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Recap Waste to Art Challenge
Last Saturday on March the 4th the kick off event of the Grassroots Science series took place! At 13:00 we took off with Dienke Groenhout from ' De Maakfabriek' @ THUIS. The session proved to be an inspirational inquiry into the subject of relating oneself there where one lives and how (making) art and digging up urban legends can help finding new ways to relate to where one might live. We also made a superfun stop-motion movie after inquiring into some of the urban legends of Wageningen!
We started the workshop with a talk by Dienke about the story of how she developed her methodology for making art in context while travelling East Asia and Latin America. It was a great story from which already many potentially thought provoking insights emerged about the way in which the stories that children and therewith people tell each other so so incredibly contextual to the culture where they live.
Before going outside to explore the story of 'Poppen Dolf' we had a short discussion on our own backgrounds. One of the themes that arose out of this conversation is that Wageningen is a very transient space itself. People move through here alot, many people come and go and many only stay for a short while. Even the lines between the locals and the not so locals gets blurred to some extend.
Once we were outside we were first taken to a mysteriouys and not very prominent old sewage pipe where Dienke introduced us to the story of an eccentric character that used to live in Wageningen in this sewage pipe that went with the name of Poppendolf. According to Dienke he was a homeless person by choice with a rather artistic streak that came out in his walking around with hats with dolls on it (hence the name 'Poppen Dolf).
After this we went to the infamous 'ugliest' place of Wageninge, the rather odd open spot next to the Albert Heijn that I'm sure everybody is familiar with. This I found myself a very intriguing place because it is just out there in the open for anyone to see and as far as I know not so much is know about it, but it is definitely famous.
It often gets mentioned as the ugliest place of Wageningen, and it is often subject to experimental interventions (like temporary garden projects). For now it is known that there will be student housing for students thejre by 2019. It was empty for so lo because there was some troubles with planning a new building because it is so close to the mill, for which by law it is determined that buildings cannot exceed a certain hight in a distance of 1 kilometer around the mill. Who would ever have thought that!
After this exploration we went back to THUIS where we got busy with a stop motion movie for which we made artifacts out of cardboard. We didnt have so much time anymore so we were in a little rush, but it was almost very fun and vibrant because of that.
I had a great time!
Jurre Zwart
Coordinator
