Programma —

I MOONSHINE

Moonshine brewing workshop is an artistic interpretation of brewing your own liquor at home. The idea of the project came about when watching the creative approach of the nation to the development of technical solutions for homebrewing. Although the tradition is shrouded in mystery, in the recent years there has been research of this tradition and documentation of moonshine brewing in Latvia.

In the cultural and historical context homebrewing doubtlessly belongs to the intangible cultural heritage of the world. During this event the audience will be offered a chance to take a look at this tradition from a different point of view – not moralizing about moonshining as a social evil but revealing the inexhaustible inventive faculties of people in catering to their needs with limited resources. In the current situation every skill and ability is a virtue that gives you opportunities to use available resources. For example, moonshine can be excellently used to make herb tinctures both for internal use and external application.

II SOAP

In Latvian there is a well-preserved and popular idiom “to make soap”, which means “to make a mess” and is usually used to refer to nasty cases of deliberate mischief. But the soap making tradition itself has died out. When asking this question to women of the older generation the answer you will most often get is that every household used to make their own soap, but few remember the whole process.

Making soap at home is not a usual thing to do. That is easily explained by the wide range of detergents available at stores, their low prices and also the lack of knowledge and skills of the people. Nowadays there are very few of those who know what ingredients are needed to make soap.

Recently a large part of the society has started paying increasingly more attention to traditions and nature-friendly products and technologies. The aim of soap making workshop is to activate this tradition and turn the attention of the modern people to the extensive heritage of intangible cultural heritage and encourage them to use traditional skills in a modern context. There has also been some research of this phenomenon on a larger scale – field research, documenting the making of soap, the context of the tradition (like soap and detergents during war) and recording related verbal evidence. The audience of the event will be introduced to the traditional process of making soap, using economical and ecological resources – ashes and lard.