'The indefinite city': join our lunch
| 1 October 2024Tomat
This Sunday afternoon, the students from Ligo, the Centre for Basic Education in the Rabot district, invite everyone to join them in cooking, sharing a delicious meal, and imagining the future of NTTent together. These students began the extraordinary "Tomat" project, which combines an immersive Dutch language course with gardening and preparing large meals from their home countries. In doing so, they also share their wealth of knowledge, skills, memories, and stories that lie behind growing and cooking food. This includes working with the elderly residents at Sint-Antoniushof, where the class transformed an abandoned plot into a lush space that nourishes, strengthens, and connects. In the NTTent, photos and snippets of their stories offer a unique insight into the groundwork of the Tomat project.
Urban voids, layered with meaning and radical imagination
This project also inspires conversations about similar public spaces in our city: undefined, often nameless areas at the fringes of the urban fabric, seemingly without purpose or meaning. But if we look more closely and dig a little deeper, we can unearth hidden layers of meaning in these places and discover unique stories that deserve a voice—perhaps even a platform and a megaphone! There may be unrecognised loss behind such urban voids, the need for social struggle, or a radical reimagining of what it means to live together in the city. The "Tomat" project does just that, through its caring, connective approach to the earth, food, language, and each other. Everyone’s practical knowledge of our undefined city spaces is valuable and welcome.
During this session, it will be mapped in three different ways: through illustrations by Klara Vanstraelen (Endeavour), through placemats where each person can write and draw, and through a tablecloth that doubles as a map of Ghent. These mapped public spaces will be the ones NTTent will travel to in the coming seasons.
The endangered Bloemekenswijk Forest and blind spots in the public transport plan
In addition to Tomat’s garden, two prime examples of such spaces will be discussed: the Bloemekenswijk Forest and the many disappeared bus stops (3,000 across Flanders) that, since early 2024, have left blind spots in Ghent’s public transport network. Activists fighting to preserve the incredibly biodiverse forest, now under threat, will speak about its vital importance to the local community. It serves as a heat-resistant sanctuary, offering respite from the hyper-functional city grid. The Ghent Bus Movement will also share stories from their funeral procession for the scrapped bus stops, held last spring at Zuid. These stops, now ghostly, unused spaces, disproportionately affect the most vulnerable in society. The movement advocates for a more robust public transport network as part of a socially just response to the climate crisis.
As this session, and NTTent, draws to a close, Tomat will offer us a delicious cup of tea. Stand-up philosopher Laura van Dolron, who has been following the four-day programme closely, will share her reflections in a specially tailored performance, aiming, as ever, to move us from head to heart.
