This is the story of building an oven, and it is the story of non-intentional giving. It’s a story about a world without money, and it’s a story about pleasure.
When two friends began to move their lives from the big city to the country and when they began to create a large garden and when they began to collect and recycle materials, the desire arose to have an oven like the one in the Familiafeliz Art Camp to have to make bread in order to be able to prepare larger quantities of food.
So the wish became reality. The place to build the new stove was found in an old open fireplace with poor ventilation. In addition to ceramic shaped stones, little cement, a lot of lime and even more clay soil from the finca were used to build the oven.
The mixture of clay soil, lime, cement and a little water is suitable for both bricking and plastering the firebox.
Clay is a grateful and dimensionally stable building material if it can dry out in peace and is protected from too much rain.
The construction of the oven was a gift. The goal was to create another place nearby where people can also gather, where friends can meet, cook together, enjoy food preparation and meals together.
Many who visit Familiafeliz ask themselves where the community can be experienced. Often you only see a few people. Many people don’t associate this with community.
In moments like these, when you build a stove like this together, this feeling of community arises. Whoever is there will experience it. Most people come to it later. They are then more attracted to the good smell of the meals. But they no longer experience this special feeling of community. That was the feeling of people who give themselves unintentionally, who do something for themselves, with good consequences for those around them, who walk part of the way together.
The oven is suitable for all sorts of things: you can make pizza in it, fish and meat dishes, especially casseroles, and you can bake bread and cakes.
Since the temperature inside only drops slowly, it is also suitable as a drying cabinet for cooking food after use.
The clay body keeps cracking easily. In the first few months, work is carried out again and again and small hairline cracks are closed with a clay slurry. After a while, no further cracks will form. The clay body glazes a little at temperatures of over 650 degrees in the combustion chamber.
Such an oven dominates a place. He becomes a social magnet. People will always gather in front of it to prepare food together. He will always feed people, a furnace of life that connects people, also in the will to enjoy themselves.
Food is FOOD, a means of life…
You can’t buy an oven like this, you can only get it as a gift, like the friendship of the people who now care for it and use it. Friends who have created their own social space and share with their friends and families.
