New Media and Back-to-the-Landers
On my way to grow Symbiocenic Environments I continue to explore back-to-the-landers in the Southen-Estern Europe. While previous generations are more about writing books about their experince and creating communities e.g. Nara Petrovic (see my longread interview with him) and Božidar Mandić (I’ve visited him at his ‘Porodica Bistrih Potoka’ place last summer) the newest newcomers to the rural life are much more about social media. Their media (youTube, TikTok, …) are even so social that somehow they don’t even try to grow a community in their places, they are self-suffient enough also in this dimension.
The newest example I’ve discovered is a (global) Russian Gleb Feels who moved from London (after a few years of school in Greece as well) to his parents and a sister to rural Serbia during COVID. The beauty of the surrounding nature (the mountain area in the East of the country) amazed him so deeply, so he started to show it in TikTok. Gleb’s family live with no neighbors in proximity, but with meadows and forests around. They've got sheep, goats, and horses and do gardening.
Now Gleb is 24. He finds himself very organic living such a simple life with one modern feature — his TikTok account has more than 200k subscribers and Instagram is about 110k. In his videos Gleb speaks Serbian, which in turn makes him locally popular in the former Yugoslavia countries. The mix of a Russian young guy who gets back to the land in Serbia with all that nature and garden views and farmer’s routines appeals strongly to Serbian hearts.
I see how such young back-to-the-landers become more and more popular around the world. Just check these rural creator out:
- Li Ziqi is a super star in China;
- Frank Erirchsen from Denmark has a top TV show within the whole of North Europe;
- Northern nature and low-tech experiments are shown by advocate Yegorov in Russia.
Do you know other people who combine their rural simple life with outreaching it to the local or global audiences? Please let me know in the comments.
My other texts based on life in the countryside:
