Woods – Community for Cultivation, Theory, and Art observes places where the interests of art, agriculture, and environmentalism intersect and studies how contemporary art relates to the land, human health, and interspecies coexistence. It follows an ethical and sustainable model for humanity and a regenerative role for humans, not just on the land.

We are a free association of people from the spheres of art, activism, theory, ecology, and permaculture with a core and a variable community. We work with a forest and meadow on a 2.8-hectare plot, where we also care for a small herd of sheep and goats.

We use the principles of permaculture care and keep note of other methods of regenerative agriculture like pastoralism, silvopasture, and syntropic systems. Our most popular public event is the annual (with occasional gaps) interdisciplinary and intergenerational forest symposium, which is always devoted to a particular topic and alternates formats between art, performances, lectures, seminars, readings, facilitative workshops, and more. Every year a children’s forest group develops the topics of the symposium together with children. During the year we also organize other smaller-scale activities in the fields of art, education, and care for the land, garden, and forest.

Currently, we are working on a two-year international project, Pastoral Twilight: Initiatives for rural cultures (2024–26), a collaboration based on a Creative Europe grant with partner organisations BAU from Italy and Inland from Spain, who, like us, work in a rural environment. Together, we will pursue how humans can have a regenerative relation to the planet, human–animal activity on the land, and sustainable education with children, plants, animals, and fungi. By studying pastoralism and vegetal knowledge at the intersection of art, education, regenerative agriculture, and more-than-human solidarity, Pastoral Twilight serves as an invitation to seek common multispecies culture and education that take account of disappearing traditions connected with care for the land and food sovereignty. The project will include an international pastoral gathering and conference, residencies, workshops, an interdisciplinary forest symposium, and the online publication Liminal Animal.

Woods – Community for Cultivation, Theory, and Art has been organized by the association Are since 2019.