Event

Samhain Celebration
November 2021

About

Glossary

We celebrated the pagan festivity Samhain, which announces the nearby arrival of winter and is a moment to turn inwards and start preparing for hibernation, for example by pickling some vegetables. This event explored food, its politics, and how it relates to art and design practices.

To learn more about these topics we invited a few people whose practices make us curious for an informal conversation. Alice Strete will be introducing Magiun, a zine about everyday food and her involvement in the fermentation group Fizz Club and the food coop Biobulkbende. Múz Spaans and Julian Crestian will be talking about the Food Station project they co-developed at WdKA and the struggles they faced. Our last invitee, Clara Harmßen is a kefir enthusiast and forager who will present her work with the Voedselbos Kralingen.

See the full detailed report of the event below.

Samhain Celebration
November, 2022

Rooftop Garden Curriculum

Rooftop Garden Curriculum

After everyone arrived at the 1e inbreiding, from where we had a great view on the Rooftop Garden, lit up with green and orange light, we briefly introduced the program of the evening. Samhain, originally taking place on the 31st of October, is said to be a moment where the borders to the otherworld are thin; this time of the year is often connected to mourning and commemorating ancestors. It is also a moment for turning inwards and preparing for winter, for example by fermenting vegetables to make them storable. As the Rooftop Garden events are organized around seasonal festivities that are traditionally connected to agricultural cycles, this event explored food, its production, and politics.

We began the event with some informal presentations on different practices surrounding food and what role it can play in artistic or cultural contexts. Santiago Pinol and Alice Strete, both teachers within Autonomous Practices, talked about the Fizz Fermentation Club which they are part of. The club connects its fermentation activities to the lunar cycle to attune to alternative approaches to time and rhythm. They also experimented with different forms of fermenting, for instance with polluted water, or by using a traditional Columbian method during which people chew on corn and spit it into a collective pot; the saliva facilitates the fermentation process.

Together with Hackers and Designers, a decentralized coop based in Amsterdam, they held the workshop Reading Food. During the workshop they did groceries for a simple meal in a nearby Albert Heijn and mapped out where all the products came from. This turned out to be shockingly difficult, which demonstrates how obscure global food distribution is. The onions they bought, for instance, came all the way from New Zealand. Alice also mentioned the food coop Biobulkbende. Members of Biobulkbende buy food together from local producers and distribute it among themselves. This way the long and intricate distribution is skipped, and the food can be brought directly from the farmer to the consumer.

Clara Harmßen talked about her involvement with Coöperatie Ondergrond, a Rotterdam-based corporation that designs and maintains food forests as a local means of food production. A food forest mimics a natural forest ecosystem, in which nonedible plants for humans are replaced with edibles. The forest consists of seven layers: the canopy with for instance nut trees, the smaller tree layer with f. e. apples, shrubs like raspberries, herbaceous perennials like vegetables or herbs, ground plants like strawberries, the underground layer with edible roots, fungi, bacteria and microorganisms, and climbing plants traversing all layers. Perennials are plants that come back every year and help to keep the soil healthy, in the optimal case different crops can be harvested all year round. The knowledge on how to build and maintain the forests is mostly based on extensive observation. Clara herself is usually cooking and preparing dishes from the harvest of the food forest.

Múz Spaans and Julian Crestian both used to be part of an extracurricular activity within the academy called also-class, where student set up their own program. As many people were interested in connecting food with their practice and saw the necessity for a space that would facilitate this within the academy, the idea of the Food Station came up. They aimed to replace the canteen caterer Césant with a student-run kitchen that would offer healthy, tasty lunch, function as a space to share knowledge about food, and create jobs for students. After doing research on the internal structures of the academy and practicing cooking for big groups, they met up with the management team to pitch their idea. Management was enthusiastic at first, but when the dean brought up the idea in an HR board meeting, it was dismissed. Having Césant rent the space is more profitable, and it would be logistically complicated to replace the canteen. The food station initiative recorded their research and efforts in the form of a zine, which was distributed during the event. Múz and Julian’s presentation sparked a debate about deceiving experiences with the academy, some voiced more optimism and argued that once one learns about the infrastructures in place many things are possible. Julian concluded that this process of negotiating with and learning to understand the institution takes a lot of energy, and everybody needs to ask themselves if it is worth putting it in.

After a short break Múz guided a fermentation workshop. Everybody had to bring a jar which we filled with pieces of cucumber and water. After weighting the content of the jar 2% of the weight was added in salt. The pickles could be flavored with dill, mustard seeds, juniper berries, and oregano and thyme picked from the rooftop.

To honor the occasion of Samhain, Nienke van Rijnswou performed her poem Practice for Death, a poetic and emotional conjuring of the forces of decay and decomposition. Clara Harmßen guided a short ritual during which cups with sage tea harvested from the Rooftop Garden were given to all participants. Clara read a short passage from Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, where she describes how every time her dad would have coffee, he would give some drops back to the earth, as a gesture of thankfulness. Everybody was invited to pour a small sip of tea into a big pot in the middle of the room. This pot was then carried outside to the Rooftop Garden and the sage tea was given back to the plants.

Afterwards, spinach potato dill soup was handed out and we listened to a performance of the band De Gestalte with their poetic lyrics and melancholic sound. The evening ended with Marty DJing, people dancing, and collective tidying-up.

Images from the event