Last week we organized our last (for now) Nomad City Gathering at @ucll.welzijn.hasselt. Despite a rainy forecast, the sun decided to show up together with lots of new and old faces. We started our day with some guided tours in which we explained all of our sustainable structures. Afterwards @ivasenkomasha started her Plant Swap with a small manifest in which she celebrated the superpower of plants to constantly grow and multiply themselves. Why should we buy indoor plants when we can just share them by trading, propagating or growing them from seeds? She presented all the donated plants for the public resulting in a new home for each plant. Later on @joulest and @qiaoyiornotqiaoyi organized a workshop in which they shared their research on Chinese idioms within the context of textile design. They instructed participants to sew a story formed by ideograms onto a piece of clothing, intertwining this story with the personal story of someone’s outfit.
Afterwards @emilyehutchingstook over our kitchen where she prepared her natural dye workshop. Participants were able to experiment with berries, pomegranate, elderflower, turmeric and lots of other natural materials that were used to dye clothing. Our settlement was suddenly transformed into a space of celebration with all these natural colors drying in the air. In the meantime Milan, Angela and Sarah were preparing dough and ingredients to make lots of pizza’s. After weeks of work we finally had the chance to test out our loam pizza oven for a big crowd. A few cracks emerged while heating the oven but apparently this can be fixed due to loam being easy to mend. We closed the evening with an introduction by @mirtemeneve about The Last Black Man In San Francisco, a movie about gentrification.
