Provincialism is a very loaded term. Especially when applied to contemporary art. Recently, provincial art, in an Estonian context, has been described as:  ‘governed by the infantile, psychopathology and parapsychological experience.’  It is accused of lacking a concrete form and being born of improvisation.

On the other hand, while ‘periphery’ or ‘margin’ never seem to break free of their orbits around the cultural centres, provincialism lacks the restrictive spatial and relational sense. It is in the character of provinces that people only really care about what happens there, in their locality, and maintain a studied indifference towards the self-promotion of the self-declared centres. Nowadays, with the easy accessibility of knowledge and communication opportunities, it really is quite an achievement to remain in blissful ignorance. When you get close to what from a distance appears to be a pulsating centrifugal hub, it usually turns out to be just another web of inward looking provincial attitudes.

By implication, the provincialist approach could be seen as offering a possible defence against the levelling effect of global capitalism on local cultures. If we are to champion the provincial, then this needs to be accompanied by attention to Antonio Negri’s famous injunction to ‘fight power everywhere.’ It’s not enough to challenge the hierarchies promoted by the centres, the injustices and inequalities of one’s provincial backyard also need to be tackled.

An alternative term that we’d like to suggest, which carries many of the positive associations of provincialism, is eco-communalism. This radical green notion brings together a lot of utopian anarchist thinking and calls for human scale, cooperative communities that both allow the development of humans but respect the rights of the non-human world.  In this vision, progress is measured by the degree to which human communities are able to adapt to eco-systems. The establishment and growth of small scale cooperatives or ‘liberated zones’ could provide a possible solution to the multi-faceted crisis of the modern world. In our opinion, art is able to act as a liberated zone for putting into practice experimental ideas. One such example of a liberated zone could be recognised in the activities of the Balatonboglár Chapel in the early 1970s.