Many things. Tiny Spaces Deep Connections, Day 18 - 20

During the public presentation on Thursday, where I talk about my work, I am very inspired by Van Bo Le-Mentzel who speaks before it is my turn. He is an architect and designer and unconventional thinker who became known for his simple and inexpensive self-assembly instructions for furniture and then continued working on the idea of democratic design by developing tiny houses and living spaces. 
On Friday we visit an interlocking tower where there is the possibility to install a video projection, visible from the outside, as if there is a whole different world inside. Most railway interlocking towers, once used to operate switches and manage signals, have been replaced by centralized electronic operation. Inside it is as if time has stood still. In the S-Bahn I embroider a question somebody shared with me the day before: “Was inspiriert dich?”, what inspires you?
The workshop in the weekend is wonderful. We walk through the garden and discover all the wild plants and their uses, we hang out with plants (an exercise or way of spending time with plants I learned from Mark Watson), we make drawings with natural ink, prepare lunch with some of the things we found and some of the vegetables that were used to make ink. Last but not least we make seedbombs and when I explain that they don’t need to be little balls, Lana comes up with a plan to make catnip seedbombs and shapes the clay and soil mixture into little cat heads.

(Text on the photo: People don't want big rooms, they want big dreams. Interview with Van Bo le Mentzel HERE) 

Colours and flavours. Tiny Spaces Deep Connections, Day 17

 

I made natural ink in the last days for my own use and for the workshop this Saturday. Different colours and different preparation methods. There are alcohol based inks (f.e. yellow, curcuma, light pink, rose) and water based inks (f.e. red: beet, green: spinach, pink: rose, brown: coffee, purple: wild cherries) but I also like to experiment with other ways to catch the colour, for example by using beets as stamps, or the yellow sap from the greater celandine straight from the plant, or even just putting a used teabag on a piece of paper. 
I prepare a dough with rose petals and lemon balm in the oven house. It would have been wonderful to use the old traditional wood oven, but this only makes sense when you bake a lot of bread or pizza, since it needs a lot of wood and a lot of time firing it. 

 

Floating. Tiny Spaces Deep Connections, Day 16

 The first thing that drew my attention when I arrived were the endless number of winged seeds, helicopter seeds, whirling down and lying scattered on the ground around the Bauwagen I live in. I share my space with the “Spitzahorn”, Acer platanoides and I’ve been collecting and experimenting with the seeds. 

Somewhere on my suit there is a question embroidered in Dutch that says “Do you think I need wings?”.

In the yellow phone booth —now book exchange and meeting point— I found a book by one of my favourite writers, Italo Calvino. Der Baron auf den Bäumen, The Baron in the Trees. It is about a young boy who is fed up with his parents bourgeoisie life and their rules and decides to live in the trees. He never comes down again and turns into a respected member of the community, somebody people go to for help and advise. It is a book about chosing an alternative lifestyle, ecology, community building, living with nature, and it touches upon everything my life here is about. 

Things always fall in place when you take the time to let it happen. And until then, you are floating.

 

Maps. Tiny Spaces Deep Connections, Day 15

The sourdough starter is doing well, I baked sheets with the sourdough discard (why call it discard when you can use it in so many ways?). They somehow remind me of old maps.

 

Wandering and dancing. Tiny Spaces Deep Connections, Day 12 - 14

Exploring the garden, collecting plants and seeds. The plants will be used to make a tea blend that will taste like Projekthaus Potsdam and the seeds will be used to make seedbombs, every seedbomb containing some of the “essence” or collective wisdom of the soil I am walking around on daily. Wandering and collecting also gives me the opportunity to be present on site and meet all the different people living and working here. With some I exchange a few words, with others I have long conversations. Everything is growing in abundance, some parts of the gardens are more cultivated, others wilder, and often there is a mix of human design and nature’s randomness. There is a sweetness in the air always, a mix of the scent of the roses that are everywhere and the flowers of the linden trees. Both are great for tea, but ask for a different way of collecting. The roses have been put there by the people living here and I can’t just pick them, even when there are many. I only take the petals of the roses that have bloomed abundantly and now almost fall apart when you touch them. The linden trees have so many flowers that you hardly see the difference when you harvest a good quantity of them. And of course people have a different connection with those flowers, they won’t be missed. I do ask the tree for permission and cut gently.

Living in the Bauwagen is easy, I like the amount of space, barely 12m2, but it is a bit of a challenge to dry everything I am collecting in there. It asks for improvisation and a careful handling of all the material, using all the available surfaces and creating new ones. And sometimes moving around inside is a little like a dance in order not to disturb all the fragile things that have occupied the space. 

Talking and listening. Tiny Spaces deep Connections, Day 11

A visit to freiLand, a self-managed cultural and community space spanning a large industrial area where once warplanes for the Nazi regime were produced and thousands of people worked in forced-labour camps. The Giraffe, a wooden sculpture and dynamic solar and wind-energy installation produces local renewable energy. I do a one hour radio interview with Erich Benesch. He has asked me to bring music, and I spent quite some time yesterday thinking about it. We talk about art and walking and activism and we don’t manage to listen to everything but this is the playlist I brought:

Pt. 9, Corrie van Binsbergen, from her solo guitar album Self Portrait in Pale Blue. A song she created while thinking of me walking.

Wild, Albert van Veenendaal, from the album The Eye in the Needle. I wrote the texts for this project about "How to be human in today's world". 

The Trees of Green-Wood, Caroline Shaw, from the album The Whale. A composer and musician who creates bridges between music, environmental awareness and deep listening. The song is a long list of trees.

Dawn Chorus, Cosmo Sheldrake, from the album Wake Up Calls. The English multi-instrumentalist and composer is known for his acoustic ecology and this album was composed entirely of bird calls from endangered species in the UK. 

Peripetatic, Alex Nowitz, from the album Spinors that came out on the label Evil Rabbit Records for which I do the photography. Peripatetic means “walking about” or “wandering” and relates to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle who taught while walking. Also: Alex is at home in Potsdam, something I didn’t know until I arrived.

Laurie Anderson, Walking and Falling, from the album Big Science. “You're walking. And you don't always realize it but you're always falling. With each step, you fall forward slightly. And then catch yourself from falling.” 

 

Impact. Tiny Spaces Deep Connections, Day 10

A tour through the neighbourhood with Petar. Around the corner is Europe’s largest film studio complex, Filmpark Babelsberg. And there is Peter Behren’s studio where Mies van der Rohe, Walter Gropius and Le Corbusier worked alongside each other before they became famous architects. But two big stones in public space have the biggest impact on me. One is from Hiroshima, the other from Nagasaki, transported here and placed in front of the building where the decision was made in WWII to use the first nuclear bombs.