Returning. Tiny Spaces deep Connections, Day 29

Potsdam - Berlin - Hannover - Karlsruhe - Paris - night train to Toulouse 

Three weeks flew by. The sourdough starter and I are travelling back to Spain, taking a different route through France. I am leaving a trail of cosmos daydream seedbombs again.  

In the train I am embroidering the questions people left during the final presentation, "Wann machen wir eine Pause?" 

It is exciting but mainly sad to encounter two elephants when exploring the area close to the railway station in Karlsruhe. And the same goes for the planters in front of the station entrance, a mix of real and plastic flowers in bright colours. It has been intruiging to see how they deal with plants and nature in and around railway stations, a subject I never really thought about until I went on this journey. Something to explore more in the future?

In Paris Austerlitz I leave a small jar with starter in public space and eat at an Asian restaurant called Le Petit Bonheur, simple and delicious. "C'etait un grand bonheur!" I tell the owner when I leave.  

I share my compartment from Paris to Toulouse with five people and their luggage. It is a tiny space and it is a bit of a puzzle and sometimes a weird kind of dance to get everything and everybody in place, but the beds are comfortable and there is something soothing about moving while sleeping.

 

Welcome. Tiny Spaces Deep Connections, Day 27

 

 

 

 

 

Activities. Tiny Spaces Deep Connections, Day 24

Transforming the leftovers and failures from the ceramic workshop into clay powder, to be reused in seedbombs. I like the fact that the material has been going through different hands and will have a new function. Testing the material qualities of the seedbomb mixture, creating different shapes, some random, some conceptually thought through (or at least to some extend). Dreaming about a human size seedbomb rolling through streets, being pushed by many people. Embroidering somebody’s question at the meeting point/book exchange at the entrance. While distracting seeds from their pods (I am still collecting as many different seeds from the garden as possible) I discover somebody sleeping in one of them.

Whereas we human beings tend to get slower on a hot day like this, the sourdough starter becomes super active. 

 

Balance. Tiny Spaces Deep Connections, Day 21 - 23

Days for reflection and thinking about final work, letting everything slowly fall in place. There is a little garden in front of my temporary home I like a lot. The tree stump resembles a pedestal. Could I install something there? I do some balancing exercises with stones and look at the shadow play of the light filtering through the trees. The Japanese have a word for this, komorebi, I learned this when watching Wim Wenders’ film “Perfect Days” in which it plays an important role. I read a little in the book I found in the yellow phonebooth that is a public book exchange and doubles as a meeting point. I always trust I find the right book at the place where I will be living and working and I was delighted to find Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees as mentioned a few days ago, a book about a boy who decides to live in the trees after he gets tired of his wealthy parents’ lifestyle and never comes down again. More seed collecting and drying plants for teas. And after being hosted by the community here for a barbecue, I return the favour unplanned to a homeless man who sneaks into my outdoor kitchen and cooks himself a feast meal with all he can find. 

Also: making a little video to go with the interview for TaikaBox, the Finnish partner organisation in the Tiny Spaces Deep Connections project (the third one is Communitism in Greece). You can read the interview, "Rewild your mind" HERE

 

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.

 

What is real? Tiny Spaces deep Connections, Day 9

A meeting with Yuliia who works with Ukrainian teenagers and is also an artist. She gives me a question, something she often asked herself when she started a new life in Germany after leaving Ukraine behind during the war: Am I real? In the Oven House, Luis is testing a destillation setup with the goal of creating mocktails that taste just as good or even better than "real" cocktails.

Suits. Tiny Spaces Deep Connections, Day 8

Another three-piece suit! Sebastian who works in the wood workshop proudly shows me his Wandergeselle suit, worn by German and Central European wandering craftsmen.

 

First landing. Tiny Spaces Deep Connections, day 7

Landing, but not for long. The sourdough starter stays behind in my new home, a former construction trailer, or Bauwagen in German. It is tempting to stay after 6 days of intense movement but I am curious about the Berlin Britzenale, site specific work by 20 artists at an allotment garden association. On my way there, the bus has a 45 minute delay and when I use the time to drink some coffee I get into a conversation with two women who are sitting next to me, embroidering. One of them works on a modernised version of a traditional Palestinian flower motive, the other is using an Egyptian traditional application technique. I love this kind of soft activism.

There are many inspiring projects (you can find all the different works HERE) and I have some nice conversations with artists and visitors. I rest for a bit in Julia Kiehlmann’s “Horticultural Housing” in one of the three beds representing different stages within a shared cycle: a protected space for growth and contemplation untouched by human intervention; a space of transformation and labour where organic material such as cut grass is collected and dried; and a space of regeneration and pause, equipped with a hay attress that invites visitors to lie down and linger. 

(first photo by Natalia Irina Roman)