Layers

 

Layers

Photos and text by Francesca Romana Rietti

 

 

Ringkøbing, Friday 7^th of August 2026

 

On our fourth day of work, we are back in an open-air space. We are at the entrance of the Ringkøbing Fjord Museum, Natur Kraft (https://ringkobingfjordmuseer.dk/en/museer/naturkraft/om-naturkraft/) and we gather around a wooden structure built for the 2024 edition (see in this blog Tuesday 13th of August 2024) which has withstood the harsh weather and today we will restore it adding new layers and putting colors 

The sky is overcast and the wind of the West Jutland’s coast is blowing steadily. We’re all bundled up, and many of us are wrapped in woolen blankets. We all seem a bit sleepy, and the tourists passing by on bicycles look at us with curiosity and puzzlement. 

The title of today’s workshop is Mud/adobe (a brick of sun-dried earth and straw/) and it will be led by Dragana Kojicic, a Serbian architect specialized in sustainable buildings made of natural materials. Having spent the first days of the festival collecting sand, clay, mud, soil, straw and preparing colors for today’s work, Dragana hadn’t yet met the group of participants, so she has chosen to start with a round of presentations. As a common thread to follow, she asked us to answer these five questions.

“What are your names? Where are you from? What is your job or your hobby? Why did you come here? What motivates you to get up in the morning?”

And so, little by little, we began to wake up, warmed by the temperature of the questions chosen by Dragana and written, in both Spanish and English, on a single sheet of paper that we passed from hand to hand, like a baton. Taking part in this small collective ritual and the unexpected sincerity of the answers created a small treasure trove of everyday stories – some of them quite personal – around which a sense of belonging was strengthened amongst the members of this community, brought together to explore the materials drawn from the earth.

E così, pian piano, abbiamo cominciato a svegliarci, riscaldati dalla temperatura degli interrogativi scelti da Dragana e scritti, tanto in spagnolo come in inglese, su un unico foglio che ci siamo passati di mano in mano, come un testimone. La partecipazione a questo piccolo rituale collettivo e l’imprevedibile sincerità delle risposte hanno generato un piccolo patrimonio di storie quotidiane, alcune anche intime, attorno al quale si è rafforzato un senso di appartenenza tra i membri d questa comunità chiamata a ricercare insieme con i materiali provenienti dalla terra. 

“They are magical materials,” Dragana reminded us, “they can be recycled endlessly”. 

This was today’s task: not to breathe life into a new work, but to engage with a pre-existing one that nature and the weather had worn away and transformed. It was a matter of creating through restoration and recycling. In this workshop, just as in those of twentieth-century theatre communities and groups, the experiment was, essentially, pedagogical in nature and consisted of carrying out a collective action whilst setting aside, for a while, the pressure of time. Just as in the process of creating a performance: layer by layer, our little polis worked to bring a shared project to life.