rewild farming with spatial practices of care
Benjamin Onno Dikmans
Stella Dikmans
Walusungu Gondwe-Köttner
Violeta Kausika Pérez Hurtado
Julio Rébora
Elie Skesig
Michael Strebel
rewild farming works in between social design, agricultural practice, and ecosystem regeneration. As a team of independently active practitioners, we gather stories from food systems and share them for their potential of reconciliation between humans and their more-than-human environments.
We are working with a core team of 5 members and have project-dependent involvement from practitioners within our network, summing up to total of around 9 - 18 active people. In 5 different locations, we are experimenting in land based practice and co-create communal stewardship.
Our approach is hands-on; we are engaged and embedded in the locations we are collaborating with, and our methodology is rooted in togetherness. We aim to create a sense of belonging in the (eco)systems that we share and are open to all forms of conversations on the social and spatial dynamics of food.
In our pilot project in Eindhoven, we prototype with the “starter kit”, a modular and semi-mobile workspace to kickstart food and ecosystem regeneration. The project won the NEXT GEN Design Award in 2025 and was nominated for the Social Design Award Eindhoven 2025 and the Kazerne Design Award 2026.
In Spring of 2025, we organized a first residency project on urban development and countering narratives through regenerative collectivity, as part of “The Window” in Sectie-C (NL). In Autumn of the same year, we were invited to Macedonia to participate in a residency of Skopje Design Week and hosted many gatherings at our pilot project. For Dutch Design Week 2025, we brought together 50+ practitioners to share their relation to food systems in the space.
This year’s September/October two of our core members will stay for a month-long research and exchange collaboration in the cultural center of Shorten the Distance in Kasungu, Malawi. And in the winter we are starting a forestry project near San Martín de Valdeglesias reacting to the current wildfire catastrophes.
We engage with environmental restoration and renovate our connection to the ecosystems we live in through exchange on experimental farming. Our approach is transscalar and plurivocal; bringing together voices of different bioregions in transition and their stories of human stewardship. We share the aim to rewild farming, to diversify, develop and discover spaces where the tethered relation to more-than-human worlds is tended to. Through settlement and inhabitation we, the human species, have evolved and built our lives in accordance to the domestication of species that nourish us. We interfered in or co-created new ecosystems and are now facing the consequential collapse, as their spatial design is exploitative, destructive and unjust.
Our work tends to these systems and is renovating, reorganizing, and rethinking them. We are experimenting how food can be a base to reposition ourselves in hegemonic power structures and have built projects from the ground up or integrated our perspectives into organizations, exhibitions and gatherings.
In our pilot project on reclaimed industrial terrain in central Eindhoven (NL) we are prototyping with the “starter kit” as a methodology of modular, temporary infrastructure that supports the start of regenerative projects and leaves ownership with its local stewards. We have focused on building community locally in the neighborhood and internationally through inviting interdisciplinary practitioners to host gatherings around farming, cooking, fermenting and claying, hand in hand with reading, thinking and debating together.
We are active in various contexts; from a cultural center in Kasungu (MW) where we support local food sovereignty, over a forestry project in rural Madrid (where, whilst writing this application, more than 20,000 hectares burn in the most severe wildfires ever recorded in the region), to a food forest on a industrial sized farm in Ens (NL) and in nature-culture community spaces in Berlin (DE).