[-empyre-] the personal is political; art and life

[Amanda McDonald Crowley]

Hi -empyrians,

So Easter Sunday is a bit of a day of catching up for me. I'm baking in one end of my apartment as I write in the other end (I live in a railroad apartment, so this is a very literal description): I intend to share food with friends after I am done here!

so the subject line of this email is a perhaps a little obvious. But its been interesting for me to note that so many of our discussants this month have begun their discussion and descriptions of their practice by drawing attention to very personal reasons for embarking on what I have earlier described as their "research based art practice". 

I've copied extracts from various posts below, but in summary:

Renate and Amy have spoken about living outside of urban centers, and how growing food has become critical to how they live their lives which (unsurprisingly) also informs their creative and critical and curatorial practices. 

Stefani drew our attention to how undertaking a residency at a location where producing, as well as consuming, food was critical to a lived experience that similarly profoundly impacted her art practice and her relationship to food systems.

Hernani describes how the "Re:farm the City" project grew from a very practical research objective, and also to his commitment to developing open source (and collaborative) solutions.

Nicole spoke to her specific interest in food and health. And she raises really very important issues of food justice. These are urgent matters!! And here in the USA, there is little question they are deeply racial. The food deserts that exist in the heartland of big agriculture in America are very real. I know I spoke to the fact that 85% of "food" in American supermarkets contain corn product and Renate followed up with a commentary about her local supermarkets. But in the "bread basket" not even these supermarkets are easily accessible in less affluent, and far too frequently, predominantly black communities.

But I am also struck by how many of our discussants are incorporating their art practices into a daily lived experience, or maybe its the other way around: their lived experiences become part of their life-as-art. One of the thing I really like in Leila's description of the "Ecologies of Experience" work she is doing with Cary, work that she describes as autobiographical, is how she talks about a "slowing-down", in the off-grid portion of their lives. And when I was fortunate enough to spend time with them in their studio in Omaha, I certainly also witnesses that in their studio practice, the studio was an art installation of sorts, even as it was their live-work space.

As this list focusses on conversations about a networked experience, or networked experiences, I'm struck that whether we are discussing borders or nourishment, migration or education, the personal is indeed political, and collaboration is key to the success of a networked experience.

I'm actually really loving that we are hearing about so many projects that are not just about the aestheticization of food as a cultural commodity (food porn), but rather that we are discussing the food justice movement, cultural contexts, food policy, AND beauty. Beauty is essential. 

So Im going to finish off with a quote from Elaine Scary from "On Beauty and Being Just", one of my favourite go-to texts when I am thinking about art and the everyday. I've chosen this quote not because it is about 'the begetting of children' *, but because she refers to Plato's Symposium, where the discussion of love is an essential part of "conversation", but just as importantly because a "Symposium", at least in ancient Greek and Rome, is a convivial meeting, usually following a dinner, for drinking and intellectual conversation.

Food is essential to life. If art can help us find a way (back?) to good food, then we are having an important conversation.

I shall (re)introduce our final week's discussants shortly, but I hope you might all find that you're interested to continue to contribute to the discussion.

 “The generation is unceasing. Beauty, as both Plato’s Symposium and everyday life confirm, prompts the begetting of children: when the eye sees someone beautiful, the whole body wants to reproduce the person.” 
― Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just

happy easter, good people.


Amanda

* though that could send me down a rabbit hole about how good food, sex, and conversation are possibly the most important things in life, and all of them are enhanced through art.





On Mar 5, 2016, at 5:21 PM, Renate Terese Ferro wrote:
> I was thinking about the relationship to food our own family has, specifically how here in the middle of the state of New York, many of us have more a direct relationship to the food we eat for sustenance.  Though food seems to be a  little less of a direct ritual here within the city limits of this University town, not even ten minutes away, many of us live on and off the land  directly.  The days and the months revolve around the growing season.  In fact right now many of us are ordering seeds or sorting seeds from those we harvested from our garden last year.  We have been fertilizing our plots and planning where and how we might change the location of planting to not only rotate crops but also allow for plentiful light. Soon we will be turning the earth over with our rototillers (or by hand) and planting the early crops of peas, spinach, lettuce, onions and hoping that there will be just enough rain, not too much to wash away the seeds and just enough to propagate and nurture the new seedlings.  From the end of March if we are lucky to well into the winter garden crops of kale, beets and carrots we can usually eek out those last few crops past Thanksgiving holiday. 
> 
> Growing is just the beginning of the process.  The harvesting, cleaning, preparing, serving, eating, composting comprises time centric rituals. I was especially excited last growing season to plant original seeds my friend gave me from her Tuscarora Reservation.  I was thrilled after learning how to plant the traditional sustainable medley of corn, beans and squash in one foot squares provided a natural habitat for those three crops.  You can imagine how I was even more surprised when I managed to propagate old bean seed that I had saved from my own Grandfather’s garden from years before. 
> 
> We have learned that there is a symbiotic relationship between the land we tend the crops we grow, the environment that allows them or prevents them from growing.  Ironically my art studio looks out onto my garden Stefani and I have often wondered just why I do not spend more time thinking about the relationship between food and art.  Of course formal decisions always seep through my decisions as I plant garden rows, select various colors of heirloom tomatoes, or prepare a feast strategically that tickles my sights and senses.  Maybe I keep thinking about the relationship my own grandparents had to the land.  For them it was a matter of survival as it remains for so many of our neighbors.  You see just a a few miles down the road from Cornell University, on the edge of Appalachia, gardening, fishing, hunting, and living off the land is an absolute necessity. 
> 
> In our upstate haven we live in a rich and fertile valley surrounded by the Finger Lakes. I feel lucky and thankful and yes I acknowledged the privileged position that I negotiate from. 



On Mar 18, 2016, at 11:29 AM, Stefani Bardin wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> My time at Shu Lea’s residency in the Catskills had a profound impact on me personally as well as my art and pedagogical practices.  At the time it was connected to a farm run by Tovey Halleck + Madalyn Warren and they would deliver fresh produce every day (it was the middle of summer) and that is what we ate.  Plus the eggs, bread meat and fish (all local) they got by trading their fruits and vegetables.  Part of the residency gig was to work on the farm a few days.  The transformation for me happened in the immersion.  I thought I knew a lot about food - and I did - mostly through books - but being present for the slaughtering of an animal (then eating it) and harvesting your own food and then immediately eating it surprised the hell out of me in terms adding a layer of understanding that before just seemed obvious.  But it’s not.  Until you’re in it.  


On Mar 21, 2016, at 8:42 PM, Amy Lipton wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
>  I became personally interested in agriculture when I moved out of NYC at the time of 9/11 and contemplated survival as a potential imminent reality. That rupture and the dislocation of my life post 9.11 and living in a quasi-rural area lead me to attempt gardening for the first time in my life. This was after 20 years as a city dweller with little regard or awareness as to where my food came from. After many years I am still a novice at growing food, but I have a greater understanding and respect for those that do this for a living and as an art form. My first food related/gardening curatorial project took place in 2009. I was invited by the Schuylkill Center for Environmental Education in Philadelphia to curate an exhibition on a large section of their 450-acre nature preserve that had been farmland at one time and included a dilapidated 19th Century farmhouse. The fields had gone fallow from years of neglect and we decided to bring them back to life with 5 artists projects making use of the land. The artists were Susan Steinman (permaculture orchards), Habitat for Artists Collective (children's art and farm project), Joan Bankemper (medicinal herb garden), Ann Rosenthal and Steffi Domeke (American native plant garden) and Stacy Levy (Kept Out exclosure for deer)
> 

On Mar 8, 2016, at 7:26 PM, hrn>refarm wrote:
> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> I’m a designer, portuguese but I live in cambrils, cataluña. I’ve started the refarmthecity.org project 8 years ago and since then I’ve been focus my work on research the urban agriculture universe: seeds, soil, low and high open technologies, sensors, urban material resources aka trash and building together workshops.
> 
> it all started trying to solve a simple problem: I need a watering system, didn’t like what I’ve fond so I'll try to build one.
> but another question came at the same time: what about other farmers? what open tools do they use? 

On Mar 23, 2016, at 12:24 PM, Nicole J. Caruth wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> I started exploring food in an art context about ten years ago. At the time, I was working at the Brooklyn Museum, in a position that bridged the Education and Curatorial departments, where I collaboratively developed didactic texts and digital “interactives” with the goal of making exhibitions and objects accessible to as many visitors as possible. I was simultaneously working in the fitness industry where I was, of course, conscious of nutrition and exercise, and also training to become a Just Food Community Chef, which taught me a lot about food justice. In doing all of this work, it became clear to me that food was a universal point of entry into art, with many layers and possibilities for engaging viewers of different ages and backgrounds. I moved to another organization before I had the chance to realize a food-focused program at the museum, but my time there, and Arnold Lehman's community-oriented vision, were influential. 
> 
> For the past few years, I’ve primarily focused on access to art and food among people of color in the United States. I’m interested in what art and artists can do to not only raise awareness of food injustice but to actually impact how people eat—particularly people who look like me, people who live on low incomes, and specifically black and Latino youth. 


On Mar 21, 2016, at 12:27 PM, Leila Christine Nadir wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> 
> Ecologies of Inconvenience (which is currently in sketch form) tries to complicate the inquiry begun by "Our Daily Bread" by posing contradictions, tensions, and unresolved questions, by actually dealing with the dilemmas that we all face in being immersed in industrialized food but wanting alternatives. It is also is autobiographical. For over a decade, Cary and I have been maintaining a wilderness studio for half the year on a remote 50-acre property in the woods. Our dwelling there is off-grid, like really off-grid, with no budget or fancy infrastructure, and so we have pioneered all sorts of D.I.Y. systems to run water, to use a toilet, to manage waste. These break down all the time, and we have to reinvent the wheel constantly. The other half of the year, we live in a city with all the  modern conveniences. Building off this experience, and all the questions it has inspired for us, Ecologies of Inconvenience juxtaposes industrial infrastructure of food commerce with a series of personal gestures performed by us that detail slower, more primitive practices. Preliminary scenes portray urban quick-marts, fast-food restaurants, military infrastructure, produce factories, and industrial agriculture (and more) alongside us building grey-water systems, slow-cooking with microbial fermentation, making meals from scratch, cooking with a solar oven, digging out forest springs, and engaging in other off-grid acts. It's a meditation on sustainability, practicality, reproductive labor, creativity, economics, and the experience of time in modernity. Climate change might be an "inconvenient truth," but so is the news that technology might not save us and creating alternative systems is hard work. And we're also interested in the possibility of death, death, and what comes after hope. Initial research and shooting for this project was done during residencies at CLUI's off-grid Southbase last year, and at Bemis. 
>