Autumn Equinox - first event 2021

The 22nd of September marks the Autumn equinox, also known as the pagan festivity Mabon. Day and night are at the same length, and many vegetables and fruits are ready to be harvested.

For our first event on the rooftop garden, we began with a movement workshop led by Lotte van Gelder, focused on connecting to the space through our bodies. It was constructed around the notions of welcoming, balancing, and weaving: welcoming the new year to come, exploring the balance between day and night and how it can translate to movement, and reconnecting our bodies with the collective body through weaving. After the workshop we had a harvesting ritual, shared dinner and concert.

See the full report below.

The first Rooftop Garden event took place on the Autumn Equinox, also known as the pagan festivity Mabon, on the 22nd of September. Next to celebrating the second harvest period, the event marked the opening of the Rooftop Garden, a space that will transform into a tangible garden that responds to the needs and interests of the student community, but also function as a space for students to come together. We hope to be able to host many different workshops, lectures, get-togethers, concerts and more in the coming year.

The event started at 5 pm, after a short introduction about the significance of the autumn equinox and the background of the rooftop garden, artist and choreographer Lotte van Gelder held a movement workshop that invited participants to become aware of and play with the embodied experience of the space. After a short warming up exercise we started to lean into parts of the architecture and experimented with the way it held or resisted our movement. Following up, we did an exercise that invited us to alternately lean into or hold each other, exploring the movement possibilities and interactions this enabled and the feeling of being supported. Questions that came up in the reflection were: Why does it feel so strange to be supported? Why are we so rough with the architecture, while we try to be reactive and careful with each other? How does it feel different to be held by a human, than to be held by a wall?

Afterwards we distributed pieces of paper that invited those present to reflect on last year’s ‘harvest’. What did we learn? What are we thankful for? Everybody received an oregano twig harvested from the rooftop garden and we exchanged our harvest with each other.

Spinach soup and bread as well as homemade water infused with herbs and fruits were prepared for dinner. People sat down, had food, chatted and spread out in the space.
As the day slowly faded into night, we ended the evening with three concerts. Viana experimented with her voice and a loop station, and later invited the audience to join in by dancing and making sounds into the microphone that were looped into a collective, experimental song. Artist Seré enchanted with poetic lyrics, vocals and guitar, and OG Wang played electronic music that set the crowd into motion, and made everybody dance until the building closed.