Number of participants: 10
Location: Learning Grounds garden @ de Zandweg allotment garden, Rotterdam South
Date: December 17th, 2022
Duration: 11:00 – 16:00 (11 am – 4 pm)
Co-conspirators:
Reading Rhythms Club and SPIN Collective
Ingredients: Used cardboard, rotting organic matter, dead and decaying plants, fallen branches, soil, a text about shit and modernity’s relation to death and decay, one of the coldest and darkest days during the year, ice, intense cold, smoke, fire, a warm hut, cookies, empanadas, cornbread, hot tea, fabric scraps, multi-coloured thread
Soft Score
11:00 Introduction
Welcome and introduction, agenda and aim for the day.
11:15 Reading the Ground
As a collective action, wander through the garden and surrounding neighbourhood.
Read the ground for any dead and decaying organic matter suitable for making a garden bed.
Gather desiccated leaves around the garden and garden entrance, the slimy remains of artichoke leaves from one of the other garden beds.
Break brittle stems off of barren pepper plants.
Hack and uproot towering sunflower husks.
Collect the branches strewn about from recent storms.
12:15 Building the Bed
Use the accumulated material to construct a raised garden bed.
Layer salvaged cardboard, branches, decaying organic matter, and soil.
Finish with a layer of leaves.
Leave the bed to rest until the following spring.
13:00 Building a Fire
Use some of the foraged branches to build a fire in the wood stove inside the garden hut.
Feel the warmth from the smoky fire as it fills and warms the cold hut.
Wait until the hut is sufficiently warm to read in comfort.
13:30 Reading the Text
Together read the text “Toilet Teachings” by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira.
Read together how modernity imposes distancing and separability from our shit, our metabolic literacy for reading dead and decaying matter.
Read together how reading is the ability to see and to recognize waste as part of a life cycle where waste returned to the land becomes soil and food before becoming shit once again.
Use warmth from the smoky fire, cookies, empanadas, cornbread and hot tea to read through the text in comfort.
13:45 Transmuting and Metabolising
While reading the text together, work collectively on a collaborative quilt.
Stitch the quilt together using used fabric scraps and multi-coloured thread.
Transmute and metabolise the words read in the text into images of shit, decay and other visualisations of metabolic entanglements.
14:30 Returning Waste
Use the greenhouse in the back fo the garden as a temporary toilet.
Add liquid waste that will fertilize the soil for the following spring.
16:00 End
Final round and reflections.
