21.04 National Tea / Banana Day
Text: Ingrid K. Bjørnaali During the stay at the Kunstnernes Hus, which day of the ceremony impressed you the most?
National Tea / Banana day!
What happened on that day? What were you doing?
That day I was supposed to do something else for some deadline I can’t remember, but then got completely immersed in building a tea hut/temple/cave together with Mari and Montse. Someone taped the banana peels from the breakfast to the solar cell powered rotating “money tree” sculpture Eirik had put up earlier. We pushed the tree into the low hanging textile roof- tea cave together with us and had a tea ceremony inside. The careful selection of teas we drank was accompanied with facts and myths and bodily movements made quite intuitively and collectively during the ceremony. A tea hut where we made our own truths. The hut was used solely for this one ceremony.
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If you could take away one thing from The Great Indoors, what would it be? It could be an object, healing, action, moment, or experience, etc.
One thing I treasure from The Great Indoors is the healing feeling of spontaneous collaborational efforts together with such an ambitious group of people, working towards a non-ambitious goal that demanded no elaborate purpose or plan.
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Text: Jinbin Chen
During the stay at the Kunstnernes Hus, which day of the ceremony impressed you the most?
The Tea and Banana Day
What happened on that day? What were you doing?
Some of us made different dishes with banana as the main ingredient. We had tea together in a temporary made tent. We tried several different kinds of tea. And I got a bit “drunk” from drinking some much tea.
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If you could take away one thing from The Great Indoors, what would it be? It could be an object, healing, action, moment, or experience, etc.
It would be the idea of the collective healing. And I think I am already taking it with me. During the residency, many of us hadn’t really felt the healing. Instead, we felt stressed from organizing so many different activities. But for me, I realized that this sense of healing is not a rapid nor a short-term thing. It comes slowly afterwards. Everytime I think about what we did, I am always so happy and fulfilled with all the memories. I’m glad that we did not just make a standard graduation show with our individual projects competing to be the star of the year. Instead, we took care of each other. This really has changed my mindset a lot to think about my future as an artist and how to work within the art filed, especially during that period that we just graduated and had to applied to a lot of applications for grants and studios, in which we kind of had to compete, since the chances were limited. Artists have always been taking the role of the one who gives in the theatrical binary of art. But what is left for the artists themselves after all the giving? I think it was nice to address this in the residency.
Text: Montserrat Llampallas![]()
The first thing that comes to me as a special moment within The Great Indoors is the tea ceremony, from building the little hut with bends and crooks and the available floating fabrics, to preparing and inventing ways to have ceremony. Using one corner of the house, half squished next to one another I imagine the rest of the house quiet now, waiting for a moment. I think I appreciate so much the tenderness of building with so much care towards something small and in a way simple and so intimately shared, sitting in a circle drinking tea, but also drinking the invention of stories and the gestures and the laughs. Some kind of innocence in all the moment (also like drawing birds!) that seems unapproachable sometimes, hard to allow oneself to it.
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Text: Ingrid K. Bjørnaali During the stay at the Kunstnernes Hus, which day of the ceremony impressed you the most?
National Tea / Banana day!
What happened on that day? What were you doing?
That day I was supposed to do something else for some deadline I can’t remember, but then got completely immersed in building a tea hut/temple/cave together with Mari and Montse. Someone taped the banana peels from the breakfast to the solar cell powered rotating “money tree” sculpture Eirik had put up earlier. We pushed the tree into the low hanging textile roof- tea cave together with us and had a tea ceremony inside. The careful selection of teas we drank was accompanied with facts and myths and bodily movements made quite intuitively and collectively during the ceremony. A tea hut where we made our own truths. The hut was used solely for this one ceremony.
If you could take away one thing from The Great Indoors, what would it be? It could be an object, healing, action, moment, or experience, etc.
One thing I treasure from The Great Indoors is the healing feeling of spontaneous collaborational efforts together with such an ambitious group of people, working towards a non-ambitious goal that demanded no elaborate purpose or plan.
During the stay at the Kunstnernes Hus, which day of the ceremony impressed you the most?
The Tea and Banana Day
What happened on that day? What were you doing?
Some of us made different dishes with banana as the main ingredient. We had tea together in a temporary made tent. We tried several different kinds of tea. And I got a bit “drunk” from drinking some much tea.
If you could take away one thing from The Great Indoors, what would it be? It could be an object, healing, action, moment, or experience, etc.
It would be the idea of the collective healing. And I think I am already taking it with me. During the residency, many of us hadn’t really felt the healing. Instead, we felt stressed from organizing so many different activities. But for me, I realized that this sense of healing is not a rapid nor a short-term thing. It comes slowly afterwards. Everytime I think about what we did, I am always so happy and fulfilled with all the memories. I’m glad that we did not just make a standard graduation show with our individual projects competing to be the star of the year. Instead, we took care of each other. This really has changed my mindset a lot to think about my future as an artist and how to work within the art filed, especially during that period that we just graduated and had to applied to a lot of applications for grants and studios, in which we kind of had to compete, since the chances were limited. Artists have always been taking the role of the one who gives in the theatrical binary of art. But what is left for the artists themselves after all the giving? I think it was nice to address this in the residency.
Text: Montserrat Llampallas
