After some thought I decided to join the SlowLab. This collective was resonating with me a lot in the sense that we were both looking for ways in which we could live a more resilient lifestyle and try to question our everyday systems and technologies to find better solutions for our everyday. It all started when we took a trip to Mallorca and tried to reduce our environmental impact as much as possible. As I was interested in Regenerative Tourism this made a lot of sense to me. We decided to integrate the slow movement into travelling and come up with slow travelling. While having different conversations we laid out all of our interests and agreed that the strongest thing we had was our vision towards a slow movement. This slow movement leads to a change of mindset and habits but it is definitely a challenge in this modern world in which we are so used to the rush of the everyday life. This discussions around alternative energies have been around for a while so the solar ovens, speakers, human powered electric bike generator and other stuff we're building is nothing new. But this collective is more about building a bridge between the existing and ancient technologies and our everyday actions.
SOLAR BRUNCH.
Our first intervention together was a Solar Brunch. Audrey and Gerda had been experimenting with different prototypes of Solar Ovens to cook their food with the sun. When I joined the team we decided to take this a step further and make an event in which we would be cooking for more people with the Solar Ovens. We contacted Connecthort because we have been volunteering at their garden and we think they have the perfect place for a Solar Brunch. Also Model Fest the architecture festival was going on at the moment. We were a bit nervous about preparing the food for 20 people fearing that it might not be enough. In the end we bought much more food than needed. The event was held on Sunday 8th of May at connecthort and was advertised by Model Fest, Iaac and Connecthort. This gave us a lot of visibility and we sold out our 20 spots for the brunch. Here is the poster of the event.
We arrived at Connecthort very early to set up the ovens and devices. We pre prepared some food and finished preparing the side dishes to go with the veggies cooked in the ovens. We put the food inside the ovens at around 10:30 am. We realised the big new oven was not warming up so much. We think this might be due to a window we installed in the oven. We still had the other 2 protoypes which were working better and were able to reach 100 celsius. Once the food is inside we are not able to take it out until we reach the desired temperature, otherwise the heat escapes and temperature lowers down. We had a lot of participants from different backgrounds joining us. We talked a bit about low-techs and Kris from Low-Tech Magazine which collaborated with us also explained some of his projects. We had some solar panels laid out that were able to charge your phone, power a soldering machine and our solar speakers. We laid out some questions for people to answer some questions about the event and we were able to gather some input. Here's a video of how it went.
After the success of this event we decided to do a Solar Brunch 2.0. This will be held as part of MDEFest. At the event a sustainability teacher reached out to us looking to collaborate on future events. We thought that was a great idea and we started meeting to discuss the organization of the event. We decided to host it on the same location but scale it up by inviting 50 people. The event would extend more this time starting with the brunch but finishing with a dj set. We will now add a stereo system to provide the solar powered music. We're experimenting to see if we can connect the solar panels to a record player. After the sun goes down we will switch to a bycicle generated energy source. Participants will be able to cycle to provide music and rotate with others when tired. We still need to work on improvements for the sound system and ovens. We are looking to collaborate with Taller Claro which is an initiative that built a cart holding a dj set and he goes around the city providing music. We're still thinking about ideas and the planning of the event.
We're still working on some improvements for our prototypes like making a new and improved Solar Oven, building our own bike generator and designing new products that people can use at home and adapt to their daily routines.
