Poster design and photo by Ioana
Rural Relation Writing Club 2026
Contributors: Ioana Lupascu
What happens to writing when it is shaped collectively?
A slow-growing writing group exploring rurality, post-socialist contexts, migration, language, and the everyday forms of living and connection.
Season 2 grew out of the first season's series of individual writing sessions into a longer collective trajectory. From February to July 2026, participants returned to the table to write, read, edit, and gradually develop unfinished texts towards a shared publication. Two themes shaped the writing process: Diasporic Attachments, exploring migration, remittances, rural belonging, return, and lives stretched between places; and Ecologies of Belief, looking at religion, gossip, social media, and rumours as ways of navigating uncertainty.
Each gathering began with a meal, followed by translated poetry, writing exercises, reading, peer feedback, and conversation. The final sessions shifted from writing and editing into collective production. We worked together on the selection, sequencing, visuals, and physical making of the texts, resulting in With This Body Of, a two-colour RISO-printed booklet produced with Multi Tool Press at Kiosk Rotterdam.
The Rural Relations Writing Club is initiated and organised by Ioana Lupașcu, with support from Seasonal Neighbours and Myvillages, and hosted at Wapke Feenstra's studio.
You can reach me at writing.rural.relations@gmail.com
✧ Rural Relations Writing Club — Season 2 Overview ✧
#1 — Diasporic AttachmentsTheme: Migration, rural belonging, remittances, memory, and lives stretched across homes
Date: 11 February 2026, 18.00–21.00
Dish: Pea stew with rice
Focus: We began by writing through the ways rural attachments travel across borders, family, objects, money, phone calls, memories, return journeys, and the everyday negotiations of belonging between villages and cities.
#2 — Ecologies of Belief
Theme: Religion, gossip, social media, rumours, and everyday forms of knowledge
Date: 11 March 2026, 18.00–21.00
Dish: Pilaf with a lot of green stuff & Cabbage Salad
Focus: We explored belief as a social practice and infrastructure: the ways religious rituals, gossip, phone conversations, social media, rumours, and informal forms of knowledge help people navigate uncertainty and maintain connections.
#3 — Writing / Developing the Texts
Theme: Staying with a place, memory, language, and the unfinished text
Date: 8 April 2026, 18.00–21.00
Dish: Coconut Curry
Focus: We returned to our own writing, developing the material from the first two sessions and allowing texts to become more specific, personal, strange, or unresolved.
#4 — Editing: Knots
Theme: Reading closely, feedback, tension, and staying with the text
Date: 6 May 2026, 18.00–21.30
Dish: Miso soup with udon
Focus: We began the collective editing process. Working in pairs, we read each other's drafts, identified what stayed with us, what felt unresolved, and where a text might open further. The session was less about fixing a text than learning how to listen to it.
#5 — Publication: Mock-up & Collective Design
Theme: Sequencing, visual language, and making the writing physical
Date: 26 June 2026, from 12.00
Location: Wapke Feenstra’s studio
Dish: Tomato Stew with Tofu
Focus: We moved from editing into production, reading through the collected texts, deciding on their sequence, and working collectively with images, drawings, backgrounds, page interventions, and the cover. Together we made the physical mock-up for the publication.
#6 — Publication: RISO Printing & Binding
Theme: Printing, folding, binding, and making together
Date: 10 July 2026, 10.00–16.00
Location: Kiosk Rotterdam / Multi Tool Press
Dish: Miso Soup
Focus: We turned the mock-up into the final publication by working with the RISO machine; we printed, collated, folded, bound, and assembled the copies.
image by Jonathan De MaeyerSomewhere here somewhere there
Contributors: Ciel Grommen, Maximiliaan Royakkers
Ciel Grommen and Maximiliaan Royakkers are architects by training and through family ties, connected to the world of agriculture. When Ciel’s brother-in-law asks for help renovating housing for foreign seasonal workers, they take on the task with open-hearted curiosity. Through conversations with developers, policymakers, social workers, and farmers, they map a landscape shaped by deep economic forces. But when they try to understand what it means to live in these accommodations, the silence of the workers reveals a blind spot — and the need to ask different questions.
In this project — a hybrid between documentary and dialogue — Ciel and Maximiliaan use models, film, and scenographic elements to recount their fieldwork journey, from Haspengouw to Brussels, to Romanian villages and back again.
What initially seemed like a simple design question gradually unfolds into fundamental inquiries about living and working, the livability of our culture, and what it means to be home in a farmyard.
Stage, video & scenography: Ciel Grommen & Maximiliaan Royakkers
Architectural research assistance: Tim Martens, Tom Van Laer
Feedback & dramaturgy: Simon Allemeersch, Anne Schilts, Nancy Vansielegem, Griet Roets
Production: Jubilee
Co-production: Decoratelier, C-takt, Kunsthal, 404
in collaboration with: LUCA school of arts
with the financial support of: the Flemish Government
Corrupt Publication
Contributors: Claire Chassot, Ciel Grommen, Ioana Lupașcu, Jonathan De Maeyer, Maximiliaan Royakkers.
What forms of solidarity emerge when official systems no longer feel enough?
CORRUPT is a collective writing and publishing trajectory developed by Rural Relations Writing Group between January and March 2026. Across two online writing sessions and a final publication-making gathering at KIOSK Rotterdam, participants moved from reading and discussion into collective writing, editing, and risograph printing.
Together, these texts became tools to think through post-socialist rural life, migration, informal economies, intimacy, and the quiet systems people build to support one another outside institutional recognition.
The resulting zine aims to hold fragments of an ongoing collective process. You can browse it here.
Haeivers & Picking Song
Contributors: Mona Thijs, Stijn Segers & TOUR
On a warm Thursday evening, the House for Seasonal Neighbours transforms into a concert venue at the small church in Haren. Overlooking orchards and farms, this idyllic setting offers the perfect backdrop to celebrate the start of summer in the village.
The evening’s guests are TOUR, a seven-piece band led by Stijn Segers. They perform Haeivers, a folk album sung in the Zutendaal dialect, exploring the longing for one's home village.
In collaboration with spoken word artist Mona Thijs, some of the lyrics are reinterpreted and translated, allowing the transnational experiences of nearby seasonal workers to resonate through the music. Moreover, Mona Thijs’ “Picking Song”, a text which resulted out of the project “Playlist van de pluk”, is set on music.
After all, is that village of origin just a few miles away, abroad, or perhaps somewhere in the past? Maybe this shared sense of nostalgia and homesickness is what truly connects us all.
More info: MoMeNT︎︎︎
