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 Olivera
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
