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Soft Score: the library as a garden the garden as a library

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Number of participants: 10
Location: Learning Grounds garden @ de Zandweg allotment garden, Rotterdam South
Date: October 16th, 2023
Duration: 14.00 – 19.45  (2 pm – 7:45 pm)
Co-conspirators: Social Design HFBK (Hamburg), Social Practice Library

Ingredients: Harvested grape leaves, sweet peas and fava beans, freshly harvested herbs, mint, parsley, dill, chives, used string, weather-worn bamboo poles, a hoverfly, spider web, blossoming salvia sclarea plant, pens and paper, wireless headphones, soil warmed by the June sun, sunlight, birdsong, rice, spices, pomegranate seeds, grape juice preserved  from the previous summer, propane gas, two texts on collective dreaming and co-sensing with radical tenderness, a grounding practice for breathing with, voices, caressing fingers, tree stumps, a broken hand-painted ceramic plate, music from the neighbouring garden

Soft Score

14.00 Intro
We enter into a Learning Grounds garden
Find a place to sit down 
Who are we? How are we coming into the garden? 
Where are we now? A brief introduction to the garden
Housekeeping 

14.15 Accessing your Heart’s Wisdom
A breathing with practice

15.00 Prepare a Meal
What are the ingredients for preparing a meal?
Introduction to the ingredients already present in the garden
How will we prepare a meal together?

15.45 Composting, Nourishing, Transferring, Infrastructuring, Archiving
Within this time period you will have the option of cooking, building a hoopa for the watermelon and squash baby plants, building a trellis for the cucumbers, documenting and recording the actions, or something else left unsaid

18.00 Eating a Meal
Stories are told about the meal and how it came to be
Stories are told about the relations and personal histories to the ingredients for the meal 
Stories are told about the infrastructures that have emerged in the garden while preparing the meal
Stories are told about the infrastructures that are already present in the garden
Stories are told about the infrastructures of support and care already present in our lives and the lives of others 
Stories are told about dreams for building, creating, and cultivating future infrastructures of care and support

19.00 Collective Reading & Digesting
What is a social practice if not caring and dreaming? 
Reading together Co-sensing with Radical Tenderness by Dani D’Emilia, Vanessa Andreotti & GTDF Collective
A collective reading of Lola Olufemi’s dreaming poetics
A collective oral writing experiment on dreaming poetics that follows where the text ends 

19.45 Outro
‘I wonder’ question round
What are the ‘I wonder’ questions that we might bring into our collective dreams?

20.00 End