The Future is Ancestral
The Future is Ancestral
🌙🌻 Welcome to our March 2022 newsletter, today we share a few highlights on our recent developments and latest projects.
The spring equinox is here! As we seize the opportunity for rebirth that this season brings, we have taken the time to write this newsletter to share with you some recent highlights. We may have been quieter recently, but we certainly have not been hibernating. Since we last spoke, we have continued our research into ‘Environmentally sustainable artist studio practices’, joined the Green Art Lab Alliance, written publications such as ‘The Future is Ancestral’ and ‘Towards Permacultural Art Practices’, launched our environmentally sustainable consultancy, and continued to forge relationships for collective sector-wide climate actions.
If you are new to this page, you can check out previous resources we have shared here, such as → ‘Environmentally sustainable artist studio practices’ → read the survey report here + watch the talk recording here.
Image credit: The Future Materials Bank
The Green Art Lab Alliance
We are delighted to have joined the Green Art Lab Alliance, a mycelium-like network of art organisations contributing to environmental sustainability through their creative practice since 2013, with partners in Europe, Asia and Latin-America.
We began this collaboration by joining the Future Materials Bank working group, a crowd-sourced archive of materials that support and promote the transition towards a more sustainable artistic practice, initiated by the Jan van Eyck Academie’s Nature Research department.
The bank is a great place to get inspiration from over 200 sustainable materials — from scoby leather, to mycelium composite and coffee waste — to which you can submit natural, non-toxic materials that you think contributes to a sustainable future.
The Future is Ancestral
We were invited to write a text for Z33 House for Contemporary Art, Design and Architecture to coincide with Seasonal Neighbours’ exhibition ‘Our Invisible Hands’, which examines the role of seasonal workers in the rich global agricultural economy and offers new insights into the interconnectedness of seasonal and economic rhythms and the relationship between humans and plants in the rural landscape.
In this article entitled ‘The Future is Ancestral’, we expand on the themes of planetary interdependence, organic farming systems and regenerative land practices. The text brings to the exhibition the long-term temporality of ancestral time and questions the unsustainability of the Western relationship to agriculture.
‘If today’s frenetic, anthropocentric and energy-intensive practices are responsible for accelerating climate change, there was a time when our pre-industrial ancestors knew how to live in harmony with nature. Reconnecting with ancestral and traditional knowledge may be our chance to ensure a healthy planet.’ — Alice Bonnot.
Read the publication in full here on Z33.
Towards Permacultural Art Production
We also wrote an essay for the new issue of Umbigo Magazine #80 to examine how permaculture principles can be applied to art practices and can help contemporary artists and art practitioners to significantly reduce the impact of their practice on the environment.
We have included the work of Inês Neto dos Santos and Cecily Loveys Jervoise to illustrate how artists can adopt some of these nature-inspired principles in their studio practices, in this case ‘observe and interact’ and ‘integrate rather than segregate’.
‘Today, artists need to reconnect with this planetary thinking to create resilient, ethical and low-maintenance frameworks for arts practices to be more respectful of people and the planet.’ — Alice Bonnot.
Read the publication in full here.
Image credit: ‘Feel the tides in your body’, Hannah Rowan x VILLA VILLA, 2021
Feel the tides in your body
Last year we collaborated with Rowan Hannah to create this gorgeous ‘Feel the tides in your body’ tote bag which is still available to order. If you are interested please email us at info@villavilla.co. The bag costs 17€, is high quality and ethically produced.
✔️ Responsibly sourced
✔️ Organic cotton (300gr)
✔️ Natural colour, not-dyed
✔️ Long handles
✔️ Handprinted by studio Oficina Loba
✔️ Produced to last a very long time
✔️ 47 x 35 x 15cm
An invitation to allow our senses to become ocean.
What you might also enjoy reading
A short list of recommendations:
✨ Annabel Keenan’s article Exhibitions’ carbon footprints come under growing scrutiny for The Art Newspaper.
✨Art Connect’s list of Art Initiatives Working Towards a Sustainable Future including the work of Gallery Climate Coalition (GCC), Julie’s Bicycle, and Art to Zero.
✨ A discussion between Caitlin Southwick, Founder and Executive Director of Ki Culture and Marije Remigius, Sustainability Manager at Fiction Factory on Series of Solutions: Circularity and Exhibitions.
✨ Curating Tomorrow’s new free guide on Action for Climate Empowerment: a guide for galleries, libraries, archives and museums.
✨ Call for contributions, Sustaining Art: People, Practice, Planet in Contemporary Art Conservation for a three-day conference in Dundee, Scotland.
villa villa is a sustainable and climate-conscious arts programme dedicated to supporting contemporary artists, curators, writers, thinkers, and other cultural and environmental practitioners committed to more ecologically sensitive practices.
In our next newsletter, we will tell you more about our new environmentally sustainable consultancy and the wonderful art projects we are helping go green. Ciao, for now!