Open Akker is a growing constellation of farmers, artists and anthropologists, among others who are working towards the healing of a plot of land to be communally farmed in Dilbeek, Belgium.
De Groentelaar
Farmers/Actvists
Gent, Belgium
De Groentelaar is a small farm run by Tijs Boelens and Sander Van Haver who are working to re-establish a mix of grains once grown in this region in the time of Bruegel.
Li Mestère
Li Mestère is an association which gathers farmers, millers, bakers, connoisseurs, gardeners, consumers, scientists and researchers around the question of cereals. The association has members living in Wallonia, Flanders and Brussels; and collaborates with different associations, networks and scientific laboratories from Europe involved in Participatory Plant Breeding.
In the alliance between farmer and seed: the kind of peasant farmer that the “peasant seeds” invokes is a farmer who sees the absurdity of big scale production. Who doesn't accept that the value of their grains would be fixed by the ona and only global market of grain prices. Being a peasant seed farmer is not in anyway a step back in time, to hark back to a romantic figure of a past peasant. It does not ignore the long history of grain selection, it navigates through this long history and crafts with the grains, tools, questions and preoccupations that animate them. A practice that defends a relationship with the land today - in the now, the now and the now.
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Didier Demorcy, Li Mestère
Futurefarmers
Artist/Architect
San Francisco, USA / Gent, Belgium
Futurefarmers is the lead artists group of Open Akker. Futureefarmers are a group of artists, activists, scientists, farmers, and architects who work together to propose alternatives to the social, political, and environmental organization of space. Founded in 1995, Futurefarmers design studio serves as a platform to support art projects, an artist in residence program, and the research of its members. Futurefarmers use various media to deconstruct systems, visualize and understand their intrinsic logics, and offer more sustainable alternatives. Such systems may involve food policy, public transportation, or education.
Livia Cahn
Notebook / Social Anthropologist
Brussels, Belgium
Livia Cahn is trained in urban anthropology and currently based in Brussels. Here she is a researcher, activist and gardener who works with and writes on soils and questions relating to land use. Co-author of “Terres des Villes, enquêtes potagères de Bruxelles au premières saisons du 21ième siècle” (éditions de l’éclat, 2017) and a series of picture essays on urban soils, she is a co-initiator of the seminar group: Ecologies de Bruxelles.
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