Last week, thanks to generous funding from an EU Erasmus+ grant, Kenn Munk from the artist group A Secret Club based in Aarhus Denmark, spent a mini-residency with Wonderful Idea Co here in Freiburg, Germany.

I got connected with Kenn and his partner Annabelle and their creative and whimsical work as part of the Tinkering World Tour online workshop that I ran during the pandemic. Then we met in-person at Dokk1 in Aarhus for a library conference and we immediately discovered many connections between our practice and process.

Our goals for our time together in Freiburg were to get exposed to some of the local artists, culture and carnival traditions, prototype new projects based on cardboard, motors and the theme of “time” and convene a meet-up of local educators, artists and designers interested in learning more about tinkering-based education. This blog post is about the first half of the residency and there will be a second installment all about the workshop.

In a stroke of good fate, the time that we had picked for the residency coincided with the fasnet (carnival) time in Freiburg. There are all sorts of creative constume, intricately carved masks, unique wooden instruments and even kinetic scultpture parades that revelers create to celebrate this festive period. A Secret Club often has theatrical or costume elements to their projects so there’s lots of connections to their work as well. We spent Monday watching the umzug (parade) and preparations in the old city and getting inspired by the spectacle.

The next day we visited the gallery and workshop of local artist Claus Schneidereit whose inspiring kinetic sculptures make use of lots of “time” related objects and phenomenon. He took us on a tour of his exhibition and we took note of the use of sand hourglasses, interesting sound making mechnanisms and repurposed clock parts.

Together we spent a few hours in the workshop prototyping some initial ideas. Kenn worked on a Pepper’s ghost projection inside of a cracked egg while Claus and I experimented with making a cardboard, motor and switch mechanism that made one revolution each time a button was pressed. Spending time together working with our hands opened up many new ideas and conversation topics around tinkering, art and education.

On Wednesday we packed up our suitcases, strollers and cardboard boxes full of tinkering tools and materials and started setting up for the tinkering meet-up. We felt really fortunate to be able to utilize the Speilmobil workshop in the Mundenhof (a family friendly animal pak) for the event. Together, Kenn and I spend several hours arranging materials, building examples and covering the tables with paper for our intiial art machines experiments. Stay tuned for the next blog post for an in-depth recap of that workshop.

To wrap up the week, we took a short forty-five minute train trip to Basel to make a visit to the Tinguely Museum. The weird and wonderful sculptures of the Swiss artist Jean Tinguely provided a great collection of high-ceiling examples related to some of the themes that we had been exploring over the week. A temporary exhibition about the work of Otto Piene also provided inspiration for tinkering with light and shadow play and animated inflatables.

Informal moments to connect with local educators, see art, build prototypes and chat about our work builds a foundation for deeper and more long-lasting engagement. The weeklong residency with A Secret Club provided plenty of opportunities to take our collaboration further and I’m already looking forward to the next chance to work together. In the second part of this series, I’ll recap the workshop that we led for local artists and educators during the mini-residency in Freiburg.

'A Secret Club' Mini-Residency in Freiburg