Filed under: 5/5, Art, Bread, Design, Food, Foraging, Helsinki, Network, Recipes, Recycling | Tags: activism, bread, city, community, consumption, event, experimental, food, forgotten, knödel, overproduction, participatory, salvage, waste
Our kitchen this morning
The last and final event of the project ‘5 The dish’ took place last night at my home on Iso Roba. Starting at 5 pm, last guests left around 1:30 am – that would be 8,5 hrs of Knödel party! This morning, I woke up with a hangover of sorts (which was not caused by too much glögi) – was this really the last event? I feel sad, but also relieved; now, the writing can start, and tomorrow, I will take off to Austria and Germany afterwards for holidays (if the snow storm doesn’t wreck my travel plans).
‘Waste’ bread from the supermarket
Preparations started with a supermarket tour on Thursday morning, when I picked up a bag full of the bread that would have officially expired the next day (supermarkets usually sort out products one day before expiration date), and which would have gone to the bin. I felt a bit like Santa Clause with that huge heavy black plastic bag full of goodies on my back, tramping back home through the snow. I unpacked the bread to prevent it from becoming mouldy – my flat smelled like some sort of bakery for three days.
The plan was to make so-called ‘Knödel’ from the waste bread, a typical German dish that recycles stale bread. I am sure none of my guests would have expected those hot steaming round bread balls to be as tasty as they were – not even me! I have to admit, the first Knödel in my mouth just truly made my night – so hearty, warming, and comforting! (talking about food arousing memories) The kitchen was packed with people, and nevertheless we managed to cook together. People just started chopping up bread and following the recipe that hung next to the stove. I didn’t even count how many different doughs were made last night, but there were quite a few, ranging from rye-beetroot- over normal white-bread-parsley-onion- to mixed-bread-with-carrots-Knödels.
All photos but first two by Marina Ekroos
The night went on with our ‘analogue Facebook’ wall – visualizing the social network of people at the party and those who had participated in former events and workshops of this project. It only stopped when we ran out of stickers! When people left, ‘Knödel doggy bags’ with the recipe printed on them were handed out to be filled with leftover bread from the table. Long live the Knödel!
Check out more pictures taken by Marina of the night on Facebook or/and Picasa! Thanks to her again for the great support. :)
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: 5/5, Art, Bread, Design, Food, Good to know, Helsinki, Network, Recipes, Recycling | Tags: activism, bread, city, community, consumption, event, food, knödel, overproduction, participatory, salvage, waste
The art and food event series ‘5 – The dish’ comes to an end with this big final event: an open invitation to the artist’s house! Welcome to bring as many friends as you want. The only thing I ask from everybody is to bring old bread – either from your own kitchen, salvaged from the supermarket waste bin, hunted for in a bakery, or from elsewhere – be creative! We will pile up the ‘waste bread’ and turn them into delicious ‘Knödels’.
This event is a chance to meet new and known faces, build up new networks, think of new projects, and reflect upon past, present, and things to come…
Date: December 5th 2010 (this week’s Sunday)
Location: at my home, on Big Mama’s 5th floor (where I share a flat with two girls). Iso Roobertinkatu 26 A 14, 00120 Helsinki
Time: starting from 5 pm onwards. Open end.
Looking forward to seeing you!
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, Food, Good to know | Tags: event, experimental, food, season
Some white vegetables
About two weeks ago, my flatmates Samara and Ilona and me sat together in the kitchen, complaining about the long Finnish winter standing right on the porch, knocking quite heavily on the door. Dark mornings, dark nights, and no real joy in the veggie shelves of the supermarket. But… what about the white things, that brighten up the winter? Such as snow? And when it comes to food, there is loads of delicious white edibles, that are actually white, because they rather grow in the dark or under the surface of the earth, and don’t get much light to see.
So the result of our discussion was: the plan of having a white-party (Forces of light), just before Halloween. White food, white drinks, white dresses. I know, it has been sort of done before. But it really gets your creativity going when you limit your choice of ingredients for a dish to solely one colour. You start adjusting known recipes and inventing new ones, and start seeing only the white things everywhere you go. According to popular lore in Italy, eating white (‘mangiare in bianco’) is recommended when you have digestional problems or a stomach flu. It basically means to cut out the sauces, eat plain, nothing fried and too fatty. Most white foods are not as acid and high in histamins likemany red foods, for example.
Marije Vogelzang, the Dutch eating designer I mentioned in an earlier post, actually graduated with a work about only white food that she designed for funerals. According to her, in many cultures, the colour white symbolizes death, unlike in western society. White is, of all ‘colours’, most rich in metaphores and meanings.
Filed under: Art, Food, Network, Projects for inspiration | Tags: activism, culture, event, nature, participatory
Interspecies collaborations/ David Rothenberg
A few weeks ago, I have been contacted by a Swedish artist named Jana Fröberg, who studied at the Art Academy of Oslo, where my good friend Tabea is studying now. Somehow, she had stumbled upon my blog, and told me about an art and ecology happening in Oslo she is participating in, Gentle Actions. Shortly after, I got to know Jan van Boeckl, who is a researcher and lecturer in Environmental Art Education, when he attended the 2/5:GROW-dinner at Taik, who tells me about participating in the Gentle Actions event. What a small world! A few days ago, I talked to Tabea on Skype, and she attended the event and got to know, without knowing about me knowing, Jana and Jan. The world is not only small, it is shrinking!
“Gentle Actions is an art & ecology happening with an experimental visual framework that will take place at the gallery Kunstnerenes Hus in Oslo/Norway from the 23rd of October till the 14th of November 2010. It will be an interactive meeting place which combines the transformatory power of art with interdisciplinary ecology. Gentle Actions will function as a social sculpture and gather people engaged in social transformation within the arts, culture, humanities, social and nature based academia together with cultural activists and an actively engaged public. It will be an interactive and collaborative platform that includes dialogues and lectures, various presentations, workshops, discussions, and an extensive film program.
Quoting Jaques Rancière: “Art no longer wants to respond to the excess of commodities and signs, but to a lack of connections. The loss of the “social bond”, and the duty incumbent on artist to work to repair it, are the words on the agenda… It’s not only the forms of civility that we have lost, but the very sense of co-presence of beings and things that constitutes a world.”
As part of the program, Jana and the artists Sandor Ellix Katz and Rebecka Beinart will do something very inspiring and related to my topic:
“Porridge, cutting edge yoghurt, and sourdough bread” – This space will provide food for thought in the form of workshops, space for conversation and the rituals of sharing meals, in addition to a variety of sensory experiences. There will be a rich array of tastes and smells from living cultured foods and sourdough bread, to traditional porridge and wild teas. The duration of the event will be marked through the slow fermentation and growth of living foods occupying the space.
Wish I could be there!
Filed under: 3/5, Art, Bread, Food, Helsinki | Tags: bread, city, culture, elements, event, experimental, food, history, local, nature, participatory, process, slow, storytelling
I hate talking about the weather, but I am still in awe of the weather circumstances we were blessed with last night: what are the odds to wake up to pouring rain after a beautiful sunny/ moonshiny night on Seurasaari, which was actually preceded by a minor snow storm the day before? So, big thanks to Petrus and his buddies for the meteorologic conditions!
The third event 3/5:PREPARE started last night around 5pm at the BBQ-area of Seurasaari. A big pot was filled with different surprise ingredients brought and prepared on location by the guests: lanttu (turnip), onions, lentils, cauliflower, carrots, cabbage, brussel sprouts, and hemp seeds were cooked into a delicious stew, which was topped with water cress and nuts and seeds. It was no problem to brave the cold with that hot stew on the table and improvised story games at hand. Each spoon was marked with a letter from the alphabet, which was used as a starting point for a long long story. When dew started to fall on us, we decided to pack things up and leave for the warmer realms of city indoors. What a night! More pictures can be found on the 5-Facebook page and Picasa!
P.S.: As always, a huge thank you to all the brave participants who made it out there in a cold late-fall-almost-winter night!!! :D
Filed under: 3/5, Art, Design, Food, Helsinki | Tags: bread, city, culture, event, experimental, food, history, local, nature, participatory, slow, storytelling
http://foreca.fi/Finland/Helsinki?details=20101023
After this year’s first real, very light and blitheful snowfall yesterday afternoon, I was getting prepared for some snowshoes and heavy weather gear for today’s event 3/5:PREPARE – but no, the forecast tells us, we will have a bright sky and sun, plus a clear night with a full moon shining on us!
So, get ready, pack your one ingredient and story for our get together tonight at Seurasaari’s grillipaikka!
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