Select Page
Can a toilet become a humus kitchen?

Can a toilet become a humus kitchen?

Humus kitchen, Kultivator/Open cargo

IMG_8677For the New biennale of art and architecture, Botkyrka konsthal, Fittja, Swedish art and agriculture collective Kultivator together with Stuart Wright, South Africa and Adam Nyandikila Nkelanza, Tanzania, gave a Humus kitchen workshop.

A humus kitchen is a room to prepare the organic materials excreted by people after their digestive processes, using time, warmth and fine ingredients in a similar way as a kitchen of foods.

In the workshop we discuss and work around stories and attitudes connected to kitchens versus toilets, how they can connect and how we experience them. Can going to the toilet be as creative, sensual and important as carefully preparing food? What are the political, social and cultural conditions wherein our experiences around toilets are shaped?

The humus kitchen is one in a series of composting and exchange actions that Kultivator has made in collaboration with Botkyrka konsthall. Closed system compost toilet will be built in Kultivators future project Open Cargo, a long term work that builds a grassroots infrastructure of small independent but connected residencys in respective community, connecting Fittja, Red Hill South Africa, Mbeya in Tanzania and Dyestad, Öland, Sweden. The residencys will be formed by each community according to its needs and to its abilities, and just like the humus kitchen in Fittja explore the potentials of each place to create small-scale sustainable architecture.

[AFG_gallery id=’86’]


 

Urban Horse soil action, Riot re-framed

Urban Horse soil action, Riot re-framed

Rotundan, Kalmar

horseboywall

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[AFG_gallery id=’84’]

URBAN HORSE SOIL ACTION, Riot Re-framed
In April this year, Kultivator build a warm-compost adjacent to the art institution ANA in Nørrebro,
Copenhagen. The compost was designed as a possible meeting place for people living and working in the
backyard, but also to be a destination for school children from the area who can leave organic waste to it, and
study how a circuit works. Symbolically, the compost becomes an image of seemingly useless scrap from many
households together is broken down and converted into fine soil that gives rise to new life.
To introduce the compost and create awareness around it, Kultivator ran a campaign to collect the first green
waste for the compost with the help of a Police horse.
The origin of the idea came from the old-time collection of waste by horse and buggy, especially in Holland,
where the collector with his horse was a popular social institution wandering from door to door, collecting
potato peeling and other green waste, mainly for animal feed.
In a song by Dutch singer Jaap Put is described how the children rush to the door with a lump of sugar
on hand at the sound of the horse-hoofs clattering onto the street. Today the clatter of hoofs on streets,
especially in areas like Nørrebro, is more likely to mean that the police took their horses out. The associations
connected with the sound are quite different from the ones of the song. Last days abuse of police on horse on
demonstrations in Malmö brings the images close to us.
In the backyard where ANA is located, the remnants of the 1930 -ies horse stables still remain. The area has a
recent history of riots and unrest in the streets. Kultivator wished to introduce contemporary green recycling
by horse and cart on the street for a day, and reclaim the horse as a servant of the people rather than a tool of domination
In Rotundan in Kalmar, we can hear the sound of the walk of the horse in Nørrebro, and contemplate the role of the urban horse today, yesterday, and in the future.
The walk of the horse in the streets took place in April 2014

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

Soil site plan

Soil site plan

Fittja Pavilion, 14th Venice Architecture Biennale.

pressThe Soil site plan for residencys in Fittja and Redhill is a sketch made by art and farming collective Kultivator, visualizing a future infrastructure of small independent but connected residencys situated in respective community. The residencys will be formed by each community according to its needs and to its abilities, and explore the potentials of small-scale, grass root exchange of ideas, culture and experiences. The bricks constituting the material of this sketch are pressed by hand of fine garden soil, being a sustainable drawing /model that is meant to dissolve into the garden, and add to the fertile layer of the place, just as the residencys will later in their places. In some of the bricks, the seeds for growing the ingredients of the two versions of Dolma from Open restaurant are put, and will eventually help dissolving the brick by breaking through it. Similar to the Fukoka idea of spreading seedballs to start growth, the soil site plan imagines a system for small units that fertilizes and gives new life to the places and communitys they are established in.

Fittja Pavilion Venice

[AFG_gallery id=’87’]

with support from iaspis_logo_eng

 


 

Retopia and Reading

Retopia and Reading

10502125_739094622819879_3485620107090801256_nWelcome to the Opening of Kultivators un-plugged camp Retopia, and the presentation and reading of the author and midwife Ruth Ehrhardt, South Africa, from her book The little green statue.
Introduction by Joanna Sandell, Botkyrka konsthall.
Soup by Leila Perikala.
16.00-20.00, with possibility to stay around the fire throughout the evening…

 

 

 

 

 

[AFG_gallery id=’85’]

 

Retopia is a structure for socializing, exchange, cooking and accommodation for 2-6 guest workers, designed and built on site in Dyestad during the spring and early summer of 2014, by students of Öland Folk High School with the support of Kultivator. By reusing materials and focusing on recycling solutions for energy, waste and water, the site has been designed to burden the environment as little as possible, and serve as a meeting place and focal point in the village. A Guest workers will here be someone who both perform practical work and share cultural expressions with the local community, through a jointly designed and built venue. Same starting point for exchanges are taken in international collaborations that Kultivator and Botkyrka Konsthall has started up in South Africa and Tanzania.

The Little Green Statue tells the story of three generations of Ehrenreich women and spans from 1930 racially segregated rural South Africa to the finishing schools of 1960s Switzerland to present day modern and post Apartheid South Africa.

Maria Burger (later Gigi Ehrenreich) is a barefoot Cape Coloured girl growing up in a missionary town in rural South Africa. At a very young age she is sent to live with her older cousin in Cape Town. As a teenager she meets, falls in love with and marries Kent Ehrenreich and they have three daughters. All is well until Kent finds a contact at Home Affairs and they decide to reclassify from Cape Coloured to White. This changes their lives immensely and they make the move from their Cape Coloured families and friends to a new life in a white neighbourhood. In order to survive this change they need to construct an entirely new family history and pretend they have recently emigrated from Europe. They are very successful at constructing this new reality and become succesful and millionaires.

Carol Ehrenreich is the second daughter of Kent and Maria (Gigi) and it is with much resentment that she goes along with the move from Cape Coloured to White classification at age eight. Angry at the loss of her Cape Coloured family and this new way of life, she is sent off to finishing school in Switzerland at age 18. She spends 20 years in Switzerland and has two daughters there. In her late 30s she moves back to South Africa, in the hope of recapturing her lost roots. Having met and fallen in love with the bushman who had appeared to her once in a vision, they purchase a farm together with the dream of emancipating the Cape Coloured people of South Africa. Carol is unprepared for the alcoholism, physical abuse and violence that meets her plans. Things begin to crumble.The author, Ruth Ehrhardt, was born in Switzerland but has been living in South Africa since she was eight years old.

A midwife and lecturer by trade, Ruth has been working on and off on The Little Green Statue since 2004. She has been visiting family members and collecting stories from her grandmother, mother, aunties, sisters, friends and other family members and hangers on. The book is a weaving together of these stories, a tapestry of old and new, from rural South African mythology to the harsh realties and violence that accompanies South African life.

Ruth is also the published author of Droeland, written for a collection of South African birth stories called Just Keep Breathing published by Jacana. Ruth has also self published a booklet called The Basic Needs of a Woman in Labour, an e-book on the role of hormones in childbirth and the environmental factors that effect these hormones. She is also currently working on a book on how to support sexually abused women during pregnancy and childbirth.

Leila Perikala is an Iranian artist, educated in India and since 12 years living in Kalmar, Sweden. She will support the event with a warming vegan soup!

With support of Kulturrådet