Redes do país (Country Networks) is the name of an exhibition showcasing the works produced during the course of the project Collaborative Village Play, which took place in rural towns in Hungary, Germany and Galicia, and was led by German artist Antje Schiffers, co-founder of the Myvillages collective, and Hungarian playwright and curator Katalin Erdödi.
Background on the Exhibition
The project Collaborative Village Play started in 2021 and has taken place in a number of small towns across Europe. Local residents would work together to create a play where their own perspectives, ways of life, and voices would converge. The crafts, traditions, festivities and celebrations, and especially the local forms of production are the main features of the project, which seeks to honour and ensure the preservation of a productive and cultural legacy that has been the economic and social foundation of a large part of Europe over the centuries, and for which the rural exodus that started in the 50s has meant having to fight to prevent its disappearance and find recognition. Until now, Collaborative Village Play has given rise to three different projects: Dinnyeköztársaság (Watermelon Republic) in Nagykaramás, Hungary; Alte Bäume werfen Schatten (Old Trees Cast Shadow) in Bostelwiebeck, Germany and O canto da subasta (The Fish Auctioneer’s Song) in Porto do Son, Galicia.
The Exhibition at the Fundación Luis Seoane
The exhibition at the Fundación Luis Seoane has been curated by arts manager Manuel Olveira, who also took part in the project in Porto do Son, where he was born. Redes do país is a compilation of the works and objects produced in the course of those three processes, which have been arranged as three chapters or sections: O bo camiño (The Right Path), A eso chámolle vivir (To Me That’s Just Living) and Sabemos cooperar (We Know How to Cooperate). The exhibition also includes visual documents -videos, audio files and photographs-, to let the local residents give their own accounts and talk about a project that gives voice and an identity as a political subject to populations that have been historically seemingly isolated from the economic, social, artistic, creative, and intellectual discourse.
Both the project Collaborative Village Play and the exhibition Redes do país have been made possible by the collaboration of local residents, workers, institutions and cultural agents of the small towns where we have worked as a collective, and by the support from the Allianz Cultural Foundation and Goethe-Institut, and Gadis’s contribution.
