Reflections in an Empty Dish: Artist Matthew Shanley

I didn't find new things in the topics discussed, so much as in how they applied to, and were dealt with by these individuals and groups. The details of what people were working on, and how they were approaching these issues was what I found most novel and interesting.

I was surprised and delighted by the group dynamics over the course of the evening. There was only a short period of awkwardness as participants felt their way into the discussion. After that, people seemed to fall naturally into conversation, and the talk flowed multiple times from involving the whole group, to breaking into small, fluid sections, and back together again.

One thought I've been left with is the observation that the Berwick group has set these dinners up as an initial gathering of many different people. But you don't seem to have created a system or pathway for people to continue to build these new connections afterward. I'm not sure you need to be involved with that at all - the initiation component is a very different task, and at least as important. People are quite able to continue developing the connections they find useful on their own. I was just curious if you would ever be interested in getting more involved with that area.

I don't remember this occurring to me while helping to plan the dinner, but I was just thinking about what might have been added to the conversation by including someone who was a bit more of a man-on-the-street. Someone who might have an interest in the art scene, and who might have some involvement in their neighborhood, but who isn't as actively involved in the actual day-to-day, behind the scenes activity of these things, in a way that everyone at this dinner was. Perhaps the Union Square event might bring more of this point of view.

The conversation that has stuck in my mind most from the dinner was one about failures and their positive aspects. It seemed to do the most to challenge my normal modes of thinking, and provoke questions and uncertainties to muse on for quite some time.

Reflections in an Empty Dish: Guest Perspectives

“[It was new to discuss] the broader definition of 'public art' as something encompassing not only site-specific installations but also things as diverse as internet communities and dinner parties.” - Brian Knep

“In the week after the dinner I ran into other dinner participants on two occasions and though both encounters were brief, it felt like the kinds of paths crossing and re-crossing that end up creating community. So in this sense the dinner provided a first meeting and an establishment that there is something in common that might be explored further in the future.” - Judith Leemann

“What sort of outcome do you want to catalyze?  As I do not
make my money working as an artist in the Berwick sense of that word,
I am not sure what sorts of goals your community is reaching for?
Fame and glory for big shows?  For inventing First Night?  Clearly
nobody wants to be an art groupie.” - Jock Gill

“I enjoyed the food and the formal presentation of that. The passing of food around a large table does something nice – calls to mind special occasions and familiar settings. The boards in the food didn’t have so much of an impact on me though I appreciated the impulse of interruption/disruption within a context that was oriented towards connecting. The sound work I appreciated even more after hearing its concept described – this strengthened my sense of it being intended/used to envelop us and to keep feeding us back into ourselves. Having a private space to write was also nice – that there was something we could go away to do – that even being away from the table had a participatory component.” - Judith Leemann

“I thought the visual component [cardboard ‘spacers’ attached to the dinner dishes that blocked guests’ views of each other as they moved around the table] served its function and made me think about who to talk to and when. I enjoyed being able to zone out of conversation entirely to focus on the ambient sounds as well.” - Neil Coletta

Reflections in an Empty Dish: Susan Sakash

When thinking about how new media has been incorporated into public art projects around Boston, including at least one—the Virtual Street Corners project by John Ewing—that has come thru the Berwick PAI program, I keep returning to this feeling that technology is a tool with mixed potentials. Not only does new media provide a way to reach people who are not as easily drawn to traditional art materials as well as providing new modes of interaction. However, there also exists the potential for these same technologies to close down communication as much as it can open it up.  Often this happens when the artist of the project becomes so enraptured with the technology itself, that they are unable to connect to the individuals and various publics interacting with the art work. Or vice versa. Somewhere the conceptual dimension of the project—why these forms of communication are interesting—get lost by the coolness factor of the object.

It is interesting then that one of the first projects discussed at the dinner was a peer-to-peer game by James Buckhouse in which Blackberry users choreographed tap dances that could then be traded with other Blackberry users. This project, included in Boston Cyberarts 2003, seemed to reflect all that I feel is alienating about new media art. My question, “Why tap dance?” was met with the response that it could have been any kind of learning exercise; the importance of the project was the peer-to-peer trading. The way that the project spread virally was amongst Cyber Arts participants and their friends.  No one at the table, myself included, questions the exclusivity of the Blackberry as a mode of communication or whether this project succeeded in exposing new audiences to the artist’s interest in the overlap of “digital public space, physical public space, and the more personal network of person-to-person exchange.”  

Neil Colletta chose to represent this challenge of connecting to new audiences and the opening/closing of communication avenues by building brightly-colored spacers that sat in the serving trays which were passed family-style during the main course. In the build-up to the dinner, we expected that these would challenge and probably frustrate the conversations around the table. In order to provide a counter-point to the spacers, Neil served a cold potato-pea soup as the first course, the openness of the bowls reflecting what we hoped would be a candid conversation amongst the whole group before the spacers were introduced.

Surprisingly, the actual conversation flow seemed reversed from last dinner. Over soup – the open dish – conversation was slow to start. I posed the question “What projects do you know of in which technology has opened up new ways of thinking about public or alternatively have shut down these avenues?” right before the course was served. Perhaps people were mulling over a reply or maybe initially posing a question so early on threw people off?

As people slurped their thin soup with too small spoons, Phaedra asked Brian to describe one of the projects he has been working on for the Minneapolis show that George Fifield was curating, a revisiting of a video projection piece he did in Harvard back in 2006. http://www.blep.com/deepWounds/index.htm

The soup was cleared.  Neil and Matt introduced the spacer trays with the buffet of main course options and asked that they be were passed around the table family-style.  People seemed alleviated by this tasks and the table broke out in a number of smaller conversations, dictated by the divisions created by the spacers. Unfortunately, due to space constraints on the table, the options of where these trays could be set was somewhat limited, but in general seemed to break the long table into three or four distinct  conversations.  

This was one interesting outcome, quite different from that of the first dinner. Though we had all entered the main course from a similar point of reference, the threads of conversations reflected the ways each person was interpreting the things discussed during the first course. For instance, at my end of the table, Kenny Bailey of the Design Studio for Social Innovation launched into a conversation with artist Judith Leeman about how great it would be if social justice organizers and artists could share forms and strategies to find ways to build awareness around their particular areas of interest. At the other end of the table, Jock Gill was explaining how his company is trying to reach new… It was quite impossible to get an overall grasp of the topics being discussed and connections being made, which the Berwick team had somewhat anticipated and therefore spaced ourselves out around the table to be privy to at least most of these conversations.

This in itself is an interesting way to think about how the public, when interacting with any public art work, but particularly those which incorporate new technologies actually fractures into any number of publics based on previous access of or knowledge to that technology. Thus another unexamined public, in the example of the tap dance choreography, would be those who had never used a Blackberry before, but looked on while the person sitting next to them laughed into their handheld on lunch-break. Does the artist or collaborative group behind such projects have a responsibility to acknowledge this many-faceted public? Or is it fine to just create for a predetermined group of individuals, while remaining open to the possibility that there will be others who interact with the work in unanticipated, tangential ways that are still very real?


I ended up getting into a conversation with George Fifield, of Cyber Arts, about these very questions about responsibility and measures of success.  I was suggesting that the Berwick is only as strong as the projects we support, which puts a lot of pressure on the resident artists and staff, especially given the fact that we work with so few projects in a year, and encourage our artists to value process over product.  Feeding off of the snippets of conversation we could hear from across the table, George and I spoke to how artists and social justice organizers might benefit from thinking about the work they do as a kind of experiment, in which they can step outside and take risks without fear of losing funding, reputation. People are often limited by their fear of failure, while developments in the fields of new media and technology are defined by failure. These fields move forward in fits and starts, yet the public only really hears about the advances which can sometimes give the appearance of a seamless motion forward.

 The same misconception also applies to past social movements—people forgetting the amount of time and persistence required to make change happen on a larger scale. This then led to a comment by George suggesting that the Berwick rethink what defines success for our projects. When asked why we choose to stay involved with the artists and projects that come through our residency programs, I responded that the Berwick, or PAI at least, is most interested in what happens once these projects are launched into social spaces and the interactions that arise. Since most of the projects that have come thru our program are in the R&D stage, we are interested in making sure or helping them reach that next level.

With dessert, a rich ricotta pie!, the spacers were cleared and the conversation returned to a full table affair.  Peoples’ reflections about the presentation of the dinner, including Matt Shanley’s ambient sound installation led to an interesting discussion about food’s ability to bring people together around art. Phaedra talked a bit about Axiom’s most successful gallery exhibition, the Cake Project, which drew submissions from people who had never before made a single piece of art! Neil treated everyone to a brief history on restaurant culture and the evolution of eating in public spaces.

This was a wonderful way to end the night, as the Berwick itself has intuitively fallen into this practice of employing food as a vehicle of engaging people around art.  Events such as MMT, the Revolving Dinner fundraisers and “Tag & Release”, were inspired by participatory food-based art projects in the vein of collectives such as Red 76 (Portland, OR) and Rirkrit Tiravanija   Somewhere along the way, we recognized that the art we are most interested in supporting is art that activates us as social beings, whether it be interactive, dialogic or interventionist performance. And dinner—the act of getting together to enjoy a delicious meal—is its own kind of social art, one that engages people who might not typically consider themselves “art patrons.” There is value, I think, in making art in this way.  Food carries such strong associations with place, memory and family, thus food-based art works offer many different avenues for people to engage with a given project

Thoughts on the sound installation

I conceived of the initial idea for this sound installation after hearing descriptions of the artwork made for the previous dinner. The artists for that event seemed interested in the artwork being a focus of attention. They had the guests interacting with the work based on elements of the ongoing conversation.

In the spirit of experimentation, I thought it might be interesting to move the work to the periphery, with the conversation and the food occupying the center of attention. I'd let the conversation feed my installation, which would in turn create an ambient soundscape, adding a tint to the environment. This atmosphere would affect the guests at the table, even though they probably wouldn't be paying conscious attention most of the time.

Triggered by sound levels and textures in the room, the completed installation recorded chunks of live sound from each end of the table, processed it with software-controlled filters and delays, and played it back at the other end of the table. The idea being that the audio environment at one end was controlled by the activity at the other end, while using the actual sounds from the other end as source material.

I knew going into the dinner that the quality of the soundscape would be different than anything I had heard while developing the piece, because of the quality of sound created by this large group of people, in tandem with new microphones and new room acoustics. I built a bank of controls into the software to give myself the ability to adjust the audio we heard, but there was still a large element of uncertainty. There were two things in particular which stood out as unpredicted. The first was that, although the volume of the sound varied, there was an upper limit to this, such that when the conversation got lively and spread out around the table, it tended to drown out the installation's audio. I thought this was great, since the conversation was the most important part of the evening. The second surprise was that the audio tended toward the higher frequencies, sounding more like chirps than the beeps and boops I'd been hearing while programming. Others commented that these sounds seemed bird-like and natural, as if the external world was being pumped into the gallery.

Neil had a great idea for dividers to place on the table, attached to the platters of food. These could be moved, but would restrict your view across the table. I think the dividers served as an effective counterpoint to my audio piece. They focused the diners' attention on the immediate interactions with those around them, and drew attention to the physical space between participants at the table. In contrast, the sound installation seemed to work as a sort of wormhole - bridging the different sections of the table by traveling outside of the intervening area.

In the end, I think that these two pieces combined to create a balance between working with conscious and unconscious attention. If I were to expand the sound work for a future event, I would concentrate on creating more complex and interesting ways for the installation system to listen and respond to the activity at the table. If I were placing it in conjunction with the dividers again, I might try to rig up a video system to allow the installation to monitor the current state of the dividers, using that as another source of input.

-- Matthew Shanley

Dinner digestions of Susan Sakash

Susan Sakash undergoes a partial digestion of the food and brain stuffs of Meet Me At The Table's first dinner.

Looking back at the first dinner party, I now see the dinner’s site and formalized aesthetic as a good example of where Berwick is at as an organization and where we are looking to grow.  By many accounts, this dinner was a wonderful success (read Big Red and Shiny article ) but I personally struggled to see how the outcomes of the dinner brought us closer to  two of our goals; namely, expanding our network beyond the arts community, and challenging us to reevaluate the ways in which the PAI program has been operating since 2005. 

By holding our first dinner inside an artist’s private working studio, in one of the longest standing artist studio buildings in the country, the Berwick was conscious that we were working within a setting that was familiar to us as artists and curators, but perhaps not as comfortable for people outside of the art community.  It was interesting to note, then, how the dinner guests were all artists or arts administrators (Kelly Brilliant, the Executive Director of the Fenway Alliance, a collaborating partner on the “Lumina” project along Huntington Avenue, actually got lost for 45 minutes trying to locate Brickbottom Studios and ended up turning around and going home!) despite many of the guests being new to the Berwick.  

The guests’ comfort within the setting of an artist studio and their delight in knowing one another’s work, meant that the dinner conversation was very fluid and quick to engage with Sarah King McKeon and Hannah Burr’s aesthetic and conceptual presentation of the meal.  So while there was a wonderful exchange of ideas throughout the evening, the conversation still felt very familiar and affirming.  There was also a lot of positive feedback from the guests about the projects previously supported by the Berwick—and the congenial atmosphere of the dinner table did not bring out some of the Berwick's own dissatisfactions with those projects.  

As an organization, we need to continue to push ourselves towards being more transparent about how and why we are looking to redefine the way that the PAI program approaches collaboration and conversation.  I am eager to take what we gained from this first event in applying it towards the next dinner events.

Some Questions

I am committed to finding ways in which this project can help push the Berwick to our learning edge.  If the Public Art Incubator program is committed to supporting public art works that want to actively engage with social spaces, the Meet me at the table initative has to find ways to activate the diversity of perspectives that create these social spaces.

How does true collaboration happen? Rather than holding a jury process that selects an artist based on their vision and then working to match that artist with a group or organization that we hope will share that vision, how can the Berwick act as a bridge-builder to bring in the collaborating partners at the earliest stage of a project?  How can we address the imbalanced power dynamic that seems so prevalent in the public art process in order to bring participants to a more equal playing field? How does Meet me at the table represent that struggle (by privileging the artist’s perspective) and, moving forward, how can we learn from other models out there? What are the questions we should be asking to create an environment where collaborators feel as though their input is essential to the conversation?

In terms of shaping the structure of the Meet me at the table series, we are inviting guests to join us in tackling these difficult but potentially rewarding questions.  Each dinner will be held in a locale that, together with the backgrounds of those assembled, will inform the direction that each conversation takes. This practice of addressing the same questions through the lens of different ways of approaching public art permits the guests, as well as the Berwick, to remain in the position of learners. 

The Question of Form

Meg Rotzel reflects on the formal successes of the April 13th dinner and the Berwick's responsibility for inclusion in conversations around public art.

The Berwick’s first dinner party in the “Meet Me at the Table” series focused on the individual artist, and was generously hosted in Jill Slosburg-Ackerman’s studio in Somerville. We gathered a group of artists and arts administrators in order to begin the series from the artists’ perspective. This was a comfortable and natural place for the Berwick to begin, as our programs and founding members are artist focused. However, one of the aims of this series is to learn and grow from our current position, and build towards meaningful collaborations and connections with wider existing communities in our local area. The dinner provided a stable starting place to venture out into more complex ideas of the intersections of public works and my interest in social artistic practice and its formalization within the art world.

Our multi-talented artists, Hannah Burr and Sarah McKeon, made a work of art that focused questions I have about the junction of artwork and meaningful conversation. Sarah and Hannah designed a menu and ongoing game that took the formal progression of a dinner and made conversation between diners and the rhythm of a multi-course dinner sculpturally visible. I’m interested in artworks based in exchange that invite awareness of individual acts within communities that acknowledge and build upon social structures in a meaningful way. For this bit of writing on “Meet me at the Table”, I’d like to parse out the formal aspects of this project in order to understand the Berwick’s, and my engagement in socially motivated artworks “…that takes as its theoretical horizon the sphere of human interactions and its social context…” (thank you Nicolas Bouurriad).

The dinner was composed of 6 courses of passed platters requiring each diner to serve her neighbor. Each guest marked the courses, in turn, by clinking a glass, opening an envelope announcing the next course, and passing around a bowl that contained varied individual instructions. Each chair at the table was outfitted with what looked like saddlebags, simply and elegantly sewn from canvas. Within these double pocketed bags were piles of unfinished wooden blocks, some gently sanded, others brilliantly colored. I received instructions throughout the dinner that read “place a block every time you smile”, “do not make eye contact” and “place several blocks when you agree with someone”. One guest received an instruction that read “place 13 blocks when the table comes to a consensus”, which was a momentous and clearly marked event! By the time we were into the second course the table started resembling a little city with towers of blocks that marked moments and gestures within conversation.

The artwork, pared with the discussion topic of public artwork, unfolded together. We learned the game of placing blocks while we got to know our fellow diners. The discovery of the game, our cohorts and the food brought the table together in convivial conversation about the objects and landscapes that we were all building together. This lead to my understanding of the blocks as symbolic of each of our actions, verbal and non-verbal, within conversation and collective building of ideas. The table was evidence of our individual activities and their relationships to each other.

I sat next to Matthew Hincman and Laurel Demarco, each of us had own ways of responding to our individual instructions. Laurel built concisely around her plate, and at times avoided placing blocks, I started to enthusiastically build up and out into my neighbor’s space, while Matthew did the same, but first began with picking up his plate and building a platform underneath it. Eventually we became comfortable with the necessity to build into each other’s spaces and developed a kind of playful set of etiquette, which allowed for the use of shared personal space.

Through the flow of courses, activity, and shared neighborly building the dinner conversation proceeded, as many formal dinner party conversations proceed, beginning with individual conversations that grow to engage the whole table. Sarah and Hannah’s engineering of a standard set of known formal dining etiquette, multiple courses, a considered pause between courses to regroup, and the introduction of new elements (food, conversation piece), we moved comfortably through the evening. Topics of the artist’s place in public art were discussed ranging from convoluted bureaucratic processes, misunderstanding of artist intelligence, frustration with funding, the multiple rewards of making things in public places, the need for education in the field, and anecdotes of making and encountering public artworks locally and in other places.

All of these conversational moments were important, however, as an organizer of this event, the conversation represented an acknowledgement of artist centered issues, but did not bring my thinking about the public sphere and it’s intricacies any further. I believe this is because we were located within the artist studio and within the artist community, a place where I feel comfortable and knowledgeable, which was our initial intention. Regardless of my comfort, I was unhappy that I came away without moving into new territory or getting into the meat of public works. This is where the project of defining goals, deeper intentions, and fears of complexity and risk of the public sphere must begin. The Berwick’s project of supporting work that builds a foundation of equal footing of collaboration must reach outside of its known world.

I’d like to return to the form of Hannah and Sarah’s dinner party.  As described, and as pictures of the evening’s events show, the dinner party proceeded in a well choreographed and, actually, well known way. This was not apparent at the onset, as the rules of the game, and its manifestation unfolded in stages as the evening progressed. However, with hindsight, I enjoyed the artwork because already knew its form and rhythm, and how to engage because of its familiar form. What does this imply then, this comfort and rhythm that is culturally embedded within me as a (western) diner? What do I take away from this experience, now knowing that the entwining of a culturally known forms of dining and games directly provide a conduit for engagement with my neighbor in conversation and friendly making? And to move into shadier territory, what does this culturally known entwinement imply when I ultimately left  with the galvanizing feeling of coming together, but not one of progress towards my goals of, well, positive impact on my social sphere.

To be clear, the artists are not responsible for the ultimate questioning of the dinner party. I’ll begin by questioning the form that has become popularized by the art world terms of relational aesthetics and dialogical artworks. I believe that these practices, which are now acknowledged by the art market, and taught in art schools, may seem to “take[s] as its theoretical horizon the sphere of human interaction[s] and its social context”, but after taking a “theoretical horizon of social context”, it does not actually impact that context unless it’s willing to take risks outside of its own social context. Unsuccessful artworks reiterate their own framework and make us aware of context. But, I don’t believe they actually do anything with its’ privileged and coded context in relationship to anything, except possibly other art objects.

THIS is why I’m fascinated by public artwork and its’, at times, doleful complexities. It’s given the challenge of actually doing something, or at least that’s what I’ve put upon the term “public art”. The form of public artwork sits at the intersection of many desires and expectations, “... expected to address urgent developments in a diverse range of social issues and relationships. Artists are given the task of taking on these complex, problematic and ultimately socially meaningful intersections in order to lead up into engagement via a civic sanctioned process of collaboration in order to express the “community’s” ultimate desire of dealing with these problems. We all know that this is a tall order for an artist, regardless of how many committees diligently work towards these hopeful goals.

So now that I’ve teased out this morsel, it’s important that I, and the Berwick, declare a closer reading of our intentions within our Public Art Incubator program as well as our goals for this series of dinner parties. The Berwick intends to take on the incubation of temporary public artworks that deal with social public space. By defining the temporality and the subject of our shared social sphere we become much more focused on our goals for the dinner parties as a whole. We are (I am) uncomfortable outside our (my) formal practice of art. We must build and depend on a well-honed practice of collaboration; one that starts as its foundation in rethinking authorship at the onset and requires intersections of common goals with another body of socially minded people. We must learn from community organizers and healthy community groups. We must seek out places where both groups have moments in common and build upon them, always with the time consuming process of building together, not side-by-side.

With this important fact stated and known, I return briefly to the issue of form. It is the artist’s gift and the Berwick’s ultimate goal, to produce artworks that are formally satisfying and engaging. To make a full step outside of the terms of the art world and into the reality of people, our artwork needs to look and feel like it’s ours to play with and learn from. In this way, we can look again at Hannah and Sarah’s dinner party artwork and acknowledge its strength in precisely instigating play and exchange on a group level. What was missing was the Berwick’s responsibility, the inclusion of people other than our own. And with this, we proceed to our next dinner parties, charged with the responsibility of true and meaningful collaboration.

 - Meg Rotzel, April 2007

Notes on Evaluation

by Nova Benway

Note: This mainly addresses the Berwick’s desire to expand its network. It does not make much of an attempt to address the establishment of MMT as a platform for the continuation of conversations about public art among individuals, municipalities, etc. I think we need to discuss that more as a group before I think about it individually. However, I think some of the issues brought up here tangentially relate to the development of such a platform, post-dinners.

Context

What do we value? The process of public art seems, by necessity, to ask that question – and, significantly, to provide an answer, whether it is as open-ended as “collaboration” or as specific as “the contributions of Abigail Adams to American history.” When we talk about “community building,” a term so often mentioned in the context of public art, I think we are trying to answer that question. I think good public art –like good art in general -- holds resonance for a wide range of people. To me finding out how to encourage the development of works that do this seems to be the point of Meet me at the table - otherwise, why expand the Berwick’s network at all? Thus in order to answer the question of “what do we value?” in a Berwickian way and in the context of these dinners, we have to ask it first – carefully and deliberately. I am thinking here about how to do that.

Building on Dinner 1

Dinner 1’s attendees were without exception experienced, thoughtful and perceptive people. Yet they could not give the Berwick the perspective we needed to expand our network, because (as we know) they are the network. There are several questions that seemed unaskable at that first dinner: ‘What is the value of public art? What is the potential of art in our public sphere? What has to happen for a public artwork to be successful?’ Though to me these are questions vital to the evolution of MMT, their answers seemed to be already hanging in the air, because of the close philosophical associations between most dinner attendees. (Though a few of these questions were briefly addressed, the answers were not pursued.)

I am struck by how few people noted afterward that they learned something profoundly new at Dinner 1. I think it is the Berwick’s responsibility to guide this project so that meaningful learning does occur. We must be able to organize the dinners so that they are relaxed and enjoyable, yet focused. Chances are, if learning is not happening for the guests, it is not happening for the Berwick either. This may be one way to think about how to ensure MMT’s effectiveness. We have talked about facilitation, and I think the topic should be revisited. I have been considering whether in order to bring new groups into the Berwick’s network in a way that is comfortable to them, we must ourselves step out of our “comfort zone.” Finding a way to facilitate the dinners, while avoiding the role of teacher, may be difficult, but necessary.

In order to expand the Berwick’s community purposefully, I think self-evaluation is a continual necessity. To that end, some questions:

• What characterizes the Berwick’s social/professional sphere now?
• In what ways does that need to change, and why? (My best answer at the moment is “We need to expand our network to include different perspectives because public art is a community process,” but I don’t think that’s nearly specific enough.)
• What defines a meaningful exchange or collaboration in this context?
• What would happen at the ideal dinner?
• What would the ideal PAI program look like?
• How can we present MMT to people who have never heard of the Berwick so that they arrive at the dinner ready to collaborate in a meaningful way – and again, how is that defined?

General Evaluation

So far, I have a few ways to “evaluate” the MMT process. I am not particularly happy with them, because they seem pretty facile. We can track the profession of each guest (artist? activist?), the neighborhoods they live or work in, or how connected they are to the Berwick. It seems to me, however, that what is missing from this type of easy-to-plot data is the Berwick itself: how are we making sure that we are developing our thoughts about the Berwick network and the PAI program in a useful/meaningful way? In evaluating MMT, we may benefit from brief, focused interviews with Susan and Meg, conducted systematically. Perhaps this would ensure the kind of continual engagement we all hope for, in the midst of all the planning and administrative work?

As I write this, I am beginning to think that asking the right questions – of ourselves and our guests - is an essential part of this social/artistic process. Are we fumbling toward a usable definition of “effective collaboration?"

Nova Benway is the MMT evaluator & a Master's candidate in Arts Administration at Boston University 

"Local" is political, personal

What does local food mean to you?

The Berwick Research Institute wanted to find out, so the arts group hosted “Yum Local(e),” a public outdoor dinner party within the Project Yum festival on Oct. 13 in Somerville’s Union Square, with the goal of sparking conversation on the topic.  

Local food, it turns out, is political, emotional, practical—and more personal than you might think.   

On this brisk sunny afternoon, the Union Square plaza was bursting with activity. Organizers of Project Yum, a festival highlighting the food and culture of the neighborhood, criss-crossed the plaza setting up tables, hauling chairs, placing posters, straining to push carts stacked with massive coolers.  

Food-related art installations began to appear.  

 
Hilary Scott, a Somerville sculptor, arranged his gigantic solar-system-like sculpture on a wooden platform. Each “planet,” actually a beach ball, was covered with a different spice. He posted questions around the sculpture, for instance, “Which spice is the center of your universe?
 

Nearby, artist Susan Berstler tied 1001 small orange tags to a tree, each holding a typewritten fact about salt.

 A cooking competition among local chefs was ready to start, and the strong smell of gas grill fuel mingled in the air with the mixed aromas of Thai, Mexican, and Peruvian food from Union Square restaurants, scooped into Styrofoam containers for lines of festival-goers. 

At one edge of the festival, Yum Local(e) organizers and volunteers arranged bread and pitchers of fruit drink on three long tables. 

Susan Sakash donned a sandwich board—that is, a giant bread-shaped pair of boards—covered with Yum Local(e) posters. Sakash is one of the curators of The Berwick Research Institute’s “Meet Me at the Table” project, a series of dinners pondering questions of art and society; at Saturday’s dinner the big question was “What does local food mean to you?”

Sakash headed off to drum up participants from the festival.

Visitors arrived, volunteers seated them, and conversations began. Somerville residents Aaron Kagin, 27, and Elise Manning, 25, said they make a practice of buying food that’s in season and grown nearby.

“We’re going to be freezing things, and canning,” this year, said Kagin. Shopping at farmer’s markets and visiting the farms has given them a connection to the people behind the food, the couple said.

“One of the most interesting parts has been rediscovering foods I thought I knew,” said Kagin.

“I never thought I was a big fan of plums,” he continued, “but then I tried local plums, and I was hooked.

Yum Local(e) organizers had distributed a survey asking people to name three words they think of when they hear the phrase “local food.” Kagin’s words were “sustainable, community, and health.” Manning’s were similar: “fresh, community, and sustainable economy.” 

Not everyone at the table was as devoted to locally-grown food. “We can’t afford to do it,” said Jill Fairbank.  Fairbank’s three words were “trendy, fresh, and expensive.” She doesn’t want to sound cynical, she said, but living in Brighton without a car, “the closest place to buy locally grown foods is Whole Foods. So we’re getting it from a second vendor anyway.”

In a more wistful tone Fairbank said, “We used to can things. When we were children we didn’t really think about it,” she said. “Now it’s a label,” she added.

At the next table sat Damon Rock, 32, a Somerville resident who is not a strong advocate of the local food movement.  “There are obviously good arguments to it,” he said, such as reducing fuel consumption, “but I think taking political action through shopping is not an effective way to bring change.”

Despite his doubts, Rock was a diligent contributor to Saturday’s event, billed as a potluck; he brought a saucepan of thick and delicious red-lentil soup, which guests poured into plastic cups to sip.

Across the table from Rock, Deborah Nicholson said local food has to do with the people she cooks for and what she makes regularly. And also what’s practical.

“I work downtown and I shop on my way home. I buy groceries in Chinatown,” she said.

Nicholson, 34, also took the potluck seriously. Her homemade curry noodles with shitake mushrooms and cilantro, broccoli and celery was local food, she explained, in that “it’s a dish I make now that I live in Boston on a non-profit salary.”

Her friend Ernie Kim, 33, chatted with a Berwick volunteer over the steady hum of traffic punctuated with horn honks and sirens. Discovering they both grew up in New Jersey, the two tried to come up with foods local to their home state.

  Corn, they concluded. “And peaches,” added Kim. “Amazing,” he said with a faraway look, “Fantastic.”

  The sun was disappearing behind the buildings and a distinct chill seeping in when Lorraine Sacco joined the table. For the 50-year-old from Everett, local food has everything to do with family.

“We’re Italian,” she said, “We eat a pasta dinner on Sundays.” She remembers her mother coming home from the Haymarket in Boston, loaded with ingredients for making raviolis with homemade dough.

The larger Project Yum festival, in its celebration of “local crops and global shops,” blurred the definition of local food. At the Yum Local(e) potluck, the meaning of local food varied in almost as many ways as the number of visitors, but clearly the idea struck an emotional chord, whether through a new connection to farmers and crop seasons or through memories of foods that say “home,” however far or near home might be.
 

Sandra Larson is a freelance writer, journalism student at Harvard University Extension School, and Spare Change News arts editor.