About us — KSCA

The Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation (KSCA) is a group of artists and writers who came together to explore the idea of adaptive cultural change. Many of KSCA’s activities revolve around the post-industrial town of Kandos, Wiradjuri country, in the Central West of NSW. However its members come from many places, and its projects bridge urban, regional and rural Australia. You can read about how KSCA came into being here.

The Kandos School of Cultural Adaptation has launched our second major initiative. We will be spending the next two years engaging artists with farmers, scientists and other stakeholders in activities that generate conversation and the adaptation of culture to changing social and material realities of our relationship to land.

Here’s our mission statement:

KSCA is a collective that supports artists and others who are experimenting with adaptive cultural change. It aims to foster creative work that reaches beyond the familiar contexts of art to investigate new ways of acting in the world.

and our objectives:

To support creative activities concerned with cultural change in real-world contexts. This can occur in areas like (but not limited to) farming, urban planning, rural industry, food production, commoning and infrastructure development.
To explore new ways to create and disseminate knowledge by supporting grassroots experimentation and experiential learning.
To support collaborations that bridge different types of knowledge, professions and areas of experience.
To build fruitful associations between communities that may be geographically remote from each other, but share particular challenges and aspirations.

Currently the members of KSCA are:

Ian Milliss, Imogen Semmler, Kim Williams, Diego Bonetto, Manu Prigioni, Erika Watson, Peter Swain, Vickie Zhang, Eloise Lindeback, Leanne Thompson, Lucas Ihlein, Kelly Reiffer, Alex Wisser and Laura Fisher.

Kandos is situated within the Wiradjuri nation, and KSCA are mindful that we we walk on Aboriginal country everywhere we go. We thank and honour the custodians of this land, and pay our respects to elders past, present and future.