Rewilding Pedagogy at Sakiya – Art | Science | Agriculture

Rewilding Pedagogy – Sakiya’s approach to knowledge generation, transmission, and sharing – is a recursive system of circular production which takes the act of ‘re-wilding’ as its point of departure — re-wilding the soil from the ravages of monoculture agriculture, and re-wilding local knowledge cultures from colonization and encroaching neoliberalism.  Sakiya’s ongoing work plugs into a global network of co-imagining and co-creating new networks, systems, processes, and narrative structures while keeping with local indigenous crafts and science to mediate new spatial and social configurations that are essential for new political, socio-economic, environmental and material realities. This kind of cultivation takes hard work, and is a fundamentally creative and collaborative process.

Sakiya is a progressive academy, a field for experimental knowledge production and sharing co-founded by Nida Sinnokrot and Sahar Qawasmi. Located in Ein Qiniya, a village seven kilometers west of Ramallah, Palestine, Sakiya seeks to create a new narrative around our relationship to land, knowledge, and the commons by grafting local agrarian traditions of self-sufficiency with contemporary arts and ecological practices. Within the framework of a cross disciplinary residency program, marginalized cultural actors, such as farmers and crafts/small industry initiatives, assume a prominent role alongside artists and scholars, challenging the demographic divide that characterizes cultural production and consumption. Through self-sufficient practices, agriculture connects with contemporary arts and sciences for a more sustainable and resilient future. Sakiya’s vision is “Liberation through a society whose confidence is rooted in traditional and contemporary ecological practices, whose tolerance echoes nature’s diversity, whose generosity springs from collective labor, whose creativity is enriched by the intersections between art, science, and agriculture and whose prosperity is shared beyond boundaries.”