🧶🌻💦 XP Summer Greetings

August has started and I have finally started writing this newsletter. It's Emma typing this intro on August 2nd (yes, one week ago), wishing you all a happy (belated) HTML day. We hope you and your computers had a great day and you felt the html energy flowing wherever you celebrated. I personally was quite impressed seeing images of the many freewrites that were happening all over the world. Elliott worked hard to organise and promote this international event, helping many poetic web lovers find each other in a shared passion for hand-coding websites. Thank you Elliott (check his website & hire him for web design/dev work!)

Extra Practice did not organise any freewrite this time: it was hard to top the coding-on-a-boat last year, but also most of XP members are not in town this week. Jack, Gijs, Kirsten, Ben and Elliott will all be up in the mountains of Tópolo, Italy by the time this e-mail goes out, taking part in Robida’s summer school, doing things with radio and sound.

Being the last XP member who has not had the pleasure of visiting Topolò yet, I can only vaguely imagine what it must feel like to be there. I know it is a tiny village in the mountains between Italy and Slovenia, that a sweet group of creative people live there and that they run cool projects, publish a beautiful magazine every year and do stuff with radio, that they sometimes travel to cities to give workshops and talks, that they host residents and run summer schools, take good care of their land and their community… they seem to have found balance between a slow, secluded, nature-filled life and cultural & creative connectedness & relevance. I think they might be living the community life of my dreams over there!

It does feel like some sort of long distance friendship exists between XP and Robida. Jack has known and worked with them for years, helped set up their radio etc. Ben and Kirsten have built them a beautiful website, coded in situ. Elliott participated in last year’s summer school, Gijs and I have written essays for their magazine. Also, dearest Vida often replies to our newsletters and posts, like a supportive aunty that lives far away but likes to know what we’re up to <3 And overall, I think we share a deep interest in community/conviviality/commitment and alternative modes of working and living in the artist context. So here's a little shoutout to Robida, and internet-hugs to everyone there right now. If I could have, I would have jumped on the plane Elliott took today, to see/hear/celebrate what the summer school students have been up to last week. Instead, I turned my FOMO into a newsletter prompt and asked everyone to write back some postcards from Topolò:

Other than this I’m not sure what other XP-related things I can share with you about July, or August so far. We’ve all been busy or away or both, and the studio has felt mostly like a work-space for our individual endeavours lately. There is one collective project cooking, inspired by an exciting piece Kirsten is writing for are.na Annual (co-written & illustrated by the rest of us), which in its turn was inspired by our recent research into alternative financial models for freelancers, such as income pooling. We've started refering to this project as 'The Pool' and I am excited to see what shape it will take...will definitely let you know when it is ready to dive in!

Right now, I feel a bit like an empty pool myself. I've had an intense 9 months, full of work and dreams and drama (summary: me and my sisters made it to the last round !! for running that regenerative farm in Brabant, dropped a "10/10" business plan...but finally got rejected for missing "stronger personalities" in our team) and now that it's all over I am left with very little energy but still some unprocessed grief. I'm a bit heartbroken over the farm, and even though I know something else will come along, and it will probably be a better fit, I will miss towards this concrete, life long, collective goal, in a location that felt like home, with people I love and trust. To get to know this farmland inside and out, meet the neighbours, understand the history and geography, research the population and their needs, the market. To slowly shape this potential future together, be scared together but also celebrate every win, laugh and cry and work our asses off, just because we believed it was possible, and would be worth it.

Which it was! No regrets. Many lessons. Just.. no energy left, while all I crave is new energy so I can start dreaming and planning for other possible futures. Although I think my wise friend Ceola (also in Topolo rn!) would tell me: "maybe.. let yourself grieve, before moving on to the next thing!" :')

Of course, this whole moving-to-a-farm-for-the-rest-of-my-life future would have had an impact on my XP-membership. I must admit it has felt strange at times, to be so extremely occupied with the farm-path while just having opened the serious conversation about the collective future of Extra Practice. The paths also both started around the same time, when I began to think a lot about commitment and ‘rooting’ somewhere. I noticed new desires in myself, both in my personal and professional life, like ‘I want to know where I’m headed’, ‘I want to build an commit to something lasting’ and ‘I don’t dream of a nuclear family’, as well as ‘maybe my purpose does not lie in the Rotterdam art scene’ and ‘I want to do work that matters’.

The latter is going well, by the way. Both Gijs and I recently started working for engage, a new movement in Rotterdam connecting creatives, residents, entrepreneurs and activists to address the big social, economical and cultural questions of our city. Trying to bridge gaps between different bubbles (eg art institutions and social initiatives) and connect them instead, which I looove and find super important. Also really landing in the neighbourhood, listening, being open. Less pretentious competitiveness, more creative collaboration! I'm learning a lot. Stay tuned for engage 9-12 Oct!

Meanwhile in our bubble, some returning conversations in and around XP, especially with our international pals, have involved questions like ‘how long am I going to stay here?’, ‘is Rotterdam my home?’, ‘how am I going to afford this city when rents go up and funding goes down?’ etc. We all seem to crave some sort of stability, in at least some areas of our lives (work, income, housing, partnership, mental health... which one would you stabilise first?). Everybody does, I guess. It feels like a giant knot of existential questions and systemic problems that everyone (us/community/generation/humanity?) is somehow entangled in. I have to admit I like this visual of the big tangle, because it makes me feel connected 🧶 haha... is that sad?

All of these thought snippets combined make me wonder about our relationships with place. Not only Rotterdam as a city, but the places we live, and the neighbourhood where Extra Practice lives. Sometimes I feel like I spend more time in that studio (or specifically, on the dock in front of it) than I do at home, but I have to admit that I do not often feel a very strong sense of belonging, or connection to the neighbourhood. We have chats with the boat rental guys, we're on a 'come in without knocking-basis' with the mailman and window cleaner, I'm friendly with some of the waiters at Bar Alaska and the baker on the corner, and there are a handful of neighbours that we have spoken to over the past 1,5 year. Like this sweet lady that has single-handedly planted a beautiful flower garden right in front of our space (including those giant sunflowers on my postcard), who we had a chat with when she walked by our outdoor mending circle.

However, I still feel a bit of a vacuum around XP, and that we are more part of the latest gentrification-wave than we are a part of Kralingen-Crooswijk. Since the next door coffee hotel (yep, you read that right, world's first coffee hotel) and the restaurant next to it opened, our street has turned from quiet (quite dead, tbh) to bustling, over night. Terraces are full almost every day, and the amount of people walking past and gazing curiously into our front window has maybe quadrupled. We suddenly have a kind of... audience? It is nice and still a bit strange: I don't feel more connection, just more people. But I think this could change easily, if we put in some effort!

Thinking about Robida and their hyper-local, situated, topophilic, grounded rootedness ; Grieving that future in which we would have a place to root for life; Being inspired by engage's manifesto and neighbourhood-care; Feeling an untapped potential in the visibility of and traffic around our space. Once I am back at full energy, I would like to investigate how we can feel and act more local with Extra Practice. This is the agenda point I will be bringing to the next XP meeting on the 18th!

In the meantime, I hope my friends have an amaaazing rest of their holiday; I am very curious what has inspired them these weeks and am excited to pool all of our summer-input together! And to feel present with each other, but also to be able to make future plans together and actually fully commit to them without prefacing everything with 'if the farm doesn't happen' ;)

self-model-making #5 on relational selves. What are situations where we already feel relational, and what are their material conditions? We’ll try get a sense of dwellings of relational selves, thinking through topics like unselfing, transindividuality, raves. More info follows via https://supergijs.com/researchgroup.html#signup

Another mending circle with Wietske! Come fix, darn, mend your clothes (and soul) with us.
👖 Bring an object you want to repair or embellish, whether a stuffed toy, a sweater, a pair of jeans, or an old t-shirt.
🧶 Bring mending materials if you have them; additional tools and materials will be provided as well as some scrap fabric if you simply want to practice mending techniques.

Upcoming events at XP