About SFS
Struggles for Sovereignty: Land, Water, Farming, Food (SFS) is a collective platform focusing on the intersections of social & ecological justice, organised by Bodies of Power / Power for Bodies and Bakudapan Food Study Group, based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. We develop programs both online and offline that bring together communities working from the fields of art, food, farming, land rights, indigenous (“adat”) and ecological activism to share their work and contexts with each other and the public. Through our programs, we aim to build lasting solidarity between groups in Indonesia and around the world who are engaged with struggles for the right to self-determination over the basic resources that our individual and collective bodies need.
In our work, we center decolonial ecologies, working from an understanding that the global ecological crisis is tied to colonial, imperialist, and capitalist knowledge systems; and that racism, pandemic, and climate crisis are symptoms of these same root causes. As communities in the Global South face increasingly harsher realities as a result of climate change, agrarian struggles for land, water and food sovereignty are a frontline in resisting the destruction of our planet, and key for sharing and learning the situated knowledge needed to build alternative futures.
Our first chapter was a 9-week online programme of talks, reading groups and sharing sessions that ran from June until September 2020. Our next chapters will unfold through ‘The World is Our Household!’ (TWIOH) a 6-month, multidisciplinary programme aiming to share and learn situated knowledges about living in solidarity with our communities and environments (June-October 2021).
Struggles for Sovereignty: Land, Water, Farming, Food (SFS) is developed in partnership with Bumi Pemuda Rahayu, Rujak Center for Urban Studies and SAM Fund for Art and Ecology. SFS is generously supported by Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development and Goethe-Institut, Marinus Plantema Foundation, Arts Collaboratory, Arts Council England and Goethe-Institut Indonesien.
About our members
Bodies of Power / Power for Bodies is an independent curatorial platform, initiated in 2018 by Sanne Oorthuizen and Alec Steadman in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, to explore the social role and political agency of artistic practice. We collaborate with artists and collectives from Indonesia and abroad who are deeply invested in rethinking the civic role of art, through various forms of DIY civic action. Specifically we bring together artists and communities and a broad range of practitioners to directly address complex issues through creative practice, asking; how can we use cultural practices to speak to (bodies of) power, whilst developing alternative models for supporting our individual and collective bodies?
Bakudapan Food Study Group is a collective of 8 members with different backgrounds and interests. Our research focuses on food, both as a field in itself and as an entry point to explore broader socio-political issues in the world today. Our projects are interdisciplinary in nature, taking from art, ethnography, and many other disciplines; and take the form of performances, art installations and exhibitions, as well as cooking, gardening and reading, amongst others. We are committed to writing and publishing texts, a way to share our research results and further distribute knowledge.
