Fresh Perspectives elaborates a compelling vision of art not merely as a representational endeavor but as a form of rural infrastructure—an embedded practice that enables communities to articulate, contest, and reimagine their spatial and social conditions, foregrounding the agency of artists working within and with rural contexts, the report dismantles binaries such as rural/urban, center/periphery, and culture/nature by asserting that artistic interventions in rural areas often carry infrastructural weight: they build networks, reanimate disused spaces, and reframe shared memory, the authors present case studies that illuminate how cultural work fosters resilience, particularly where state-supported services have eroded, from mobile residencies to site-specific installations, art practices function as generative nodes of connectivity, linking isolated geographies to broader conversations around ecology, migration, and identity, this aligns with a post-anthropocentric framework where the rural is not a nostalgic holdover but a living laboratory of experimentation and governance, one poignant example is the use of abandoned barns and churches as performance spaces, turning sites of historical neglect into arenas of community negotiation and symbolic repair, moreover, the report emphasizes co-creation and process-based engagement, shifting away from finished objects toward relational infrastructures of participation and affect, such an approach situates the artist as a facilitator of rural futurity, not an external agent but a situated interlocutor, this paradigm challenges policymakers to view cultural investment not as decorative but as fundamental to rural regeneration, asserting that when art is recognized as infrastructure, it becomes integral to how we build, remember, and govern rural space beyond developmentalist or extractivist frameworks.
