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Sara Vrugt would prefer to embroider the world all over again. Together with a lot of other people. Normally, she works with needle and thread. She calls her practice Craftivism. A non-aggressive form of activism in which meeting the other person and making something by hand together is essential. For Vrugt, this is the way to make a topical social issue discussible and visible. It is also the way to get to know and understand each other and the world better. For example, she embroidered a poem on chairs in the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam, the words of which came from conversations with local residents, prostitutes and tourists about the significance of this building in their red light district(Dust for thought, 2013/14). In 2020/2021, she embroidered an entire forest with more than 1,000 people to draw attention to deforestation worldwide(100,000 trees and a forest of thread). At the same time she had 100,000 trees planted.

For the Edith Stein College, Vrugt chose a different material. The approach remained the same. Together with the pupils, she felled a tree and sawed it into pieces. In addition, in earlier workshops she and the pupils had made models for the future sculpture that would be erected in their schoolyard. From small slats, they each built a proposal for an attractive sculpture. The project is not called Looking with your hands for nothing. Vrugt distilled the interesting parts from all the models and used them to compose the final sculpture. It was made from the beams of the tree that had been cut down.

In secondary school, you learn to work in a structured way. While in the unfinished adolescent brain chaos often prevails. This contrast can be physically experienced in this monumental sculpture. Pupils climb on it every day. Or they hide underneath it. Looking with your hands in optima forma.