Boerenzij meets RURAL IMAGINATIONS (UVA)

In the exhibition space at the Boerenpraat table, they focus on the questions that have arisen around the research of RURAL IMAGINATIONS and Boerenzij. Professor Esther Peeren and researchers Anke Bosma and Tjalling Valdés Olmos are present on behalf of the University of Amsterdam and the RURAL IMAGINATIONS organization. They focus on the crucial role of cultural imagination in determining which aspects of contemporary rural life do and do not become visible at national and global level, which in turn influences how the countryside can be politically mobilized.

Our guests:
Esther Peeren is Professor of Cultural Analysis and Academic Director of the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA – http://asca.uva.nl). With Jeroen de Kloet, she is series editor of Palgrave Studies in Globalization, Culture and Society (https://www.palgrave.com/de/series/15109). From 2018 to 2023, she will lead the ERC-funded Rural Imagination project.

Anke Bosma is a PhD candidate in the Rural Imaginations project at the Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), University of Amsterdam (UvA). Her sub-project will assess how the rural is imagined in Dutch cultural consciousness in relation to globalization, by looking at cultural objects from tv, film, and literature. Her research focus is on how coloniality takes shape and is expressed within a Dutch context.

Tjalling Valdés Olmos (he/him) is a PhD Candidate at ASCA and his research within Rural Imaginations traces the manners in which the US rural is imagined across film, television series, and literature through and in the context of globalization. Tjalling’s theoretical and methodological framework is mainly centred around feminist, queer, critical race, and decolonial studies.

The exhibition BOERENZIJ is a project by Wapke Feenstra, she is a founder of Myvillages (2003). Her work focusses on the rural by making space for grass-rooted imaginations in contemporary art. She is also an initiator of Myvillages’ learning activities such as Eco Nomadic School (from 2009), Images of Farming (from 2008) and she edited with Kathrin Böhm the book The Rural (2019 Whitechapel Gallery/MIT press).