DAY 95: Let’s Build and Eat !
By Leif Czakai, Timm Donke and Nathan Fordy, Eindhoven, the Netherlands, 27 October 2017
A stack of hollowed out bricks. Visitors, who eventually meet for the first time, fill them with fresh food. Then, they build up an oven structure with the same bricks, in order to cook the food inside and eat together.
The work before and around our Day of Learning was already a learning process in itself. We had to figure out that the bricks could actually be produced in time from our collaboration partner Roemertopf.
How do we organize ourselves logistically, so that we are able to put a conceptual idea into the tangible reality? How do we organize the three of us? A collaboration as the one we are doing starts to become a well functioning interaction. And above all we learnt to not be afraid of doing something for the first time.
Of course you wouldn’t learn if everything worked as planned. However we came with a goal in mind, a sketch for the layout of the bricknic setting; where people would come and dedicate their time for building, eating and celebrating together. For this initial scenario the DDW setting was actually a very difficult context because everyone is individualized into its own agenda : « I want to check this, I don’t have time to stay around because I stil want to see this and that… » Eventually we managed to get some people involved who still stayed around the oven for the whole process. People who found their task in creating and trying recipes for the bricks, from tee and fries to cake and soup. How can we not mention this lady who loved to observe the whole happening, becoming part of a group and took part in thinking about how to best build the oven so that the food would get cooked.
By doing so, there was no more hierarchy (us : teachers/participants : learners), but a group of people, a collective, learning on a equal level through interacting with each other.
In the end of the day we were a group of people that created a circle around the fire for the last bricks, talking about our common effort but also just talking. We managed to even let the people who shortly joined in to get an understanding of what the participants were actively doing.
The things that we wanted to communicate are not things that can be set upon or structured; it’s about embracing the present moment. The community, the common effort and the common celebration that only come to existence and last as long as we are just building an oven, or better having a bricknic.
The simple image of a brick embeds the power of an individual item that is brought to an other level when combined with others of its own kind.
During DDW we managed to spread the bricks into different places and hands, not only in the NL but also outside of Europe. We want to become better in communicating this so that everyone can have a brick to build a moment together with other people. Let’s build and eat !
