Today I want to share a summary of a conversation I had with a friend

“I spent all weekend building a cave.”

“A cave?”

“Yes - my friend and I are teaching a class on art history to kids, and I want the first lesson to be about cave-painting. So I made a cave for them to draw on.”

“I spent all weekend building a cave.”

“How?”

“Well, out of wire, paper-mache, and staples… it was really difficult, it would look good when wet but then once it dried the staples would pop out and it would fall apart. But then I realised that if I put the staples under less tension and let it come together organically, the cave stayed together. In that way, the cave was like a communication partner. Isn’t that interesting?”

“I spent all weekend building a cave.”

“All weekend?”

“Yes - my friend and I teach art to kids - mostly children of refugees or from lower-income families - for free as part of a nonprofit. But we only get government grants for the week spent teaching, not the time spetn setting up the class or the time we spend on paperwork to justify why we should get the taxpayer’s money. It’s 3 days I have to spend on bureaucracy afterwards!”

“I spent all weekend building a cave.”

“What did you think about as you built it?”

“Honestly - at points when I was on my knees for hours, sleeping in the studio because I was too tired to carry my bike downstairs, I was asking myself - ‘What are you doing in Berlin being paid so little to do this?’.”

“I spent all weekend building a cave.”

“Do you consider it art?”