An interview with Annemie Maes, during the Burning Ice #04 festival, at the Changing Tents project:
OpenGreens at ChangingTents

This is the OpenGreens Tent, it's a tent on gift economy, exchange of goods and services, out of the OpenGreens. And the OpenGreens are strange little green places in urban contexts in the city where culture and nature meet. So like wastelands or rooftop gardens or some tracks next to the railroads or a little patch on the sidewalk where plants start to grow suddenly.

From there, we collect all edibles, like wild plants that are edible, herbs, all these kind of stuff. And we dry it and we make tea of it.

From there, we collect all edibles, like wild plants that are edible, herbs, all these kinds of stuff. And we dry it and we make teas of it.

This weekend's offer in exchange for other goods, you can come and work in our garden, or you can give a workshop, you can talk about historical facts of those places or you can do whatever… Like the kids, they made some drawing, we got some books in place. Well, it's, yeah, just like discussing and trying to see what we can do together, without money, and that gives a valuable thing in the end.

We have an edible forest rooftop garden. We have bees in the garden. We have 5 beehives, so we have a lot of honey. We monitor these bees with all kind of technological means. Because we are an art collective and we work with media and technology. So we build enhanced beehives, where we monitor the bees, how they grow, how the colonies grow overtime, where the bees go in the city to get their nectar. We let the bees inspire us to organize performances in the public space, like bee walks or botanical walks.We build a lot of things, strange devices in the gardens, like wind clocks.

We have our own wind time, that is generated by ecological processes. For example here, this wind clock is connected to a computer and on the computer I had a list of all the plants in the garden and with the movement of the wind, you have the names of the plants that are written on the screen and they overwrite themselves. The more wind the bigger the font.

We work, for example, with conductive fabrics in plants, who measure the plants' emotion and all these kinds of things.

So, it's not only about greenery and edible stuff. Let's say that these green things inspire us to make artworks with technological input.

This is the map of Brussels. You have 8 small speakers. They are placed on spots where the bees go to take the honey, actually. So it's all in parks and gardens. Like, for example, the wasteland of Thurn & Taxis. Because that's the place where they often go. I'm sure of that. They also go, for example, to the linden trees of the Fish Market, and they go to the little park at the Basiliek van Koekelberg. We try to trace a little bit, where they get their stuff from.

This is an experiment that I did to see how far you can go in the heart of the winter with growing plants. It's just a stupid little experiment. But, on the walls, that's homemade compost. It's really nice to feel, the compost. It really feels a little crumbly, crumbly in your fingers, it's nice.

So people can take that also. Give it to the plants at home, or just put it in such a little flower and start your mini little OpenGreen at home.

That are all dried herbs which are mixes for teas. There are some seeds. There are olives, from our olive trees. And then you have the honey of course, at the right. Some of the pots that are in between are exchanges that people gave already, in exchange. There's some jams that I got, some drinkable stuff. Some other people just gave some ideas for things I can make. Other people, they will come and work in the garden. Some people proposed to give workshops…

In this book, there is everything on the gardens.
So there is one garden on the rooftop of out artist collective. OKNO is the name. That's a wild flower garden, in that garden we decided; so, it's an artificial garden, because it's on a rooftop, we started it from scratch. And then we decided to let it go and see what the birds and what the wind brought us, in flowers. So it's full of wild flowers. But we monitor it in a clear way to see how the evolution is going on.

And the other garden in the Rue de Flandres, at Place Sainte-Catherine. It's on top of a parking lot, and it's an edible forest rooftop garden. An edible forest means, that everything is edible, first of all, and that plants are growing in layers. That way they benefit from each other's companionship, let's say. So, you have the low layer, you have a higher layer, and then you have the trees.

We're busy with the kind of stuff of Buckminster Fuller, on which also these hexayurts are inspired. It's a visionary American architect and inventor who mainly worked in the 50's, 60's, 70's. And he invented this geodesic dome.
That's on the rooftop of OKNO, we're busing with installing solar panels and the whole network for the transfer the data of the gardens.

These are other windmills. This was a big windmill that we built. It's 3 meters high, this one. We built it during a workshop week in France, in St Erme at Jan Ritsema's place, in PAF.
This is another windmill that is at Verbeke Foundation now. It's from one of my colleagues. It's in a network… it is turning around and every time that the two frames are in one line, it takes a picture; because there is a webcam integrated, and that picture is sent to a similar windmill that is set up in Denmark, on an island. And the projection of this place, which is at Verbeke Foundtation is projected in a box on the windmill in Denmark. And then the picture of Denmark is projected here. It's an installation, a networked installation with wind.

This is in Kravín, that's out of Prague. It's other people with whom we work that are living there and we did also workshop-weeks there for building strange devices. To catch the wind.

This is at OKNO with pollepels from IKEA. Devices.

You see here, we are also busy measuring the emotions of the plants. This was a device that we tried to build that was based on the lie-detector. And the lie detector, you know, is working with sweat on your skin. So we tried to work with the sap of the plant to discover, what they thought or were thinking at the moment. And with this data we made music, actually we made a concert.

I just want to show you… these are seedlings that we do every year, and then we distribute them.
These are the plants from the garden. But I was just looking for my solar cookers, they are somewhere. Ah here. This is the solar cookers that we built also in OKNO and it's a design that is used, not this design, it's another one, but it's used often by African and South American women on places where there is not really electricity, in the villages and in the mountains, for example. And they cook really with the solar heat that is reflected on the pot by using aluminum paper. So, we did it with umbrellas. And here we have the proof that the water was heated to 100°. Actually, it's some kind of similar model to this, that they make, foldable in cardboard.

These are some of the things we do at OKNO, in the OpenGreens.