Edible Window Story

New exhibition in “Het Raam” Including workshop by Uno Fujisawa

Uno makes Ikebana and Bento boxes. She combines the two Japanese traditions in an untraditional way by calling them ´edible stories´. Ikebana is a special way of flower arranging in Japan. The very balanced and non-abundant pieces might be difficult to grasp at first for westerners who mainly like to celebrate the colourfulness, the blooming and the abundance of flowers, which resamble mainly spring and new life. The trick with Ikebana, says Uno, is in appreciating all beauty of the plant, not only when its blooming, but the entire process including the dying. She compares this to the way she makes her bento boxes. ¨You have to appreciate what you eat, from the seed to the fruit, to the harvest, untill you digest it.¨ So Uno creates edible Ikebana (flower art pieces) and after enjoying its beauty she eats them. Is it cruel? Or humorous and honest? www.unobento.com

The 14th of November we invite you to the Harvest and ‘Edible Story’ Ikebana Workshop

The radish is a fast growing vegetable that looks gorgeous. It will take a radish only 20 days to produce a beautiful red body. You can watch the radishes grow in the window at Churchillweg 25 and keep track of their progress with the counter. To give them some extra time because of the autumn temperatures, we will harvest 30 days after sowing. Uno will give an ‘Edible Story’ Ikebana workshop and afterwards we will prepare some typical Japanese dishes with radish and eat them together. You are welcome  on the 14th of November from 14:00 until 17:00 In a corona proof setting at Maakfabriek, Churchillweg 21, Wageningen. 14:00 Uno will introduce herself and her work. 14:30 Harvest at the Window galery. 15:00 Edible Ikebana workshop 16:00 Prepare radish based Bento 16:45 Eating our creations! This workshop is for free, please subscribe by sending an email to maakfabriek.org@gmail.com See you there!

7 Houses

The MakeFactory visited 7 countries. The 7 houses in this exhibtion each represent one of the visited countries. You are invited to enter the houses and to listen, watch, feel and experience them for yourself.
More and more people are on the move. People travel for their work, tourists travel further away, and huge numbers of refugees leave their countries. Not only data and goods are covering larger distances, also people move more frequently and further away. What is everyone looking for? For refugees we might think it is clear: They need to leave from where they are. They are not so much looking at the place they are going to, as they are wanting to get away from where they are. Any place is better then the home location. Sometimes you hear people say: ‘We don’t want any fortune hunters’. But why actually not? Is some one who is going to search for happiness not a good contributor to society? Would we rather have people showing of their misery so we can be sure that they are not just here to get happy? And why is that any different for the massive amount of tourists that walk all over Thailand or Venice each year? Aren’t they fortune hunters too? You might argue that they are paying for their stay. Maybe, yes, but does paying for your visit make it a better visit? Tourists are paying to change local environments into a showcase. Into an environment that has become unavaillable for the local residents and isolated from its surrounding. Contact with ‘home’ is not always clear anymore. Poeple work in other cities, their social contacts are being maintained via social media, you congratulate via WhatsApp. And if you by chance walk the street you are lokking at your phone. Are people still feeling enough at home in their neighbourhood? Maybe the new being at home is now being on the way….?

Living Doll

Living Doll started up a long long time ago: a giant baby of polyester. I was supposed to make twelve of them, out of a big mold. Twelve giant babies turning slowly around on a old merry-go-round. A grown-up could easily sit on it’s lap. The baby has a buddha-like position, why? Babies are a special kind of people. The find almost everything okay. Everything is enormous to them and new and a potential danger. But they seem to have the least of trouble with that, as long as they are not too thirsty, or too hungry or too cold, they are pretty much okay with everything. Living Doll was shown at Gallery Art on the Move, Arnhem. The Living Doll finds a perfect spot in my investigation of the relation between the 2- and 3-dimensional space, and the relation between the ‘real’ world and the virtual or imaginable world. Also part in this investigation are Spatial room and Cardboard life. The living, laughing, talking childs face is projected on the static doll. Sneak preview of this installation was shown at the World Travel event. Below some extra pictures of living doll at my studio. @dienkegroenhout pop2 pop3 pop4 pop5 pop6

Traffic Jam!

“Around 63.000 people rush themselves every morning in their cars to the highway to join the line and then stand still. They rush themselves, and go nowhere. The defenition of a highway is ‘a conflictfree road for fast motorised traffic that doesn’t have to stop or wait at junctions’.  Every morning though, the highway transforms into a gigantic roadblock. Discription: ‘Traffic Jam!’ is a 4 km long installation that resambles a ‘normal’ morning rushhour in the Netherlands, on scale. The installation consists out of 80.000 white porcelan cars and lorries like we see them every day driving on the Dutch roads. Or actually standing still on the Dutch roads. The installation ‘Traffic Jam!’ means to give the audience an insight on the scale of the traffic jam problem the Netherlands has. Where other countries have usually traffic jam problems around the big cities, the Netherlands is practicly all jammed up. Because the cities are so close together, it can happen that the entire route from one to another is filled with still standing cars. If you want to build an entire morning rushour on, let’s say, a scale of 1:87 (standard scaletrain), you will see a ‘Droste effect’ appearing. The installation itself becomes this long that it has the size of one pretty large jam. In order to see the whole amount of cars at once there needs to be made a special construction of ‘scaleroads’ that turns and twists around itself and can be connected on walls and ceilings, and should maybe even go out of the building and come in again through the back to fit the 4 kilometers. The installation will be supported by usefull, interesting or bizarre information about the traffic jam problem. Ranging from the economical loss for employers per traffic jam minute, to irritation by the traffic jam drivers, and from how much money is being made with traffic jam, to how it can deliver the traffic jam drivers  a moment of relaxation and time for oneself. File was shown (in parts) at Art Aalsmeer, Otto and at Boxxshop, Lloyd Hotel, Amsterdam.

Small Worlds

Small Worlds was shown at Pluk de Nacht Festival, Amsterdam and at Fringefestival, Amsterdam. Small Worlds is an installation made in asignement of ‘Pluk de Nacht‘. The outdoor filmfestival on the pear in ‘het IJ’ in Amsterdam. For this installation Dienke Groenhout en Gigja Reynisdottir collaborated together just like they did for the installation Pocket Garden. Small Worlds is a small bluescreen studio. One camera films the person in the caravan. Another camera films the miniature world under the plastic dome. These two images are being mixed and the ‘actor’ appears in the small world. The public was invited to operate the first camera and people invented quite alot of new fun stuff! Check the films and pictures. Small Worlds came to exist as the outcome of some funny expiriments with miniature filmsets that Dienke was showing on TV’s. When Gigja saw them she thought it would be so cool to actually be ín those sets. Together they invented a way which made this possible. Beam you up Scotty! Pictures of the filmsets:

Pocket Garden

Zoem Zoem “If you see its silver gleaming armor you may expect something hightech inside, maybe a cockpit with flashing lights.  But nothing could be less true! Once you step inside you will be outside again. With this Pocket Garden you are not bringing your house on wheels, but you’re bringing your camping spot. With this caravan you can easily camp in the middle of Shanghai, or any other spot where the urbanization is an unstopable fact.” Inside of Poket Garden is a sweet romantic flowergarden, complete with pond and fountain! Roll out your sleepingbag on the grass and you will spent the night in your own private garden under the stars. Grow your own fruits and vegetables and you will have healthy food for on the road!” Pocket Garden was made by Dienke Groenhout en Gigja Reynisdottir in assignment of Pluk de Nacht 2007. Pocket garden was shown at: Robodock, (Amsterdam), Witte de With, (Rotterdam), Camping Rotterdam, (Rotterdam), Noorderzon, (Groningen), Kunstvlaai, (Amsterdam) Gogbot, (Enschede) amonst lots of other locations.

Peephouses

socialmedia installatie 'gluurhuisjes'Social media is hot. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram… If you do it well you can present an entire new avatar of yourself on each one of them. But does it make the world more social? In the Peephouses you can check out one’s profile through the camera’s en tv’s first. Like what you see ? You can directly meet ‘live’. Peephouses was made in assignment of Pluk de Nacht 2010, Outdoor filmfestival on the pear in ‘het IJ’, Amsterdam. Twelve wooden boxes are grouping together like the buildings of a small town. In six of them there are large looking holes. If you peek in them you will see somebody’s face really close by. Is this me? you wonder. Is this being filmed? But soon enough you will find out that it is live and that face, might be the person standing next to you peeking in that other hole!

Make & Mix

Makefactory organised a special series of workshops: kids from Wageningen worked together with kids living in the nearby asylum center. The series of seven workshops is designed by the kids themselves, in a ‘design’dinner at the asylum center. Klik here or at the picture below to see the booklet – created for the exhibition of the results, held in the asylum center.

Replaceable or Irreplaceable that’s the question

Replaceables is a campaigning project about the replaceability of workers. Someone I know worked at a big company. He told me he was at a meeting where a dozen of people would be told that they were to get fired. It was the third meeting like that in three years.  In the three years he had worked there he had also outlived three bosses. At the meeting some people wore yellow badges and some wore red badges. The yellows were the replaceables and the red ones didn’t have much to fear, they were the irreplaceables. I was shocked when he told me this and asked him what color he had. He told me his team didn’t wear any colors and then he told me he made the whole story up to check if I was listening. It is not far besides the real world, though, and together we set up this campaign. We made the actual badges and had the workers choose what they would wear: red or yellow….?

Art brush (Kunstkwast) 2013

Makefactory kids win prizes !!!! The Makefactory entered the national Art Price for children “Kunstkwast 2013” of the Art and literature magazine “Boekie Boekie”. The subject of this year was portraits. Of the Makefactory seven children sent in their portraits:  Eva, Pien, Maika, Ate, Jochem, Julus en Mees. On the 25th of May the awards were being handed out in Lantaren/Venster in Rotterdam. More then 100 portraits were sent in by children of all of the Netherlands and of all those children FOUR kids from Makefactory were selected for the shortlist of 12! Hurray! And ……believe it or not, the winner of the first price was…… tadatatada… ATE! Congratulations Ate!
Uitreiking in Lantaren het Venster, Rotterdam.
The Awards in Lantaren het Venster, Rotterdam.
Here you can see the works that Ate won the prize with: Title: “How I look like a rabbit”
ate2web
‘How I look like a rabbit’. Ate 9 years. 1e Prize.
ate @ maakfabriek
‘How I look like a rabbit’. Ate 9 years. 1e Prize.
And the nomminees: uitreiking venster
julusweb
‘Me as an astronaut’, Julus, 7 years. Nominated.
maikaweb
‘ Doll for teasing my sister when I am not around’ Maika, 8 years. Nominated.
mees1web
‘This is me standing’ Mees, 5 years. Nominated.
mees2web
‘ This is me jumping’. Mees, 5 years. Nominated.

What did we do in the lessons of the second edtion?

We have done a ‘super’ lot in the last Makefactory, so much that I didn’t even find the time to put all of it on the website! We talked about famous monsters that inspired many artists, like Godzilla and Kingkong. We talked about how you can make your self-made monster move or your machine, like Theo Jansen does with his beach animals.
Godzilla, een beroemd Japans monster.
Godzilla, famous Japanese monster.
Then we made cardboard figures that would move if you pulled them by a rope.  We worked on that for two whole lessons. Some kids made an animal, some made a machine, there were even scissors! Everything was allowed as long as it could move. In the second lesson our Makefactory kids build an electric circuit on the back of their figures to make the eyes light up! That wasn’t easy, but… everyone did it! Here you can see Jip’s beautifull dragon and the machine made by Jurriaan.
maakfabriek @ dienke groenhout
Jip’s dragon.
Maakfabriek @ dienke groenhout
Jurriaans machine.
maakfabriek @ dienke groenhout
Jochem with his doll (looks like him!)
maakfabriek @ dienke groenhout
Ole with his fox.
In this beautiful last edition of Make factory in which we even won prizes, we also spoke about Pop-art and collage and made a pocket monster. A tiny monster that you can easily carry around in your pocket and that jumps out of it’s box when you absolutely need to scare someone! There is a NEW MAKEFACTORY coming up after the summer holidays! That one is possibly a very special edition with cooperation of the Public Library. The Public Library wishes to make an art exhibition with children from Holland and children from Croatia in cooperation with a the Croatian library of an old monastry. The Library has asked Makefactory to develop a programm. We will keep you posted! Goodbye for now, but before you go, have a look at this: Two super nice photocollages by Sam and Eva. Look at what a scary story Eva’s work is telling you, look at the scared babyface of the figure on the right! Well done!
maakfabriek @ dienke groenhout
Eva’s collage
maakfabriek @ dienke groenhout
and Sams !