Corona in the City

During the last week of May it was launched: a free invitation for 100 citizens of Amsterdam to participate in this collective art event, it was called the 100 BRAIN Salads Bowls. The proposal was to meet online and join a group of other ‘makers’ to hand build with clay your BRAIN Salad Bowl.

The main idea was to take the personal act of making a BRAIN Salad Bowl as a metaphor, as an exercise to work on flexibility and the ability to construct and also deconstruct mind settings.

The hand-building clay sessions, more than an opportunity to learn a skill, were presented as a collective art experience based on togetherness, where the setting encouraged body-mind awareness by working with both hands at the same time and being collectively focused in the present moment.

This initiative stems from the eagerness to cheer up together and the necessity to reconstruct the way of how we can re-connect with people in times of social disability, uncertainty and fear of physical touch.

53 citizens of Amsterdam accepted the invitation.

After online booking, they received at home a little package with 1400 gr of clay, which is the same average weight of an adult human brain.

9 online interactive sessions were scheduled with a maximum of 10 participants to build up the bowl. At the end of June, everybody gathered together in the last online meeting, called ‘the Party’.

In this video, you can see part of this last event when everybody attended with their finished salad bowl. In a playful way, everybody synchronized their movements to elaborate collectively constructed images using their bowl as a pattern.

In the same way as the salad bowl was constructed, movements of de-construction were suggested. Everybody was free to decide to follow the instructions and undo their BRAIN Salad Bowl or keep it as it was, hoping to be fired and used.

Despite the physical distance, the fact of making together and touching the same material at the same time gave us the space for empathy and togetherness. After finishing the activities, a special bond was created and it makes the project a success.

This event was granted by AFK and clay sponsored by Keramikos Center. It was free of cost for all participants. Amsterdam, May – June 2020.

You can see the complete video and picture documentation on https://www.su-melo.com/100brainsaladsbowls

by Su Melo