LOSING IS WINNING
1. Borrow a cart. It should be a lightweight open cart
or trailer that is comfortable to pull/ push by hand, e.g. a goods
trolley (a flat-bed warehouse trolley) or a garden cart.
2. Choose a route in the city (work-home, home-school,
supermarket-friend’s place, etc). The route should not be less
than one kilometer.
3. At your starting point, climb into the cart.
4. Promise not to leave the cart until you have reached your destination.
5. Ask people in the street to pull you towards your destination for as
long as they can /want to / are headed that way. Tell them that it is
for an art project, to win a bet, to raise green energy awareness or
anything else that seems to work.
6. While enjoying the free ride, ponder over / engage the puller in a
conversation about who’s actually gaining from this deal in a
(Western) world where there is an abundance of available biological
energy and the privilege is not consuming it but spending it (compare:
affording a meal versus affording a fitness club membership; the
skyrocketing number of jobs that require no physical effort due to
information technology and the internet versus physical activity, once
inevitable in competing for nutrition, becoming ever more elitist and
commercialized).
7. (Optional) calculate the amount of energy spent by the pullers and
the amount of energy spending sacrificed by staying in the cart.
8. (Optional) to tilt the trade balance,
actually make the bet concerning your success at reaching your
destination mentioned in point 5
© Kadri Klementi /// Tallinn, Estonia