This workshop, tutored by Michela Dal Brollo on behalf of the Living Equipment Portable Space collective, involved the participants in the collaborative creation of paper using pulp derived from the vegetable fibers found in the excrement of ruminants such as deer, goats, and cows animals, whose stomachs finely shred plant material. The workshop stems from research into biomaterial recipes developed by the artistic duo.
The concept behind these material experiments is to reflect on how the activities of animals are intertwined with the landscape shaping each other and to reflect on how, as humans, we can find inspiration in forms of reciprocity with natural environments.
The workshop was accompanied by the screening of the short film ‘Respigar Espinhos’ by Michela Dal Brollo and Ines Ballesteros, filmed in the village of Casa Branca. The short film shows other processes of experimentation with biomaterials and culinary practices with local plants.
ESTAÇÃO COOPERATIVA de Casa Branca, Casa Branca, Portugal
“Muta”. (2024)
In 2024, Michela Dal Brollo and Inés Ballesteros participated in a residency in Casa Branca, an old railway village inhabited by a few dozen of people in the interior of the region of Alentejo in Portugal. Our focus during the residency was to work with the ingredients and natural materials that were available locally at that time and, with some abundance, spices of plants that manage to survive the heat of the driest season of the year in a decertified landscape, some of them centuries old, others arriving from distant lands, some wild, and some domesticated.
During the residency, we processed the plants we collected into food and biomaterial recipes, gathering as well some seasonal local recipes from neighbors.
This research was presented and transformed into an artistic video titled: Respigar Espinhos and a sculptural piece named MUTA, created with biomaterials. The two works were shown during an open event and exhibition at the museum Terras de Ferro. The interplay between these two works invites reflection on the landscape and territorial resources through the metaphor of the recipe. The final exhibition was accompanied by a food event where we prepared recipes discovered during the residency, cooked with living equipment tools: Cum-panis and Mud fire.
RESPIGAR ESPINHOS
short film
The film Respigar Espinhos presents itself as an experimental archive of biomaterial and food recipes research, accompanied by spatial and environmental reflections. The film highlights the connection to the local landscape, blending traditional knowledge and various processes of food recipes and biomaterial experimentation.
Inspired by thorns, mucilage sap, and fibers of local plants, the artists humorously personified the vegetal ingredients of the presented recipes, prompting reflections on the reciprocity between human bodies and plant bodies.
The movie was shown at Museum Terras de Ferro, casa Branca, Portugal and MUSE Museum, Trento Italy
MUTA
Sculpture
In the Alentejo tradition, women sew patchwork bags for bread made from fabric scraps. This technique inspired the creation of MUTA, pieces sewn together from self-produced bioplastic and plant-based papers. Muta is reminiscent of a map and skin left behind by a hybrid creature. The materials from which MUTA is made are derived from heat-resistant plant species such as cactus thistles and acorns, capable of surviving arid landscapes.
Produced in the context of the artistic residency at ESTAÇÃO COOPERATIVA de Casa Branca
with the financial assistance of the European Union. Culture moves Europe.
Living Equipment came to Rovereto with a workshop tutored by Michela Dal Brollo. The workshop focused on the concept of “recipe”. The recipes were used as a tools for exchange to reflect on issues such as community, cultural heritage and sustainable practices.
Multigenerational prints
Participants explored the theme through hands-on activities, such as DIY printing with the low-tech techniques of the GELATIONGRAFO.
The workshop involved the guests of a retirement home, who enriched the experience with intergenerational knowledge and perspectives. The participants contributed to printing the recipes, expressing themselves through drawing and writing.
The shared recipes, linked to the Trentino tradition, became an opportunity to exchange memories and reflect on the theme of resistance to consumerism. Each recipe and ingredient shared tells stories of territories, migrations and traditions.
The workshop concluded with the creation of collective prints with photosensitive ink, deliberately impermanent, to symbolize the fluid and temporary nature of the informal knowledge transmission. This unconventional way of recording knowledge became like a ‘living archive’ that evolves over time and across generations.
The city as recipe
We held a second workshop to reflect on the city and urban space as a recipe, with territorial resources as ingredients. We also explored how the recipe can be a methodological cue for design (inspired Il riso verde Bruno Munari). Using these suggestions, we imagined ‘relational tools’ for urban space.
The day ended with the presentation of Living Equipment’s relational tools, the projection of the film The Last Summer, and a parallel between the topics discussed, especially that of the recipe, with the artistic and methodological research of the artists’ duo.
Organized by Acropoli Trento and La Foresta Rovereto, curated by AIDEL and financed by GiPro.
“Pig Tails and Pigeon Wings” is a board game that shows the causes and effects of critical or small actions that contributed to transforming the neighborhood of Den Dam in Antwerp for how we see it now. To realize it we were inspired by events that happened or could have happened in the past. Investors, social housing, the ring project, artists activating the vacant space of the old slaughterhouse of the city, new housing projects, peripheries, pigeons, rats, and all the pigs and cows that passed through the space, neighborhood actions, small actions, and big moves brings you back and forward in the game.
The game was presented on the portable table “Rotula” during the exhibition Vanishing Past(s) in Archipel in the context of Antwerp Art Weekend.
Organized by Cultural Association La seconda lunaLaives, Italy
How our cities will be linked to food in the future?
The project CIBO CASA CITTÀ was divided into four meetings and aimed to involve the community of Laives and neighboring communities in a discussion on how food determines the city’s shape and how the city defines the type of society that inhabits it.
The initiative proposed a reflection on various themes (food, urban planning, self-construction, and relationships).
Toutor of the laboratories: Sara Filippi Plotegher – Scientific illustrator and nutritionist; Marco Cestarolli – Architect-craftsman; Michela Dal Brollo- Living equipment: portable spaces – Relational artist.
During the last meeting, each participant was invited to bring an ingredient and tell something related to it. We mixed the ingredients and the participants’ stories. The ingredients brought became the filling for the pizzas cooked with the Living equipment cum panis.
EXHIBITION and INTERVENTION IN PUBLIC SPACE 10/2022
Biennial for Contemporary Art, Leipzig, Germany
In the context of the ART GO EAST biennial we participate in the exhibition “To enchant” at Poege Haus In Leipzig together with the artists, Aleksandra Majzel, Gijs Watershoot and Rien Schellemans
We use the exhibition space as an open studio space to organize an intervention in public space.
“The living equipment” intrudes a small portion of public space. We proposed to the participants a game to create a story by reimagining infrastructures and characters of the surrounding space. Each invented character, needs another participant to complete and animate it. The Gelatinografo and cum panis were the devices used to imagine a place with other relationships and gravity. The intervention in public space concludes with the creation of a small publication.
Michela Dal Brollo and Inés Ballesteros join the Biennale van Mol-Rauw with their Living Equipment tools. In this edition, the Biennale van Mol-Rauw is organized around the topic “How to survive as an artist”.
Antwerp Art Weekend, Vleeshaak Archipel site, Antwerp, Belgium
“One bird had two long wings and four wheels instead of legs. It could become two or more and when necessary come back as one creature. They could fold and unfold, flip and twist.Now they wander the city in search of places to temporarily build their nests, their form and function remain flexible and change quickly, infiltrating the inner rhythms of the city.They unfold a backpack and fire comes to warm the guests and bring a meal together. At the end of the day, the bird feeds a blue gelatine with their stories. The stories melt and the jelly expands and multiplies.“
Five of the Living Equipment: Cum-Panis, Gelatinografo, Bibliotek, Ruotala, and our Mapping Tool have been staged in the group exhibition “Dis-connected” during the “Antwerp Art Weekend,” in the Vleeshaak, Archipel.
By exhibiting indoors, the habitat of “Living equipment” is transformed giving more attention to their sculptural values. In the exhibition, it was possible to concentrate on how we subvert the logic of usual design objects, such as tables, wheelchairs, or parapending merging their functions and changing their anatomy.
The “living equipment” are shown as objects with personalities, experiences, and stories about the world outside the exhibition, where they create unforeseen circumstances.
The narratives produced were shown through prints about the stories and drawings of experiences lived in public spaces elaborated into new narratives.
Supported by the research group B&M reinvented (RAFA), Den Dam, Antwerp, Belgium
On the occasion of the soup session, we presented our research methodology on a work-in-progress site of the Den Dam, Antwerp, under the bridge of the ring (R1).
We present ourselves with Ruotala, our portable studio on wheels. We introduce our methodology of research and show how we use our research tools Living Equipment to collaborate with “liminal” public spaces of Antwerp.
The food prepared was made with collected spontaneous weeds. The artists talk about each plant present in the recipes introducing their strategy to reproduce and transform human-build environments and how their behaviors can be an inspiration for artistic methodology.
On the menu and protagonist of the Soup session:
-Soup with nettle, wild hops, elder ground and garlic mustard.
University of Antwerp / Royal Academy of Fine Arts
Archipel – Luchtbal, Antwerp, Belgium
In the context of the RESEARCH WEEK, re-ACT by Design organized by the Faculty of Design Sciences, we tutored the MASTER CLASS called “Living Equipment – portable spaces”. The workshop was intended for students of Fine Arts from the Academy and students of UA Departments of Architecture, Product Development, Interior Architecture, and Heritage.
The week was organized through the different Living Equipment tools, with one day of mapping spaces to intervene, one day of printing and communicating with neighbors, one day of setting up the structure and experimenting with its possibilities, and one final day where the different tools come together also with cooking.
The didactical aim of the workshop was to experiment and experience the possibilities of mobile and relational architecture with the students.
On the interventions in public space, we collaborate with the neighbor Pierre DJ
