SPIN emerged as a student advocate group in the university of the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam, supporting a net of students and teachers through community building, a student-led curriculum and protests. Now, we are a collective of friends who engage in community building, organising and exploring different forms of study. Recently, we have been looking into self-publishing and gardening as a collective practice by sharing and caring for a garden that is part of Learning Grounds, 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 has changed a lot since our start in 2019 at the Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam. We began as an activist collective of 10 - 15 students, calling on the university and our fellow students to question our relationship to the climate crisis and to act in solidarity with climate movements.
We soon realized we were doing white activism, so we took some time to re-think our activities and learn about our bias and privileges. This guided us to focus on community building and creating a space for learning the topics that were not part of the university curriculum because they were too political, or rather, “not important”. Together with students and staff we began learning about the politics of food, seed sovereignty, gardening, Palestinian embroidery, Israeli apartheid in Palestinian territories, how to organize collectives and many crafts.
These learning sessions often included free food and festive environments, soon creating a strong community and net of teachers, students and staff, who began to understand and care for each other in an institution that isolates these groups from one another. This allowed for a lot of beautiful solidarity moments such as: a student protest when budget cuts caused many teachers to lose their jobs and teachers fighting for us to continue our work at the university when our project got defunded. This taught us how to mobilize people through our craft of printing, organizing protests and creative forms of complaint towards institutions.
