Pastoral Twilight: Initiatives for rural cultures is a two-year international project, a collaboration between art organisations ARE (Czechia), BAU (Italy), and Inland (Spain), all of which work in a rural environment.
The project explores how humans can have a regenerative relationship to the planet, engage in human–animal activity on the land, and activate experimental pedagogical methods involving people, plants, animals, and fungi.
By studying pastoralism and vegetal knowledge at the intersection of art, education, regenerative agriculture, and more-than-human solidarity, Pastoral Twilight serves as an invitation to seek common multispecies culture and education that take account of endangered practices connected with care for the land and food sovereignty.
The project will include an international pastoral gathering and conference, residencies, workshops, an interdisciplinary forest symposium, and the online publication Liminal Animal.
Project Partners
Since 2019, the association ARE has been organizing Woods – Community for Cultivation, Theory, and Art. Woods observes places where the interests of art, agriculture, and environmentalism intersect and studies how contemporary art relates to the land, human health, and interspecies coexistence. It follows an ethical and sustainable model for humanity and a regenerative role for humans, not just on the land.
Woods is a free association of people from the spheres of art, activism, theory, ecology, and permaculture. Woods takes care of a 2.8-hectare plot – a forest and meadow – together with a small herd of sheep and goats.
Woods uses the principles of permaculture care and keeps note of other methods of regenerative agriculture like pastoralism, silvopasture, and syntropic systems. Woods’ most popular public event is the annual (with occasional gaps) interdisciplinary and intergenerational forest symposium, which is always devoted to a particular topic and alternates formats between art, performances, lectures, seminars, readings, facilitative workshops, and more. Every year a children’s forest group develops the topics of the symposium together with children. During the year Woods also organizes other smaller-scale activities in the fields of art, education, and care for the land, garden, and forest. W IG FB les@are-events.org
BAU is an institute for contemporary arts and ecology. BAU deals with contemporary art projects that respond to questions of the present, conceiving of nature and culture together and regarding the human with its environment as part of an ecological cycle. It is adynamically evolving structure, shifting with each project, expanding its partnerships and alliances, forming temporary constellations of international artists and local experts within the landscapes of Südtirol – Alto Adige. At the heart of BAU is its residency program, running since its inception, inviting artists and collectives to develop projects that emerge from the rhythms and specificities of this rural terrain. These projects unfold in dialogue with local partners, fostering an exchange of knowledge that is reciprocal and rooted in respect. BAU moves fluidly between roles—curator, cultural producer, mediator—seeking to dissolve the rigid boundaries between local and global, instead experimenting with ways of gathering where landscape, the human, and the more-than-human speak to one another. BAU is constantly exploring alternative models of education in collaboration with local partners such as art institutions, universities, schools, and farms. Since 2022, for example, BAU has been developing educational projects in partnership with a school, farmers and artists at Caldera, an agronomist’s glasshouse in the village of Algund / Lagundo (Italy).
W IG FB info@b-a-u.it
Inland is a collaborative platform started in 2009. It provides a platform for diverse actors engaged in agricultural, social, and cultural production and questions the center-periphery dynamics so prevalent in the arts system. It also aims to strengthen the rural as a space for change.
During its first stage (2010 – 2013) and taking Spain as an initial case study, INLAND was engaged with artistic production in twenty-two villages across the country, nationwide exhibitions and presentations, and an international conference. This was followed by a period of reflection and evaluation, launching study groups on art and ecology, and a series of publications. Today INLAND functions as a collective focused on land-based collaborations and economies, and communities-of-practice as a substrate for post-contemporary art and cultural forms.
INLAND has a radio station, an academy, the Shepherds School, produces shows, and makes cheese. It is also coordinates the European Shepherds’ Network, and the Confederacy of Villages network of art projects in the rural.
W IG FB campoadentro@campoadentro.es
The Pastoral Twilight project is co-funded by the European Union. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the authors only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the EACEA. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
The project is also supported by the Ministry of Culture Czech Republic, the Autonomous Province of Bolzano, the Office for German Culture, the Allianz Foundation, the Grassroots International, and the World Alliance of Mobile Indigenous People (WAMIP).
Photos by Jan Kolský, Daniel Mazza.
