Ethan Hayes-Chute’s dreams of wood

Ethan Hayes-Chute’s studio is located on Karl-Marx-Strasse in Neukölln, between a construction site and a playground – and even from the inside it looks a bit like a mixture of construction site and playground: the walls are lined with shelves crammed with a wide variety of materials, books, machines and tools. Under the ceiling hangs a bicycle here, a collection of postcards there; the large windows are covered with a huge sail and next to it is a small kitchen with a homemade pizza oven and a thousand different ingredients. There are also posters, bulletin boards, notes, sketches and boxes and above all one thing: a lot of wood!

Does Ethan find the things he needs in the cluttered workroom? At first, yes – when he moved in here ten years ago, everything was in order. Now the hit rate is 50/50, he admits with a grin. On the other hand, he sometimes finds things he’s not looking for, and that’s not always a bad thing.

And why all the wood?

Scene from the Camp Solong, 2018 session. Courtesy Dafna Maimon and Ethan Hayes-Chute, Photo: Mike Terry & Dan D'ippolito

But now we really want to know what is made of the wood – here we see primarily slats that are still waiting for further processing. That’s because, Ethan explains, most of his artworks wouldn’t fit in his studio at all, and they often only exist for a certain period of time in a certain place. For example the project Camp Solong by Dafna Maimon and him is a summer camp that has taken place in four different locations so far: in Finland, the USA, Switzerland and in Braunschweig in Germany. For each of these camps, an open wooden hut is built in which eight people can sleep, cook and eat for three days. The camp – that is, not only the hut, but also the people and what they do during the three days – then results in a living work of art. Ethan loves humor and absurdity – that is, when things are a little crazy or offbeat and contradict the “normal” course of things. What’s absurd about Camp Solong, for example, is that summer camps are supposed to be for kids, but only adults are invited to Ethan and Dafna’s camp. Yet they do the same things that children would do – primarily play. (Ethan thinks that playing is super important and that adults do it far too rarely). They also practice saying goodbye together. Sometimes the fear of saying goodbye makes us not want to start, try or get to know something. For many, this fear increases the older they get. But every day we have to let go of something small or big, for example the sun. For this reason, all participants wear clothes in the colors of the sunset: pink, yellow or orange. This not only makes sense, but also looks really nice in the photos, we think. And that adults should make more children’s things is clear anyway.

Scenes from the Camp Solong, 2017 and 2018 session. Courtesy Dafna Maimon and Ethan Hayes-Chute, Photos: Mike Terry & Dan D'ippolito

Manifesto for Camp Solong, Courtesy Dafna Maimon and Ethan Hayes-Chute.

Another thing that a lot of adults do less often than kids is make things up and fantasize. This is super important to Ethan and his art. That’s why he has prepared hundreds of little pieces of wood for us to build fantasy dream houses out of. We don’t need to be told twice, we jump on the blocks and become so engrossed in building that it suddenly becomes very quiet between all the wooden slats. Swings and whirlpools, slides and floating benches, houses that look like playgrounds or climbing castles are created.

Ethan tells us that we are the first kids to visit his studio and he looks a bit wistful as we head back with our cottages in tow. Fortunately, he is a farewell professional and who knows – maybe we will see each other again at Camp Solong when we are adults ourselves. Even if we can’t really imagine that right now ...