What do you get if you mix the desire for a Cascoland coffee shop with two hands full of artists having to start to get their hands dirty and work together? Add a request from Nkosana Ngobese of C.I.C.I. (Creative Inner City Initiative) to run a ceramics workshop and the need to bake your own Cascoland cakes and you have the recipe for the Clay Oven Project. A way is figured out to produce our own outdoor oven. Internet provides a manual with a description and pictures of how to go about it. The pictures are printed out and stuck onto an outside wall near the place the oven will be built. First a strong foundation of bricks is made to place the oven on. A dome of sand acts as a mould for the dome shaped oven. Clay is worked onto it and as a finishing a layer of clay mixed with straw is added on. W ithin a day the oven is reality. Over the next days it is fired up daily to prepare it for baking. And not only for baking buns! On a Friday night the oven is tried out. Everybody involved in Cascoland is invited for a Casco Pizza session. In true Cascoland DIY -tradition all start dressing up their own pizza from the ingredients prepared by our chef Duncan and soon everyone is getting a slice of the pie. The oven proves perfect and all welcome the delicious Casco Pizza as a nicely peppered addition to life at Cascoland. T he ladies from Time 4 Change jump on the opportunity to run a little pizzeria and during the course of the festival one can daily smell the delicious products from the Clay Oven Project all over the site.

Nkosana Ngobese