Rural Matters. Decentered Knowledge
Akee’s public programme Rural Matters returns, inviting further exploration of the shifting natural and human-made landscapes beyond the city. While last year’s programme focused on the layered rhythms of the countryside, this year turns to how rural territories shape our thinking and everyday life—even when we do not see them or directly inhabit them.
This year’s Rural Matters proposes to look at villages and cultivated fields as sites where experiences, forms of knowledge, and practices emerge—shaping broader Western understandings of the world. Rather than approaching the rural as a distant or separate space, the programme considers it as a field intertwined with the city, where agriculture, industry, services, and everyday life intersect.
The first gathering of the Rural Matters programme, taking place on May 12, brings together guests from LungA School in East Iceland, the international artists’ collective Myvillages, and the Rural School of Economics—a collaborative infrastructure for learning. Their work is closely embedded in local environmental and historical contexts. Here, learning and artistic practice are not understood as separate stages, but as forms of acting within specific situations—where uncertainty, working without predetermined outcomes, attentiveness to surroundings, and the capacity to act together become essential.
Programme
17:45 — Mark Rohtmaa-Jackson
“Noise and Driftwood: ‘To Be’ Weeks and Radical Pedagogy at LungA School”
LungA School was conceived as an art situation—an artist-led school where programmes emerge through practice and collective activity. It is based in the small town of Seyðisfjörður in East Iceland. In recent years, the school has also been developing the alternative “LAND” programme—12-week cycles that shift attention away from the dominant model of artistic praxis towards themes grounded in local contexts: land, water, community, and their transformations.
This lecture examines a pedagogical experiment within the “LAND” programme—the so-called “To Be” weeks. These weeks reframe the usual “praxis” weeks of the art programme by foregrounding a form of infra-productive being. They draw attention to practices of not knowing, disorientation, and indifferent “noise,” opening up connections to what is often considered outside the school, as well as to conditions of emergence within the landscape.
The lecture will consider how these “To Be” weeks function as a structural glitch—a space of intentional rupture, where participants shift from being producers and educational subjects to becoming permeable participants, engaging alongside others—both human and non-human—within a shared environment.
18:45 — Wapke Feenstra
“Tracing Rural Undercurrents and Creating New Orientations”
Drawing on the Boerenzij project as a case study, Wapke Feenstra will explore how so-called rural undercurrents can be identified and activated.
When these undercurrents surface, they can disrupt our tendency to act as observers and consumers, viewing the countryside—and the planet—as objects. Globally, urbanisation is closely linked to industrialisation and migration away from rural areas. In countries such as the Netherlands, the shift from agricultural and extractive economies to service-based ways of living—less directly connected to land—has fundamentally changed how we perceive the places we inhabit. We often construct images of the countryside that reflect longing, yet remain detached from the land itself. How we see the rural shapes how we relate to it—making imagination and perception central to the fields of art and culture.
As many rural undercurrents remain latent within urban contexts, Feenstra has developed and employed a range of working methods through the Boerenzij project that activate ways of seeing and relating to the layers we inhabit.
The lecture will present examples—also from projects connected to the Rural School of Economics—demonstrating artistic methods such as drawing on site, sitting outdoors and sketching harbours or community gardens, as well as presenting brought objects through storytelling, singing, or recitation.
In urban contexts, Feenstra often poses questions such as: what kinds of soils are present here? Was this once agricultural land? Who worked and farmed this land? Her practice engages with drawings, images of places of origin, memory maps, and plants or animals from places left behind when moving to the city.
19:45 — Discussion
“Knowledge Without a Center: Practices of Alternative Education”
Participants: Wapke Feenstra, Mark Rohtmaa-Jackson, Viktorija Šiaulytė
Moderator: Vytenis Burokas
Who gets to define knowledge—and from where? Alternative art education often begins where centralized models feel insufficient, revealing how formal structures can privilege dominant frameworks while overlooking situated, local, and embodied ways of knowing.
In response, grassroots and experimental initiatives emerge as spaces where learning is not fixed but negotiated—shaped by context, collaboration, and at times pushback, as well as by the encounter between different perspectives.
This discussion brings together practitioners working across international art networks and rural contexts to share how their models are formed, tested, and sustained in ever-changing environments.
Location: Rupert, Mindaugo st. 15, Vilnius
During the event, visitors will be invited to enjoy refreshments from the Pakruojis region
Participants
Wapke Feenstra is an artist and co-founder of the Myvillages collective. Raised on a farm in Friesland, her work explores how agricultural labour and forms of community-making are culturally valued or marginalised. By expanding dominant cultural frameworks and questioning clichés such as “the cow” or “the landscape,” she creates space for alternative modes of representation.
Her practice is grounded in relationships and takes everyday knowledge and skills seriously. Through cultural analysis, collective editing, and interventions, she brings rural themes into art contexts and research groups (including the University of Amsterdam and the “Soils” initiative). Since 2019, her work has become distinctly transdisciplinary and intergenerational, and she works with collaborators both in her studio in Rotterdam South and in other locations.
Mark Rohtmaa-Jackson is the Director of LungA School in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland. His practice spans roles as an artist, curator, administrator, and academic. Prior to joining LungA School, he worked as a curator at IMT Gallery in London and was Assistant Professor in Fine Art Critical Theory and Curatorial Practices at Northumbria University.
As an artist, Mark works primarily with collaborative, intermedia practices, including as part of Plastique Fantastique, NEUSCHLOSS, and Blue Mountain Arcturus. His book Contemporary Exhibition-Making and Management, based on his time at IMT Gallery, was published by Routledge in 2023.
Viktorija Šiaulytė has worked as an independent curator and producer for more than 10 years in the fields of contemporary art, architecture, and film. Šiaulytė holds an MFA in Critical Writing and Curatorial Practice from Konstfack and a BA in Art History from the Vilnius Academy of Arts. She is currently the director of Rupert and holds the post of research affiliate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Program in Art, Culture and Technology and has been a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude (2020–2021). She presented personal and collaborative projects at Architektūros fondas, transmediale festival for art and digital culture, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, among others. Her documentary film, co-directed and produced together with Marta Dauliūtė, premiered at the Gothenburg International Film Festival, Sweden, and Hot Docs, Canada, in 2022. Since 2020 she has been a co-founder and co-curator of Videograms, a festival for artists’ film and moving image in Vilnius, Lithuania.
Vytenis Burokas is an artist, curator, and lecturer. He holds a Master’s degree in Contemporary Sculpture and Art Pedagogy from the Vilnius Academy of Arts (VAA). Between 2013 and 2014, he took part in the 𝘙𝘶𝘱𝘦𝘳𝘵 alternative educational programme. He has worked as an education and exhibition curator at the LNMA National Gallery of Art and currently teaches in the Sculpture Department of the VAA.
Institutions and Initiatives
LungA School
LungA School is an independent, artist-led institution and situation where artistic and land-based practices are explored as ways of doing, thinking, and being—cultivating, challenging, and transforming our understanding of aesthetics, learning, perception, and judgement.
While it identifies itself as a school, it can equally be understood as a work of art or a commune. These different notions do not simply coexist but overlap, each describing essential aspects of the place. For this reason, the idea of a “school” alone is not sufficient to convey the experience it offers. Instead, LungA operates through multiple perspectives—different voices that approach it from various sides and, together, form a more complete picture.
Myvillages
Myvillages is an international artists’ collective, founded in 2003, that positions the rural as a cultural and emancipatory force within contemporary art. The collective connects rural communities, migrant populations, artists, and researchers through trans-local networks.
Here, the rural is not approached as a nostalgic site, but as a source of knowledge, imagination, and social and ecological transformation. Working through feminist and horizontal principles, Myvillages develops collaborations, public presentations, and collaborative infrastructures for learning. By activating local knowledge and rural economies, it challenges dominant urban perspectives and opens space for multiple representations of the rural.
Rupert
Rupert is an independent art centre based in Vilnius, Lithuania. Its mission is to foster close collaboration between artists, thinkers, researchers, and other cultural practitioners through transdisciplinary programmes and residencies. Rupert is committed to engaging with the social and cultural life of Vilnius and Lithuania, while maintaining a strong international outlook.
This mission is realised through three interconnected programmes: residencies, alternative education, and public programmes. Together, they create platforms for conversation, research, and learning, supporting both local and international practitioners in developing their work and situating it within a broader context.
Programme Curator: Vilius Vaitiekūnas
Graphic Identity: Kornelija Žalpytė
Graphic Identity Adaptation: Rūta Rancevaitė
Communications: Aistė Marija Stankevičiūtė
Project Partner: Rupert
Funded by: the Lithuanian Council for Culture and Pakruojis District Municipality
