Deveron Projects held a digital conversation with our international partners Labtanya, reflecting on a collaborative project Our Commons: Food Resources (Harta Kampung Kota Kita). Since October 2021 until March 2022, both organisations were discussing, reimagining, and experimenting on how our food resources shape urban/rural spaces, crisis, and community resilience.
This project was divided into three phases:
1. Critical Conversation: A series of intimate conversations around food resources and its relation to commonality, everyday conflict, and anticipating the future.
2. Site Specific Project: Both Labtanya and Deveron Projects were developing site-specific project together with each respective local communities. Throughout this partnership, both collaborators explored and experimented ideas about food resources, space, and communities in their locale.
3. Reflection: Online public session which reflected on our creative process and the knowledge we've generated during this project in last few months. This event will feed into a publication for the wider project.
In accordance with Labtanya and Deveron Projects' shared focus of promoting local community values, this project feeds into wider work with communities to share skills and knowledge around ecological issues. By arranging local, participatory initiatives and inter-local/community networking, this project hopes to contribute to greater community resilience in the face of precarious futures, especially considering the current socio-ecological crisis.
During “Reflection: How Fragile are we?”, this online concluding event of the Labtanya and Deveron Projects project, we discussed how the concept of fragility is being perceived by both individuals and communities. Do we have different realities in an urban (Labtanya) and rural (Deveron Projects) context? This session will also explore everyday solutions that could be used a source of power to change our futures.
These conversations reminded us of our global community – the importance of coming together to share learning and knowledge – but it also reminded us of the importance of local community. The plants that grow in Scotland are not the same plants that grow in Indonesia. The names that the plants, weeds, seeds have been given change from neighbourhood to neighbourhood. By protecting our own individual communities can we contribute to a global movement, away from capitalism and towards sustainable, community-focused organising?
Our Commons: Food Resources (Harta Kampung Kota Kita) was a collaborative project between Labtanya (Indonesia) and Deveron Projects (UK) that discussed, re-imagined, and experimented on how our food resources shape urban/rural spaces, crisis, and community resilience. The project was supported by the British Council Culture Connects Us grant.
