2025-2026 COOP study group ~ The Salt of the Earth

de Appel COOP 2025–26, The Salt of the Earth, borrows its title from the human and land resources that sustain life in a time when both are increasingly at risk. Emerging as a collective study group, the COOP turns to the relationships of land and water as formative resources of culture, asking what kinds of traditions, knowledge, and practices they have generated, and how they continue to shape the present. The COOP approaches these questions not only through critical theory, but also through oral histories, myths, folklore, songs, lullabies, dances, and other embodied forms of storytelling. These parallel histories —too often excluded from dominant accounts— become a lens through which to understand current realities, while imagining alternative futures.

The COOP participants are invited to share their formal background and personal practices as a resource for the study group's collective work. This process further references the participants’ localities, reflected in stories and traditions from cultural and everyday life. For instance, songs, movements, and collective dances tied to agriculture and resistance carry histories that exceed linear narratives of the past. They remind us that history is not behind us but structurally present through colonial extraction, dispossession, and systems of domination. The COOP thus seeks modes of relation and organizing in the context of land and water struggles translocally. 

On the basis of the COOP’s themes, traditions are understood not as static inheritances but as accumulations of “structures of feeling.” These structures form through active processes of selecting and re-selecting ancestry. Which traditions are carried forward, and to which ancestry—literal or metaphorical—does one turn? Each such turning is also an act of imagination, reshaping the past in relation to the present. Within the COOP, the participants’ resources carry lived expressions as they emerge and orient a trajectory toward placemaking. Questions of intergenerational knowledge, heritage preservation (and for whom), and collective memory unpack here as ways of culture-building and the futures it enables. 

The COOP confluences feature self-led sessions, where each participant hosts and facilitates a session introducing the study group to a specific practice around the COOP themes. These can include screenings, collective readings, listening sessions, contemplative walks, and conversations with invited guests. Moreover, the COOP approaches sound not as a technical discipline, but as a conceptual practice that traverses storytelling, music, and memory. In collaboration with Radio Alhara, outlets are shared not as ‘complete’ productions, but as fragments, readymade materials, and reflections, extending the COOP’s conversations into wider communities. Radio as a platform also opens sound as a commons: a way of listening collectively across distances.

Ultimately, this year’s COOP engages in depth with one of the lumbung components, particularly in relation to economy of art as a resource. Just as land and water enrich us with culture, the redistribution of practices and their resources unfold into forms of collectivity. Alternative economies (past and present) that move away from dominant economic logics, come into focus. This includes looking at the histories of cooperatives, the economies they put forth, and their continuities and ruptures in the present. How might cultural production be sustained in ways that resist monetary focus and the constraints of temporary timelines? To address this, the COOP budget is divided among small groups from the very start. Each group develops a creative proposal for using the resource in a way that extends across time, creating infrastructural traces rather than fleeting expenditures. A key question remains: how to feed back into infrastructural inquiry and sustain cooperative (or collective) modes of being and organizing?