwinger (Berlin), and participated in residency/symposium programs by the Dalvazza Group (Swiss Artistic Research Network) and others.
Sascia Bailer
is a feminist researcher, writer, and curator working at the intersection of care, contemporary art, and social transformation. In her practice-based curatorial PhD at the Zurich University of the Arts and the University of Reading she explores the activist potential of curating as a form of care. She is the author of Curating, Care, and Corona (2020), and the co-editor of the anthology Letters to Joan (2020), and the artist monographs Re-Assembling Motherhood(s) (2021) by Maternal Fantasies and What We Could Have Become: Reflections on Queer Feminist Curating (2021) by Malu Blume. She has worked internationally within the arts, including MoMA PS1, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. In 2019-20 she was the Artistic Director at the M.1 Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung, today she works as an independent curator and educator. She holds an MA from Parsons School of Design, and a BA from Zeppelin University.
hn. lyonga
is a writer and curator of words, notions, and perspectives. He has an academic and personal interest in Anti-Black racism, the use of language in Black speculative fiction, the Black familial dynamic and the role of women in black postcolonial literature, Museums as carceral systems where looted art, histories, cultures, and bodies are being held hostage. He graduated with a Bachelor’s in American Culture and Sociology from the University of Kassel. Currently, he is an MA student in Amerikanistik at the Humboldt University of Berlin, a founding member of the Black Student Union at Humboldt, a member of the AK Museen und Sammlungen von Decolonize Berlin e. V. and a member of the Kuratorium of BARAZANI.berlin - Forum Kolonialismus und Widerstand. lyonga was born at a place in rural Western Cameroon called Mutengene. His work, which has appeared in Kunstraum Kreuzberg – Berlin, Bärenzwinger im Köllnischen Park, in Boykott Magazine, Textur Magazine, etc., addresses ways of existing in a foreign country with respect to bureaucracy, immigration politics, etc. He is deeply interested in Agriculture in the context of rural and urban spaces across Africa. The dialogue-centric workshop he held for the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in 2020 entitled “Agro-Centric Thinking: A Pathway to a Collective Biographical Imagination?” tackled the ”fixity” of land as infrastructure.
Lene Markusen
is a visual artist and filmmaker. She was born and raised in a farmer family in rural northwest Denmark and lives in Hamburg. In 2021 she received the Villa Romana Prize, Florence. From 2011 until 2017 she was a professor at the University of Fine Arts, Hamburg. Her films and video installations have been screened and exhibited at Kunstverein Braunschweig (2022), Center for Contemporary Art, Glasgow (2019), BeFem Festival, Belgrade (2019), Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2019), Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow (2018), Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg (2017), Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2013), Hamburger Kunsthalle (2012), Photo Paris (2011), Halle für Kunst Lueneburg (2010), K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen, Duesseldorf (2006), Stuk, Leuven (2006), and Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn (2005), among others. In 2019, she published the art book Sisters Alike. Female Identities in the Post-Utopian (Spector Books).
Andreas Doepke
Andreas Doepke is a cultural worker, project coordinator, and researcher from Berlin. With degrees in political science and geography, his interests revolve around concepts of nature, social justice, the practical application of transdisciplinarity, and the potential of biographical research in the arts. Andreas draws on his background in rural Germany to connect situated narratives on resource economies with perspectives and memories from other places. As an author, he collaborates conceptually with artists, for example, in the essay Blue Canary, co-authored with Barbara Marcel (Intercalations 6, K. Verlag/HKW, 2022), or in the workshop Agro-Centric Thinking: A Pathway to a Collective Biographical Imagination? with poet hn. lyonga (New Alphabet School #4: Caring, HKW, 2020). Andreas has been working as a researcher, coordinator, and assistant for transdisciplinary projects in and through museums since 2017, including the long-term Anthropocene Project (2021-2022) by HKW Berlin, Owned By Others (2020) on Museum Island, Ocean-Archive.org (2019) for TBA21 Academy, the touring exhibition Disappearing Legacies: The World as Forest (2018-2019), and another project on forests, titled Forests (2023-2024), for the German Romanticism Museum.
Design by visual intelligence (visual-intelligence.org)
A digital artistic research platform for rural biographies, transgenerational and cross-continental storytelling
Fields and rural environments till this day shape many biographies, for instance through family ties or in form of memories in the experience of migration. Elsewhere, they continue to make up the foundation of most people’s livelihoods. In how far can stories of such rural biographies inspire new perspectives on the present?
Beginning from this question, the multi-disciplinary and transgenerational project Field Narratives aims to collect and share narrative perspectives which originate from or reflect on rural spaces – with their colonial continuities, their gendered and social divisions.
Since 2020, Field Narratives has been working with the genres of film, drawing, performance, creative writing, artistic and curatorial activism. The group has developed a practice of hosting participatory workshops that are centered around what they call “agro-centric” conversations. These public exchanges deliberately put to the fore personal and historic connections which participants bring in relation to the rural. While exchanging about personal accounts, fragments of theory or poems, a memory shared by one participant may find unexpected parallels to contributions from completely different parts of the world. Such interconnections constitute beginnings of new understandings of today’s rural space, transgressing narrow and identarian concepts of the countryside which are on the rise in many places.
Building on these collaborations, the group also tests long-term archival and storytelling strategies to engage with a set of themes over several years. The aim is to produce and weave together individual works in a in a meaningful and sustainable way that puts care ethics to practice as well as possible. Combining practices like documentary and fictional videos, drawings, academic and poetic writing, the results are presented in the framework of exhibitions as well as on this online platform.
Origins of Field Narratives
Field Narratives emerged out of a workshop at the New Alphabet School on #Caring in collaboration with the Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung and the HKW (June 2020). The workshop “Agro-Centric Thinking: A Pathway to a Collective Biographical Imagination?” was part of an online program, co-curated by Sascia Bailer and facilitated by hn. lyonga & Andreas Doepke; Lene Markusen was a participant. The group formed out of its shared interest in rural spaces, art, and social change. The collective has since contributed with workshops, presentations and installations to the programming of Gropius Bau (Berlin), HKW (Berlin), M.1 Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung (Hohenlockstedt), Talking Objects Lab (Berlin), and Bärenzwinger (Berlin), and participated in residency/symposium programs by the Dalvazza Group (Swiss Artistic Research Network) and others.
Sascia Bailer
is a feminist researcher, writer, and curator working at the intersection of care, contemporary art, and social transformation. In her practice-based curatorial PhD at the Zurich University of the Arts and the University of Reading she explores the activist potential of curating as a form of care. She is the author of Curating, Care, and Corona (2020), and the co-editor of the anthology Letters to Joan (2020), and the artist monographs Re-Assembling Motherhood(s) (2021) by Maternal Fantasies and What We Could Have Become: Reflections on Queer Feminist Curating (2021) by Malu Blume. She has worked internationally within the arts, including MoMA PS1, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics. In 2019-20 she was the Artistic Director at the M.1 Arthur Boskamp-Stiftung, today she works as an independent curator and educator. She holds an MA from Parsons School of Design, and a BA from Zeppelin University.
hn. lyonga
is a writer and curator of words, notions, and perspectives. He has an academic and personal interest in Anti-Black racism, the use of language in Black speculative fiction, the Black familial dynamic and the role of women in black postcolonial literature, Museums as carceral systems where looted art, histories, cultures, and bodies are being held hostage. He graduated with a Bachelor’s in American Culture and Sociology from the University of Kassel. Currently, he is an MA student in Amerikanistik at the Humboldt University of Berlin, a founding member of the Black Student Union at Humboldt, a member of the AK Museen und Sammlungen von Decolonize Berlin e. V. and a member of the Kuratorium of BARAZANI.berlin - Forum Kolonialismus und Widerstand. lyonga was born at a place in rural Western Cameroon called Mutengene. His work, which has appeared in Kunstraum Kreuzberg – Berlin, Bärenzwinger im Köllnischen Park, in Boykott Magazine, Textur Magazine, etc., addresses ways of existing in a foreign country with respect to bureaucracy, immigration politics, etc. He is deeply interested in Agriculture in the context of rural and urban spaces across Africa. The dialogue-centric workshop he held for the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in 2020 entitled “Agro-Centric Thinking: A Pathway to a Collective Biographical Imagination?” tackled the ”fixity” of land as infrastructure.
Lene Markusen
is a visual artist and filmmaker. She was born and raised in a farmer family in rural northwest Denmark and lives in Hamburg. In 2021 she received the Villa Romana Prize, Florence. From 2011 until 2017 she was a professor at the University of Fine Arts, Hamburg. Her films and video installations have been screened and exhibited at Kunstverein Braunschweig (2022), Center for Contemporary Art, Glasgow (2019), BeFem Festival, Belgrade (2019), Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (2019), Moscow Museum of Modern Art, Moscow (2018), Museum für Neue Kunst, Freiburg (2017), Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden (2013), Hamburger Kunsthalle (2012), Photo Paris (2011), Halle für Kunst Lueneburg (2010), K21 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein Westfalen, Duesseldorf (2006), Stuk, Leuven (2006), and Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn (2005), among others. In 2019, she published the art book Sisters Alike. Female Identities in the Post-Utopian (Spector Books).
Andreas Doepke
Andreas Doepke is a cultural worker, project coordinator, and researcher from Berlin. With degrees in political science and geography, his interests revolve around concepts of nature, social justice, the practical application of transdisciplinarity, and the potential of biographical research in the arts. Andreas draws on his background in rural Germany to connect situated narratives on resource economies with perspectives and memories from other places. As an author, he collaborates conceptually with artists, for example, in the essay Blue Canary, co-authored with Barbara Marcel (Intercalations 6, K. Verlag/HKW, 2022), or in the workshop Agro-Centric Thinking: A Pathway to a Collective Biographical Imagination? with poet hn. lyonga (New Alphabet School #4: Caring, HKW, 2020). Andreas has been working as a researcher, coordinator, and assistant for transdisciplinary projects in and through museums since 2017, including the long-term Anthropocene Project (2021-2022) by HKW Berlin, Owned By Others (2020) on Museum Island, Ocean-Archive.org (2019) for TBA21 Academy, the touring exhibition Disappearing Legacies: The World as Forest (2018-2019), and another project on forests, titled Forests (2023-2024), for the German Romanticism Museum.
Design by visual intelligence (visual-intelligence.org)