The Dutch artist 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).
Current Myvillages projects from 2019 on are initiated by the Rural School of Economics - this is an infrastructure for collective learning and made by many.
In her work Feenstra wants to stretch central cultures by breaking open the clichés we think we know. This can create a “stretched space”. 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.
