RECONNECT - Research Residency at Gagel Farm, Netherlands

For the first time, Gagel farm will open her ecosystem to facilitate a residency for artists to help us in answering the question: how do we become native to place, within European contexts of the 21st century?

We live in a time of crises. The climate crisis, social injustice and loss of life are all apparent and accelerating. If you look closely, they are also interconnected. They all point to a crisis in our culture. In the global north, for centuries people have cultivated colonial extractive cultures that are inherently destructive. This now dominant worldview in modern Western society is based on separation – separating nature from culture, individual from collective, humans from other living beings. Separation causes disengagement with and abstraction from our surroundings. The more we get disengaged, the easier we refer to extraction and destruction.
Regeneration could offer an alternate pathway: one which reconnects us to place, each other and life (in the broadest sense of the word). To regenerate is to ask yourself with every action and decision you make whether it will result in more life. This question arises from a reciprocal worldview and builds on the understanding that taking care of others – plants, animals, microbes and people – is the same as taking care of ourselves. Indigenous cultures all over the world have known for centuries that we live in an interconnected world. In fact, they almost all perceive all life forms as sacred and honour the wisdom of the heart and hands as much as the mind.
This begs the question of how we, when disconnected, can get back in touch. How do we build a regenerative culture, with its own rules, sacraments, languages, institutions and rituals that facilitate life? How do we become native? And what would that even look like in a 21st century European context?

These urgent cultural questions are at the heart of Gagel farm RECONNECT residency. Here we invite talented cultural practitioners – such as artists (of all disciplines), scientists, policy makers – to start working on exploring, imagining and building a culture that cares, connects and heals.