Pontio Cymunedau Gwledig - Pobl, Prosesau, Lleoedd // Brückenschlag zwischen ländlichen Gemeinden – Menschen, Prozesse, Orte // Bridging Rural Communities - People, Process, Places
It’s 6am. I’m woken by an incredibly loud combination of repeated pealing of greenfinch, gun-shot and church bells.
Dorothee showing us that Mary standing on a crescent moon
This is Münsterland, a tiny part of North West Germany I’ve got to know a bit over the last month. A predominantly Catholic region, with its heavy clay soils, sandy springs, calcium pearls, pollarded and neat everythings.
A new house comes to Schöppingen
Its one hundred and something metre ‘mountains’ with far, far views, covered in huge straight ploughed fields, aerials, windmills, shrines and warblers.
A place where you are (although probably only if you are over 50) a ‘clay person’ speaking Clay Platt or a sand person speaking Sand Platt, or a refugee or a migrant worker in the huge dairy or aberttoir, speaking all sorts of languages and a lot younger.
Traditional farm nestles up to a huge industrial dairy and windmill
In this village/town, Schöppingen, of 8000 people (living a strange mix of remnants of peasant farms, industrial and suburban rural and urban aesthetics and buildings together with a surprising variety of shops and 3 supermarkets), everyone says ‘hallo’ or ‘mourn’ (which is the clay Platt version) as you pass. History and tradition is cherished and censored (Nazi’s appropriated a lot of it), and everything and everyone is organised into Associations. The volunteer Fire Brigade is one with its brassbands, a building the Easter bonfire and providing the music, food and drink, taking the photos, lightly overseeing Health and Safety.
Visit to the Fishing Association with Clement. They breed fish to an age where they can survive the high nitrate levels in the streams
Here 4 weeks ago, I entered the other part of the village - the Kunstler*Dorf (artists’ village - the asterix in the middle indicating gender neutral version of the male artist), with Marleen and Micha from the Syndikat Gefährliche Liebschaften (the Collective of Dangerous Liaisons). I don’t think there is a version of the Kunstler*Dorf in the UK? But here, almost every state seems to have some kind of artist-provision and funded residencies like this. We, here at the Kunstler*Dorf are an international bunch - currently as I write, Germany, Nepal, Bangladesh, Morocco, Columbia, New York. Mostly writers and composers with a smattering of visual artists, on a slow turnover (most here for 3-4 months). I have idly wondered from time to time if anyone from Wales has been here before.
The reason I am here is thanks to a Cyfnewid Cultural Bridge Exchange between Dyffryn Dyfodol and Syndikat Gefährliche Liebschaften (The Collective of Dangerous Liasons). You can watch a podcast with them both talking together about their work here. The Syndikat is a performance collective who use clever engaged processes to create place-based interventions in rural areas.
We are here to work on a project called ‘Land Lines’, working with 5 other creatives commissioned by the Centre for Literature based 15km from Schöppingen, near Havixbeck. We are together to come up with a ‘performance’ in the form of a (4 x repeated) bus tour between Havixbeck and Schöppingen in September 2025.
Clog of Clay experiment
our land lines Investigations so far
The Syndikat have a set of pretty clear ‘steps’ that they use in all their work, starting with finding people to talk to. So we set off to do just that, starting with asking our hosts who to talk to, and going from there. The result is a web of entanglements of ideas, places, people. This has included conversations (40 hours maybe? probably more), walks, hosting a tombola stall at Frühlingsfest (springfestival) with ‘payment’ for a turn being a conversation, taking part in workshops, trips, site visits, researching and me becoming slightly addicted to cheese with fenugreek seeds.
As well as our little house at Kunster*Dorf, we have use of the ‘exhibition hall’ next door (due to late cancellation by artists who were to have an exhibition here). It is huge and spacious and echo-ey. We have established the ‘operations centre’ in one room and I’m making it extremely messy with sand and clay experiments in the other. My ‘materials led’ investigation of the clay and sand here took me a bit by surprise - but it seems to have worked as a ‘way in’ to get literally grounded in this place.
Our current investigations wall
My impromptu ‘exhibition’ of sand socks and clay clogs (give an artist space and they will use it)
Our ‘land lines’ investigations have ranged across the past, present and future of amateur radio, farming, windfarms, landscape, cracks, sandstone quarrying and ‘Spökenkeiker” - future tellers - once a common and distinctive phenomenon in the area.
This is a glimpse into what our investigations have looked like so far…
An exchange and melding of working practices
Although our ‘practices’ come from different angles (all members of the Syndikat come from a theatre background), we share an understanding of meaningful engagement and open-ended, emergent, creative practice. Their specific focus on rural areas has helped me notice how working in a rural area is for me so ‘usual’ that I’d forgotten to think of it as something specific.
The most solid ‘difference’ in our practices is that the Syndikat’s work always (?) leads to a collaborative performance. They explore forms of storytelling about and from the peripheries that invite a shift in perspective and reveal interconnectedness. Whereas I create processes of collaboration in places that I live in (or near), that are more about ‘finding out together’, not necessarily with an end point. But the distinction is not nearly as simple as that.
I think i’ll talk about that in another blog, and perhaps even better, in conversation with the Syndikat.
Anyway, now the nightingale is singing outside my room. It must be time for bed!
The local theatre group, t “Das Törchen”, recording Spökenkieken For Future (2025)
Postscript
You can read more about the resulting ‘radio play’ Spökenkieken For Future (2025), a piece written by Micha and Marleen from the conversations and investigations, and performed by the theatre group “Das Törchen” on the Syndikat’s website:
(it is in german, but you can click on ‘translate the website’ icon in the website window)
