Filed under: 4/5, Art, Bread, Design, Food, Pictures, Uncategorized, Workshop | Tags: bread, city, consumption, event, experimental, food, manual, näkkileipä, participatory
All photos by Marina Ekroos
This time, the event was documented by photographer Marina Ekroos, who also participated as a guest in the happening. Find more of her work from her website! Thanks to her for the beautiful pictures which can be now checked out on Picasa! Enjoy…
Filed under: 4/5, Art, Bread, Design, Food, Workshop | Tags: bread, city, consumption, event, experimental, food, näkkileipä, participatory, season, sourdough
Yesterday night at Ravintola Kuurna in Kruununhaka: a bread making and root cutlery workshop, three plus five chefs of sorts, bottle candle lights, three experimental dishes, a shopping receipt tablecloth, melting beer glasses, and ten strangers. The ingredients that composed the fourth event of the food series ‘5- The dish’. Sounds chaotic? Maybe it was, but a beautiful chaos, with an open-minded atmosphere, delicious plates, and a nice crowd.
The evening started at 5 pm with the first half of our guests coming to join forces to create the first dish of the evening – a plate made from Ravintola Kuurna’s specialty, the home made sourdough crisp bread, topped with any vegetable creation people wanted to think of, to be eaten with cutlery made from local root vegetables as material. There were carrots, radish, parsnip, celery, different kinds of turnips and cabbages, cucumbers, leek, and spring onions ready to be cut up and composed into colourful dishes. The guests were asked to make one set for themselves and one for their avec which would join us two hours later, at 7 pm, for dinner.
When the second half of the guests arrived, preparations were still underway, but soon we could sit down for the starter creations. Antto offered a special brew of a Finnish beer brand (won’t do any advertisement here!;)), which we served in glasses made from ice (that’s how you make people drink fast!). In the meanwhile, the main course and the dessert were being completed in the kitchen – a barley-beetroot bowl with melted goat cheese and honey, and a strawberry sorbet container with lingonberries and chocolate sauce on top of a cookie plate. Yummy! The basic idea of the dinner event was to make a wholesome ephemeral experience with all objects slowly melting away, being eaten, or salvaging and repurposing trash.
Time to give props to all those people involved: first of all, thanks to all the guests for your interest and participation! Thanks to Marina for documenting the event. A very special thank you to Salla for the big support, help, and creativity with the dishes and preparations, and of course, last but not least, to Antto for the support in the kitchen, the generous sponsoring of all the food and drinks, and the provision of the kitchen and the atmospheric location! More photos are coming soon (as soon as I get hands on Marina’s material)! :)
Stay tuned for the 5th and last event coming up this week’s Sunday, 5th of December, more information can be found online soon!
Filed under: 4/5, Art, Bread, Design, Food, Workshop | Tags: artifact, consumption, event, experimental, food, handicraft, identity, local, näkkileipä, participatory, season
The invitations for the 4th event are ready and sent out to three people plus my tutor Cathérine. Antto and Salla will also pick three people of their choice for the event, so that we will have many new faces coming together. The 10 guests will first participate in making edible objects together with us in a mini-workshop and then, we will be joined by their avecs two hours later.
I am excited about our list of guests and the menu! It will be inspired by Finnish local handicraft, seasonal ingredients, popular objects, and traditional recipes, and be executed by the guests, Antto, Salla, and me.
Filed under: 4/5, Art, Bread, Design, Food, Making of, Network, Workshop | Tags: activism, city, consumption, event, experimental, food, local, näkkileipä, participatory
Last night, I finally had a meeting with Antto Melasniemi, co-owner of the two Helsinki restaurants Ateljé Finne in Töölö and Kuurna in Kruununhaka, to schedule and plan the 4th event of the 5-series, which deals with the consumption step (4/5:CONSUME). The day before, I bumped into Salla Kuuluvainen, who played an important role in the oven workshop and is generally active in urban gardening and food activism. I invited her along, and she immediately joined forces. So now, there is a team!
Since Antto is busy travelling the next week, we moved the event to the 29th of Nov., a Monday, which is the usual day of rest of the location (restaurant Ateljé Finne). The rough plan is to create an ephemeral dinner, meaning that literally nothing will be left after the meal, no tools, no crockery, no cutlery. We will organize an afternoon workshop for creating those ephemeral objects for 10 people, who will invite one avec to join us for the dinner following the workshop. Antto, Salla, and I will complete the edible objects with dishes that will be kept in secret. Stay tuned for updates!
Filed under: Art, Design, Handicraft, Workshop | Tags: artifact, education, event, experimental, handicraft, participatory, stitching
Just got home from an amazing night of stitching, dreaming, chatting, having (anti stress) tea and cookies. The ‘Stitch your dreams’ event took place tonight at Taik. I had invited students from my school to come by and stitch their dreams on a tablecloth, and it was a big success.
After the first people had arrived, Sari from the Anarchistic Marttas started to show us some basic stitching methods. Soon, more of my fellow students came by, from all sorts of different departments – Graphic Design, Researchers in Fine Art and Product Design, Environmental Art, Furniture Design, Textile Design, and Industrial Design and various countries: Austria, France, Canada, Finland, USA, Japan, Thailand, Korea, China, and England (wow, I had not realized that almost everybody came from a different country!).
The tablecloth turned out beautiful with lots of different words, drawings, sentences, stories, and dreams, all stitched in different individual styles. It will be part of the 2/5:GROW installation, which I will install tomorrow during the day. People can still finish their stitchings during the day tomorrow. In the afternoon (around 4 pm, gotta leave to a class after), I will sow cress seeds on the tabletop, which will grow during the week until they will be harvested in a final dinner next week. But the hanging parts of the table cloth can be stitched on during the whole installation. So, welcome!
Thanks to Sari for her kind instructions, Linda for her big help today, Osse and Are for the technical support, 5th floor for the hot water, Martin for borrowing the table top, Cathérine for everything, and to everyone who came for participating! A picture gallery can soon be found on Picasa, stay tuned for the update! :)
Filed under: Bread, Design, Helsinki, Workshop | Tags: bread, city, culture, event, experimental, food, forgotten, participatory, public space
The first event out of the 5-food event series just took place. About 20 people gathered in this experimental rieska workshop on a Sunday afternoon at Kalasatama and created all sorts of rieska – from really thin barley rieska over small thick delicious potato rieska, on cabbage leaves baked oat “röpörieska”, aronia berry-filled and potato-filled rieska, forestal porrige rieska, to beer-butter rieska (which tasted like croissants!) – people didn’t stop being creative! Wow!
Check out another hundreds of pics here.
Thanks to Aki Arjola from Maatilatori for the genorous sponsoring of the nice flours!! They are produced by miller Pekka Nikkilää , who earned last year’s title for making the best organic flour of Finland! Jam!
And, of course, thanks to all the participants for coming, the big interest, and creating those beautiful pieces of… art?
Filed under: Design, Food, Good to know, Helsinki, Production, Projects for inspiration, Workshop | Tags: activism, city, experimental, food, gardening, manual, participatory
Just came back from the Hub which is hosting a three-day-workshop about windowfarming, a vertical growing-system for growing greens in your own urban dwelling. The project was started by artists Britta Riley and Rebecca Bray in February, 2009 through an artist’s residency in New York. The idea came out of the simple will to grow own vegetables in Britta’s Brooklyn flat, which does not, like most urban housing, have access to dirt. Since then, it has found an incredible fast-growing worldwide acclaim. The internet and social media has allowed the project to be developped further by all sorts of people with different backgrounds around the globe, building the system themselves and sharing their experiences on the open source community blog of the project, http://our.windowfarms.org/. And here the link to the “official” website of the project.
The system has also been installed in Finland in a bigger scale (81 bottles) during the Pixelache festival 2010 by Mikko Laajola, Andrew Paterson and Niko Punin with the help of many volunteers in Helsinki’s contemporary art museum Kiasma. One third of the materials went to the Hub Helsinki, so that the windowfarming could be continued in a semi-public location in the city.
Here is a link to the Facebook-event, taking place tomorrow and the day after (24./24.08.2010, starting from 6 pm-8 pm). It is not too late to participate yet! Tomorrow, the planning and material retrievement will be discussed and adjusted to Finnish conditions, and on Wednesday, we will build a windowfarm to the Hub! This project is a beautiful example of how open source, collaboration, participatory design, social media, and a simple and great idea can make the world a better place.
I am really thrilled about this, since I am famous for my rather black thumb, but still always wanted to grow something at home. Never really had the possibility because of the lack of a garden or a balcony. In Finnish conditions, this system even gives the possibility to grow food all year through, and, by adding a light system like the Kiasma-crew did, even throughout the dark Finnish winter. Anxious to learn more by trying it out!
Filed under: Good to know, Helsinki, Making of, Network, Press, Workshop | Tags: activism, city, handicraft, knowledge, participatory
Check this out, a feature article on Simon’s clayoven blog about Archie and the project! Once more: hurray to the internet!
http://clayoven.wordpress.com/
Filed under: Bread, Helsinki, Making of, Workshop | Tags: activism, bread, city, culture, event, participatory
One could say that Friday 13th of August was Archie’s birthday because he got finally completed! In a communal effort, stretching from 2 pm to about 9 pm, the last and final layer of the oven was built, with different people showing up and engaging their hands and feet in puddling, shaping bricks, and layering them on top of the insulation layer. No collapsing of the dome, everything is fine, and we can now impatiently wait and look forward to the official inauguration. After first experiments with firing it, the first public use will be 4th of September at dodo’s harvest feast, taking place around Archie’s corner, with veggies harvested from dodo’s vegetable garden from the other side of Kalasatama. Here the link to the Facebook-event:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#!/event.php?eid=120042798044787
Depending on weather and other factors, the “5”- food event series will have their kick-off happening at the same place, one day later, on a hopefully beautiful sunny late summer afternoon. Keep your eyes open for hints to the event! And welcome…!
Filed under: Design, Foraging, Good to know, Helsinki, Making of, Uncategorized, Workshop
http://picasaweb.google.de/105277324473045859094
Enjoy!
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