Rurality Re-imagined is divided into four loosely themed sections: Villagers, Farmers, Wanderers, and Wild Things with each comprised of six diverse chapters.
In the Villagers section, rural communities are considered as assemblages and spaces of vernacularity, as dark settings for TV dramas, new wave photography, and as sites for community arts projects. The Farmers section critically re-invigorates art’s historical fascination with peasantry and farming through essays, painting, and photography that critique the agency of the artist as much as images of agricultural space and people. Stereotypically, the word Wanderers typically conjures images of gypsy caravans, or country ramblers, but Rurality Re-imagined stretches its scope to mean not only traditional migrations of reindeer herds, or even those of motorway drivers, but also the territorial movements and mutations of cultural forms, such as that of hip hop music as exported from New York housing projects to the fields of rural Devon. In the essays and images about Wild Things, wilderness emerges as a highly contested cultural terrain far from any state of unadulterated purity as it manifests itself in the behaviour of people, flora, and fauna in cultivated and uncultivated landscapes, parks and artists’ studios.
Ben Stringer teaches architecture design and history and theory at the University of Westminster, London.
Contributors:
Katy Beinart (artist, writer and lecturer) Brighton UK
John Brennan (architect, lecturer) Edinburgh UK
Kate Corder (artist, lecturer) Reading UK
Julie Crawshaw (fine arts researcher) Newcastle UK
Adam Evans (architect, historian) Preston UK
Anna Fox (photographer, professor) Farnham UK
Kate Genever (farmer, artist) Uffington UK
Rupert Griffiths / Lia Wei (geographer / archaeologist, artist) London UK
Sigrid Holmwood (artist) London UK
Jessica Lee (journalist) London UK
Christine Mackey (artist) Manorhamilton, Ireland
Jane McAllister (architect, lecturer) London UK
Lala Meredith-Vula (photographer, lecturer) Leicester UK
Malcolm Miles (art historian) Totnes UK
Jonathan Mosley / Sophie Warren (architect, lecturer / artist)
Rosemary McGoldrick (artist, lecturer) London UK
Dierdre O’Mahoney (artist, academic)
Esther Peeren (media studies lecturer) Amsterdam Netherlands
Ben Pitcher (sociologist, lecturer) London UK
Wood Roberdeau (lecturer in visual culture) London UK
Sara Serrão (artist) Portugal
Rosemary Shirley (art historian) Manchester UK
Ben Stringer (lecturer in architecture) London
Kjerstin Uhre (architect, lecturer) Oslo Norway
Marcel Vellinga (anthropologist) Oxford UK
Michael Woods (geographer, professor) Aberystwyth UK
