Wooden spoon carving workshop in a GarageLab by Alex Römer, created for the 2023 edition of the UIT Urban Art Festival in Tartu, Estonia, under the theme “Urban Pauses”

A garage is a place for tinkering and experimenting. It is constantly evolving alongside its users, adapting to changing needs and activities, and is never quite finished.

The garage also extends the living space beyond the home. It offers room for personal expression, experimentation and activities that might not find a place within domestic life. Each garage can be individually shaped, adapted and inhabited, while the shared garage yard becomes a place for gathering, exchanging and spending time together.

There is hardly any transition between inside and outside. When the garage doors are open, the entire space becomes part of the yard. When they are closed, it turns into a private world of its own. By coincidence, the Garage Lab took this spatial quality one step further: with its roof missing, the space remained open to the sky, even behind closed doors.

I had a few days at the Garage Lab and deliberately started without a preconceived idea of what to do. On the first day, I furnished the garage with a few things and made a sign. Then I picked up a broken branch from an apple tree across the yard, sat down and started carving a spoon, something I had only recently learned from a colleague during a previous project.

Soon, curious neighbours from the surrounding garages came over and joined me. I bought more carving knives, and one spoon led to another as gradually more people started carving together. Word spread through the garage yard, the neighbourhood and eventually the entire city that anyone could come by and carve a wooden spoon.

Conversations emerged alongside the carving. Working together makes it easy to sit in silence, listen or join a conversation whenever you feel like it. There is no need to constantly talk or even look at each other. Unlike sitting face to face with the expectation of having a conversation, sharing a simple activity allows conversations to happen naturally, without having to force them.

I asked everyone who had carved a spoon to leave it hanging on the garage wall for a while, turning the growing collection into an exhibition. After all, I had been invited as an artist to an art festival, and visitors were expecting something to see.

But of course, people also wanted their spoons back. So I invited everyone to return on the last day, not only to collect their spoons but also to share a meal together. With the help of our neighbours, we prepared a big pot of traditional Baltic cold beetroot soup (külm peedisupp) for everyone who came by to pick up their spoon.

The soup was delicious, and its deep red colour was also a playful reminder of the occasionally bloody process of learning to carve a spoon.

photo credits: Alex Römer, UIT_Raatuse99_fotomorgaana, Saara Tõugjas_UIT