co-produced with MICHAEL BEISMANN and

Away from the pull of our capitalised cities, marginalised regions are witnessing a demographic and cultural collapse. Empty villages, fallen farmhouses and overgrown pathways – a whole landscape in ruin and running wild – these are common scenes that ask complicated questions about our collective cultural heritage and what its loss might signify. Yet as the populations of these small places continue to dwindle their relevance to a centralised economy seems only to diminish further, making a consistent policy response all the more difficult.

For those living in the abandoned lands the challenges are great. Public services are deemed expensive while the private sector sees little incentive to invest: hospitals, schools and shops close, buses and trains are cancelled and basic infrastructure falls into disrepair, all of which increases the sense of distance. This isolation is intensified by the idea of the hyper-connected urban world of the future, adding to the disparity and impression of a world past.

So what can be done? 

From the city the countryside tends to be imagined as a place of stability, as something to therefore conserve, and various attempts to halt or even reverse this demographic change can be understood within this context. The situation demands an urgent reappraisal however, because to judge these spaces on their population sizes alone is to commit rural development projects to failure whilst eroding the political will to assist regions that genuinely need support. All the more we risk missing the inherent value of these places as unique laboratories that help diversify our cultural landscape. For while the bleak statistical picture is discouraging, it doesn't reveal the many idiosyncrasies of a countryside in transformation, nor can it recount the many individual stories of tenacity and initiative that are already taking place all around Europe. Where the state cannot see solutions some people are simply finding ways. 

To understand the small places we perhaps need small stories. 

Local initiatives might appear token acts against the overall backdrop of abandon, but they hold open the door of imagination for others, and their effect on the local rural structure – the architecture, the landscape, the community – can often be considerable. They can also have a profound effect on the perception of an area by both its own people and outsiders: one proactive spark of human activity can often lead to others. 

As such The Remote Postman proposes to seek out these stories and help circulate them: collecting and delivering; listening and retelling. This act of dissemination would aim to serve both the initiatives themselves but also the institutions that would like to support them. The Remote Postman’s ‘round’ would provide a network of knowledge and experience between different peripheral regions of Europe with the aim of sharing ideas and reducing the sense of isolation, while also directly linking these new inter-remote lines of communication with the political and research institutions involved in the project. The aim is not to build a model but rather an appropriate resource bank of ideas and experience that both existing and new initiatives – as well as institutions – can use to think through their own responses.

What can be done? Perhaps we could start by looking closer at what is being done...