Solar Harvest: gesturing sunlight memories 

During three days we gathered with resident families under Amsterdam’s Nieuw West summer sun to be people.
Inspired and nourished by Pluk!’s agroecological farming practices and their fresh and beautiful vegetable harvest. Guided by the approach to food and collectivity of TheWastetoSuccess, we converted an art atelier into a kitchen and a dinning table where we deeply practiced the art of encounters.

Through different recipes we found common ground in the soil that is now the holder of our diverse migration stories. We found a common spirit in the sun that provides all beings of the territories we live, dream and are part of, with energy and life. We found common nourishment in the vegetables that convert that sunlight into food for our bodies to live and connect in community.
Food was our storytelling device and harvesting, cooking and eating it made it our community planter. Through pleasure and rest this space became a space for rooting. A space that offered choice in ways to engage and practice creative and tasty forms of collectivity.
In our visit to the farm we greeted the soil, worms, chickens, pigs, nightshades and snails. We shared faraway songs under the sunlight while eating flowers that adorned our fresh salads. We got lost in translation and found each other through gestures of harvesting, planting, weeding, watering, digging, playing and laughing.


Finally we harvested the memory of these three days in an audio diary. This piece features a  glimpse of the multiplicity of conversations and sharings we lived. For our visual publication, we invited the sun to be our guest writer, drawer and photographer while using cyanotype printing technique. Apart from this digital publication, our final piece is a cotton tablecloth that contains all the kitchen utensils that allowed us to transform the vegetables and the ingredients into a rich banquet of life.