Reading Assignment for Project #5 (Share)

Reading Assignment for Project #5- SHARE

Michelle Fuerst "Homemade Cook" website

The "Taste of Place" project was created by Laura Parker who is an established cook in the Bay area where she has worked at both Zuni Cafe and Chez Panisse which are two places that are known as the pioneers of the local and sustainable food movement. Parker's writings have appeared in the Slow Food Guide to San Francisco and the Civil Eats blog. She has been profiled on Chow.com and the California Report as well as the San Francisco Chronicle. On her website, the homemade cook has shown to have been part of a lot of different projects but only five projects are shown under the projects section of the website. The "Eatsy Chef" project was created during the Winter of 2010 of Etsy's in-house lunch program called Eatsy. The project was planned and executed to have a diverse range of seasonally-influenced meals that served family's style for the company's 180 employees. The meals were sustainable sourced, diverse, and deliciously enjoyed by the employees as well as the whole community. The "Yes We Can" project created recipes and had workshops on how to safely preserve fruits and vegetables. The project allowed large numbers of people to participate in communal food production and in its inaugural year, the project canned over a thousand pounds of tomatoes, Blenheim apricot jam and bread & butter pickles. There are about three other projects listed on her website but they all show Fuerst's desire to provide ingredient-driven, responsibly sourced, and traditional handmade cooking methods to provide delicious food to people. The response to her projects and others that she has taken part in has been outstanding and rewarding in allowing her to share food that is healthy to you and the environment. 


Source: http://www.lauraparkerstudio.com/tasteofplace/index.html 

Susanne Cockrell and Ted Purves of Temescal Amity Works

The Temescal Amity Works was a four year project that lasted from July 2004 to January 2007 in the Temescal neighborhood of Oakland, California. The idea behind this project came to Cockrell and Purves when they wanted this to be a way to localize people's attention and to restructure people's attention to work in a community that many people are not used to. The project was designed to be a social sculpture that got inspiration from historical models of mutual-aid societies, barn-raisings, DIY collectives, and urban communism. The Big Back Yard and Reading Room are two interlocking programs that were created to see how a specific community built relationships through essentially personal and casually tailored economies. The Big Back Yard was constructed as an Italian-American immigrant community that had citrus and fruit trees all around it. To this day, the fruit trees still bear fruit while the culture behind those who planted has faded away. On the website, a picture of the hand-built, steel pushcart that was made to collect surplus fruits and vegetables from neighborhood yards which was given away fresh or re-distributed in form of fruit butters and collective marmalades. Whereas the other room (The Reading Room) which is located at a storefront area just off of Telegraph Avenue made a contextualized ongoing experience of the Big Backyard through casual contact during the hours they were open. In addition to that, a series of public events, film screenings, and a small resource library was found to be provided by The Reading Room. Many artists, historians, and others gathered together to make projects that overlaid themselves onto Temescal Amity Works in a productive way.

The project could have continued for a long time but in January of 2007, the creators made the decision to close the storefront and end the "public" phase of the Temescal Amity Works. After seeing the amount of the time the storefront remained in operation, the two projects captured the identity of service which became more ingrained in the neighborhood's "consciousness". The creators had the plan of having neighbors circulate their backyard surplus among each other but the desired outcome was not found to be the case among the neighbors. The creators hosted a final discussion in the space on the closing weekend. Many who attended the meeting felt like the dialogue and concepts generated through the two projects (storefront and programs) was what got the neighborhood really interested but others felt like the project didn't create a harvesting service for all. While many of these ideas and opinions were conveyed at the meeting, the input the creators received highlighted the core issues of practicing as artists in a community context.  

Source: https://fieldfaring.wordpress.com/temescal-amity-works/

Dying for the Other by Beatriz da Costa

Beatriz da Costa's project "Dying for the Other" was three channel video installation that dealt with the artist's lifelong battle with cancer. This was one her of last works of art before she passed away on December 27th, 2012. While watching da Costa's video, I heard the echoes of self-mutilating artist Bob Flanagan. Also, video clips of mice that were used in cancer research was projected and shown throughout different video segment's of the artist's life as she was going through physical and cognitive therapy after having a brain surgery. This particular project conveyed da Cost'a last days of life in a beautifully bittersweet way. Unfortunately, many of us have been touched by someone who died from cancer or someone who is currently going through it. The battle of any type of cancer is one of the darkest and most personal times in which the emotional toll is heaviest for those closest to the patient. A lot of times, the immense medical traumas are hidden away from the world and usually the pain is internalized by the suffering person. As it is shown in the video where da Coasta is walking with a walker to help her to get around. As she is walking on the street, people star at her and in a way she is exposed to the world and seen as not the same as everyone else. Few people want to be seen in public fighting this battle, losing their hair, fighting for their lives, all the while knowing that this may be a fight they don't win. 

Source: https://vimeo.com/33170755