Forno Vagabondo
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Full project title
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Project Description
Forno Vagabondo is a mobile social oven that travels through the Vallagarina Valley (IT) on an electric cargo bike to cultivate caring encounters and food network sensitivities through the practice of sourdough bread baking.
The oven stops in parks, squares, and little-noticed courtyards where city and countryside merge, to stimulate awareness for the multiple interrelations between humans, microbes, material infrastructures and many other earth creatures that enable us to make and share bread.
Geographical Scope
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Urban or rural issues
Physical or other transformations
EU Programme or fund
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Description of the project
Summary
The Forno Vagabondo is a wood-fired mobile social oven that travels through the villages of the Vallagarina valley (IT) on board an electric cargo bike. It is a swarm of encounters, stories and sourdough bread baking, all mixed together into a convivial format to knead desirable futures.
The aim of the Forno Vagabondo is to ferment community in the public space through a series of creative activities centred on the practice of bread making. It seeks to concretise abstract ecological issues by making them tangible, and to raise awareness of the multifaceted economic-ecological interconnectedness.This is done by experiencing a tangible utopia in first person, literally putting hands into a new narrative. The oven thus serves as an interfacing practice through which dualities are to be transcended to create nature-cultures, ecological livelihoods and teeming networks of liveness.
The community spaces that the oven generates offer opportunities for exchange and experimentation to approach issues of sustainability, biodiversity and care for the territory in a convivial manner, attracting and involving different cultures of knowledge, and promoting mutual learning and understanding.
The project emerged from a series of practice-based design experiments in and around Rovereto (Trentino, Italy) and was implemented in spring 2020, a time in which interpersonal meetings were avoided and access to public spaces was strictly regulated. Precisely during this time it was necessary to enable practices of care and encounter, to reshape public spaces collectively and to stimulate the imagination of desirable futures.
Forno Vagabondo was realised thanks to the support of Fondazione Trentino per il Volontariato Sociale and six partners (Ass. Portobeseno, Ass. Italia-Nicaragua, Ass. Multiverso, Ass. Brave New Alps, Ass. La Foresta, Ass. Goever-Cereali del Trentino), numerous volunteers and socio-material infrastructures contributed by the inhabitants of the valley.
Key objectives for sustainability
In order to live in harmony with our in many cases severely damaged earth, we need to engage in other forms of knowing, acting and being-with. These forms must be radically relational, that is, we must recognise that we are interdependent with human and more-than-human worlds.
One of Forno Vagabondo's main goals is fostering a greater understanding of the interdependencies between sustainable agriculture, biodiversity, circular economy and the importance of zero-km lifestyles. This also means raising awareness of living food webs and challenging anthropocentric attitudes.
Fermenting bread makes these interdependencies and the ingredients we need for regenerative, sustainable futures tangible: time, healthy ingredients, care for others even more-than-humans, rituals, rhythms, a healthy environment, love for strangers and a little magic. The success of a ferment is in fact based on a baking-with-act, a deep and careful observation of the environment and the microbial world, engaging in uncertainty and uncontrollability. Through the Forno Vagabondo’s activities, adults and children could come into contact with all these different perspectives linked with healthy food self-production and consumption.
The format Forno Vagabondo tries to bring transportation, convivial production of bread, means of production (e.g. through a puppet show that tells the story of how a seed becomes grain), tastings and sharing, as well as caring practices all into one place, with the objective to experience production not as something alone-standing, but as deeply connected to receiving and providing livelihoods for others (human and more-than-humans).
Finally, the project aims at reinforcing the network of ecological actors in the valley, by creating a common ground for exchange, involving them in the oven’s activities, and supporting the ethical purchasing group connected to local farmers and mills born from its activities.
Key objectives for aesthetics and quality
Design has always been very strongly connected with giving form. Forms and aesthetics tied to unsustainable consumer cultures surround us in our everyday lives. In the journey of the Forno Vagabondo we have tried to stimulate new aesthetics and forms that challenge homogenisation, standardisation, competition and extractivism, embodying values such as cooperation, pluriversity and sharing.
The activities around the Forno Vagabondo seek to actively challenge the prevailing aesthetics of bread (which in Italy is white, industrially produced yeast bread) through a collective and open exploration of ingredients, shapes, and colour combinations, slowly discovering new textures and flavours, and challenging common perceptions. Many participants were very unsure and had never made bread themselves before. We tried to detach from prevailing aesthetical standards focussing more on unusual appearances and thereby inviting participants to creatively understand themselves as actors in an interwoven network of life.
The breads baked in the Forno Vagabondo have the unique flavour of wood-fired ovens, a spicy note, a slightly sour character, a barely burnt crust and an infinite variety of shapes. The sensual-aesthetic experiences formed around the oven alone were enough to arouse curiosity for this unusual bread and entice the participants to deepen what they had experienced.
By fermenting bread together, we stimulate the imagination of what a different, sustainable agricultural culture might taste, smell, or look like and communicate diverse sustainable ethics through bread.
From the question of “what we need to do in order to savour these smells and tastes in the future” the Forno Vagabondo activities aim to activate transformation processes towards more solidary and just futures.
Key objectives for inclusion
The whole process from project development, to the construction of the oven, to the implementation of the Forno Vagabondo activities was done in a participatory way and in close collaboration with local associations that have been active in the valley for years.
During each stop, a person or group from the local communities was invited to contribute their knowledge and co-design a flexible format that would allow for continuous participation of passers-by. Among others we invited a herbal expert, a puppeteer, a local water expert, and a group of farmers and millers. This involvement not only enabled mutual learning, but also rootedness in the local community and tailored access to people with different life realities.
The format of the mobile social oven had at its core the aim to strive for a more inclusive environmental education by bringing the activities to the people in the public places where they usually spend time.
In general, we tried to hold the donor-based Forno activities at family-friendly times in places that created new access points. There were opportunities to be randomly contaminated by the oven on the street, to pick up some sparks by listening to the puppet show, to taste or put your hands in the dough, but also to get involved and lovingly accompany the oven on its journey. We tried to make participation possible through multiple activities and different depths in order to foster a broader inclusion.
This happened also by keeping material expenditure low, making learning materials easily accessible and usable for all, and triggering low-threshold moments of environmental education.
What is more, practical and creative activities were always combined with storytelling, exploratory walks and bread baking. The focus on "making" and the presence of various possible entry points were central and unifying elements of all activities that helped to start spontaneous conversations rather than top-down educational moments.
Results in relation to category
The journey of the Forno Vagabondo brought great joy not only to the participants but also to passers-by who saw the oven mounted on a bicycle that seemed almost alien travelling through the valley. Through its diverse activities, the format has contributed to reconnect people with nature, achieving multiple outcomes:
- A co-design process was inspired and fostered to give contemporary form to local traditional practices of the valley (social ovens, communal moments of sharing and a long history of cereal farming)
- Moments of low-threshold environmental awareness for people of different ages and backgrounds were activated through collective “doing” and sharing
- Non-environmentalists have been introduced to self-production of bread and to healthy and sustainable cultivation and food practices
- Participants reached a greater understanding of the interdependencies between sustainable agriculture, biodiversity, circular economy and the importance of zero-km through concrete practices
- Local circular economy was strengthened through the creation of an agri-cultural group and the promotion of local and organic cereals and mills
- The basics of environmentally-friendly collection of wild herbs and their usage in food self-production were explored
- Care and nurturing of a non-human being, a sourdough starter, was practised. Through this practice, awareness was raised on the importance of microbes, the relationship between micro- and biodiversity, and the influence of microbes as processors and contributors to our ecosystem
- Less noticed and less active spaces were re-imagined through the presence of the oven and its transformational practices
Generally the mobile infrastructure became a bridge to spread countercultural ways of living, thinking, working and being. This "vagabonding" strategy has also infected other projects in Vallagarina, so that for example a "iterating library" in Rovereto started its journey with a cargo bike.
How Citizens benefit
The construction and implementation of the activities of the itinerant oven was only possible through the contribution of time, material, zero-interest loans, knowledge, relationships, care, spaces, infrastructures and much more from a wide network of contributors that grew through the journey of the oven. The project received local funding, but it could have never taken place without other non-monetary and monetary contributions of the people involved, who made available knowledge for the activities, printers for printing flyers and educational material, woodworking machinery and tools to build the oven’s structure, bowls and other materials to make bread, sewing machines and fabrics to make aprons, oven mitts and dishcloths, and even wood to fire the oven.
Overall, a significant part of the educational material and ingredients used was collected from the surroundings. We often made use of elements present in the immediate vicinity of the places where the Forno stopped, such as herbs, grains or lichens. The participants found this aspect particularly exciting, as it helped them to rediscover and appreciate even more their life spaces. This kind of attention and careful look at the world we are part of often leads to a more interrelated perception and a more attentive care of the environment.
The oven’s journey took place in a time characterised by severe restrictions due to the pandemic situation. Obtaining permits for activities in the public space would have been impossible without the long-term relationships and site-specific knowledge cultivated for years by the network. Furthermore, the network knew exactly at which times and in which places people enjoyed the public space and helped to define a favourable environment for the activation of the local community - knowledge that was essential for the implementation of the activities and for the engagement of the diverse communities.
Physical or other transformations
Innovative character
Community Ovens have a long history in Europe and specifically in Italy. They were often placed in the centre of villages and collectively managed. Today these ovens are hard to find. Nevertheless, more and more associations in Italy are trying to revive community ovens - mostly with the aim of creating a place of mutual learning and social fermentation.
The Forno Vagabondo project has taken the community oven tradition as a starting point trying to interweave it with contemporary “glocal” issues and necessities. Some of these issues discovered during our place-based research were the dominance of cars in the area and the consequent low use of bicycles, the difficulty of engagement of people in environmental activities, and the lack of open, accessible and convivial gathering places. The design elements of the Forno Vagabondo were therefore the direct expression of an engagement with the local community, the place and its “glocal” dynamics.
We propose to experiment with these elements by activating an itinerant social oven as a germ cell for change - a travelling heterotopia. Compared to other projects in the area, the Forno Vagabondo was not just a place to bake bread, but a process of environmental education, exploration of the “bread system”, discovery of the surroundings, a chance to question patriarchal and exclusive community administration structures, and to strive for caring feminist forms of sharing.
The choice of an electric bike as a means of transport fostered curiosity and opened the debate on the importance of reducing fossil fuels looking for low greenhouse gas emission means of mobility. Through the itinerant convivial bread-making workshops we involved citizens in caring for the territory and raised awareness of complex and often abstract issues such as circular economy, the importance of biodiversity and adaptation to climate change using a simple language materialised in the various components of the bread-making practice.
Learning transferred to other parties
The Forno Vagabondo is a wood-fired mobile social oven that travels through the villages of the Vallagarina valley (IT) on board an electric cargo bike. It is a swarm of encounters, stories and sourdough bread baking, all mixed together into a convivial format to knead desirable futures.
The aim of the Forno Vagabondo is to ferment community in the public space through a series of creative activities centred on the practice of bread making. It seeks to concretise abstract ecological issues by making them tangible, and to raise awareness of the multifaceted economic-ecological interconnectedness.This is done by experiencing a tangible utopia in first person, literally putting hands into a new narrative. The oven thus serves as an interfacing practice through which dualities are to be transcended to create nature-cultures, ecological livelihoods and teeming networks of liveness.
The community spaces that the oven generates offer opportunities for exchange and experimentation to approach issues of sustainability, biodiversity and care for the territory in a convivial manner, attracting and involving different cultures of knowledge, and promoting mutual learning and understanding.
The project emerged from a series of practice-based design experiments in and around Rovereto (Trentino, Italy) and was implemented in spring 2020, a time in which interpersonal meetings were avoided and access to public spaces was strictly regulated. Precisely during this time it was necessary to enable practices of care and encounter, to reshape public spaces collectively and to stimulate the imagination of desirable futures.
Forno Vagabondo was realised thanks to the support of Fondazione Trentino per il Volontariato Sociale and six partners (Ass. Portobeseno, Ass. Italia-Nicaragua, Ass. Multiverso, Ass. Brave New Alps, Ass. La Foresta, Ass. Goever-Cereali del Trentino), numerous volunteers and socio-material infrastructures contributed by the inhabitants of the valley.
