Learning Grounds

 Learning Grounds is a platform for collective learning, dreaming and cultivating care practices through and with gardens. The project was co-initiated by artists/gardeners/educators/researchers Michelle Teran and Renée Turner around their individual allotment garden plots in Rotterdam South and Rotterdam West.

SPIN started taking care of this garden when we began the Lumbung Practice programme, a collaboration between the Sandberg Institute Temporary Masters programme and de Appel’s Curatorial programme in Amsterdam, and Gudskul’s Collective Study programme in Indonesia. The Lumbung Practice programme invited collectives from various localities around the world to come to Amsterdam and build a lumbung, an Indonesian term for rice barn or collectively governed rice barn where the surplus of harvested goods are stored for the community and governed collectively. In our context, practicing the lumbung means: . Throughout the past year, we have become damdam, an interconnected web of collectives that share our struggles, resources, needs, questions and livelihoods together.​