Making Time is coming to Sydney! As part of Performance Space’s upcoming ‘Matters of Life and Death’ program, Making Time will be in residence at Carriageworks and the Eveleigh Farmers’ Market from Feb 23 – Mar 9, 2013. Each Saturday between 8am – 1pm we’ll be setting up a temporary experimental kitchen amongst the market, offering a platform for participants to share strategies for preserving food, and human life.
More info here
Next up on the cards for Makeshift is ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival, which takes place in Kuopio, Finland, in less than a month!! We’re presenting a new version of our work Making Time, devised as part of p4pilot in 2010, with Performance Space/Perth Institute for Contemporary Art. Fellow live artist extraordinaire Sarah Rodigari has joined the Makeshift team for this exciting caper.
Infos below:
Making Time
Tessa Zettel (makeshift) with Sarah Rodigari
ANTI Contemporary Live Art Festival, Kuopio, Finland
25-30 Sept, 2012
Making Time is an unfolding exercise in redirective practice, beginning with the crafts of pickling, jam making, bottling and otherwise preserving food. Participants are invited to share strategies for preserving a variety of native or backyard surplus foods. In exchange, the artist will provide micro-seminars on key concepts relating to design futures. At the conclusion of each session, those present will collectively decide upon a title with which to label their filled jars, a miniature poetic manifesto indicating both conversational and material contents. All jars will be collected by participants (and given away to passers-by) at a market stall at the end of the festival.
There are 6 preserving sessions, and you can either come and teach your specific recipe or technique to others, or come and learn from others. The festival provides the ingredients used. The working language is English.
Our new project just opened at Taylor Square in the old toilets. It’s part of We Make This City, the City of Sydney Public Art Program co-presented by the National Institute for Experimental Art, which also included work by David Cross, Lynette Wallworth and the Magnificent Revolution.
OPEN: 8am – 1pm, Saturdays in March, 2012
*only 2 more Saturdays to go..!!
On the edges of an organic farmer’s market in the thick of the city, a curatorium of thinkers, activists and dreamers is assembled to catalyse another space of exchange, a subterranean ‘dark market’ trading instead in radical economies, growing cultures and craft futures. Every Saturday morning in March, members of the curatorium will meet in the women’s toilet block (used outside these hours to store market infrastructure) for a series of tactical gatherings, making time for sharing old and new strategies – across disciplines, ways of thinking and practices – for rethinking and redirecting how we collectively sustain ourselves in this city, beyond the feel-good rhetoric of sustainability and eco-consumption.
From week to week, traces of these conversations will be made public in the underground men’s toilets, taking shape as an abandoned trade fair where market-goers may encounter such exotic offerings as a jar swap gang, a fermentation club, a radical reading room, an unreal estate agency and a nu-craft think tank. Making use of an antiquated hobby letterpress, the curatorium will also produce a collection of handmade communiqués advertising – and theorising – such emergent (or forgotten) practices.
Weekly conversations are directed by invited guests with expertise in a particular area. Week One was led by design theorist and educator Matthew Kiem, with guests John von Sturmer, Rebecca Conroy, Zanny Begg and David McNeill. Other participants have included Lara Thoms and James Arvanitakis. Future weeks’ attendees to be advised.
Tessa Zettel
[Published in Das 500, December 2011]
In recent years, much of the work I’ve made in collaboration with Karl Khoe has been eaten. Not by us (the host rarely gets a chance), but by people who’ve been invited into an unusual space of exchange facilitated by the presence of food – dawn breakfast on a dry salt lake, nighttime afternoon tea in a 19th century basement, pikelets and sugarbag honey on the grass at Circular Quay. Of course all these situations have also produced conversation, often a particular kind of semi-directed discussion around where we are and by what circumstances we have arrived there. Food in this instance is an offering given to induce engagement; more than that, it is a point of entry into the parameters of the conversation: what do you need to sustain yourself, where can you find that in the place you’re in, what kinds of located knowledge have been overlooked or erased?
Earlier this month the place we were in was the dry salt lake, in Esperance, WA. Our journey there had something of Werner Herzog’s 1982 film Fitzcarraldo about it – weeks of persistent enquiry into the edibility of the landscape, in archives of photographs taken when the town was young (ladies with starched collars taking tea on the verandah, men picnicking with camel under the tasty mooja or Christmas tree), and negotiating to borrow articles of furniture and tableware that were once old grocer Daw’s or great-aunt Annie’s. Tramping over the salty mud with bentwood chairs and lace tablecloths and jars of pickled bloodroot or wattleseed-flecked madeleines, we were as knowingly out of place, and time, as those early settlers and indeed today’s residents whose food is trucked down from Perth. The meal itself, for guests who had given time to the foraging of its ingredients, was filmed as a series of frozen long-exposure poses, tablecloth flapping in the Esperance wind. In attendance were the feisty secretary of the wildflower society, the Indigenous pastor and community gardener, the renegade commercial plant hunter and the local high school art teacher. The imagined audience of their repast (alongside the more prosaic gallery-goer) was one Claude-Antoine-Gaspard Riche, naturalist with the d’Entrecasteaux expedition who found himself lost and disoriented on the shores of Pink Lake this very day 219 years ago, thirsty and hungry and surrounded by food he could not recognise.
On another level, the collaborative doing entailed by making and sharing food with such ad hoc and provisional participant ‘communities’ is a way of practicing practices that aren’t so familiar anymore, and that could perhaps be useful in the development of futuring (sustain-able) modes of living. Our first deployment of food preservation was Making Time (2010), an experimental gallery-kitchen at PICA where ideas drawn from design philosophy were swapped for help making street-gleaned mulberry jam. This came close on the heels of Gwago patabagun ___ We will eat presently (2010), a mobile pikelet cart with native bees producing honey to sweeten a program of site-based picnic discussions on the MCA’s front lawn. Most recently food and dialogue were key ingredients in The Delirious Bakery (2011), home to the Sweet Damper and Gossip Society whose weekly meetings teased out darker histories of how the Rocks have been lived, in relationship to broader geographies and timescales.
The trajectory of these projects – marking time to slow down and be attentive, accounting for pre-existing cultural knowledge – maps out a new kind of quality economy in which place, and our own (dis)placement within it, is a source of redirective potential. That is, by enacting other ways of feeding ourselves within specific micro-fabulist scenarios, we can begin to (bodily) reimagine our collective understanding of the worlds we inhabit, industrialised and elaborately designed but largely dysfunctional in any long-term sense, that in turn design our daily lives and the politicised spaces we eat in.
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Sojourn in Esperance Bay was exhibited as part of the IASKA spaced: art out of place exhibition & symposium at Fremantle Arts Centre, Perth, 4 Feb – 11 Mar 2012.
IMAGE CREDIT:
Sojourn in Espérance Bay, Tessa Zettel & Karl Khoe, 2011. Production still.
Last night saw the opening of our little one-day exhibition in the old (1896) chemist’s building at Museum Park Period Village. Lots of good people came and looked and sampled the incr-edible spread put on by Tim and Dewi from the Cannery. Special thanks to Peter, Jason, Shannan and Mouse for being the frozen video stars, and to John Totterdell for his filming, editing and projector.
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Mouse played banjo blues in what also happens to have once been his great uncle’s chemist shop (!), Jason fronted up with a spectacular edible wildflower bouquet in a Xanthorrhoea (grass tree) stump, and we had visiting special guests from Perth, IASKA’s own Jan Teagle Kapetas and Marco Marcon.
Then this morning it was back in to open up for the Village markets, tucked in between the sausage man and the natural therapies ladies. A big day with an unending stream of curious visitors watching and wondering just what it was they were watching, and remembering times past and asking questions about other things too.
Jason and Minna of the Esperance Wildflower Society with his handiwork
Aforementioned sausage seller, pointing out edible root of fringe lily,
preserved in pink lake salt
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More photos will be added to this post soon…
Tomorrow morning 9am (for 9:30 start) will be the final Sweet Damper and Gossip Society meeting before Saturday’s public open day. Our guest this time is Jeremy Steele, who will be presenting some of his research on the Aboriginal language of Sydney, the sound of which once filled this place. See his blog naabawinya and MA thesis
RSVP on the website below or by emailing direct (bakery@makeshift.com.au), all welcome. Rosella shortcrust cakes & various tasty teas will be on hand.
Come!!!
www.makeshift.work/deliriousbakery
Tomorrow (Saturday 15 Oct) will see our first weekend meeting hosted in The Delirious Bakery. For those of you willing to brave an 8:45am arrival (for 9am start), we’ll be providing sweet potato and wattleseed cinnamon scrolls and lemon myrtle scones to accompany John von Sturmer on invented histories.
RSVP as always, the sooner the better.
Note: This will be one of the last meetings as our time is almost up!!!
ATTENTION: Next meeting will be held tomorrow evening, Tuesday 11 October, at 6pm. RSVP required – go to www.makeshift.work/deliriousbakery – where you can also sign up to the mailing list if you haven’t already. Our special guest is Ross Gibson (Professor of Contemporary Art at University of Sydney) – you can read an article he wrote about William Dawes and Patyegarang some years back in Meanjin here
TONIGHT the first meeting of the Sweet Damper and Gossip Society will take place in The Delirious Bakery, at 6pm. Our special guest on this auspicious evening is Michael Paton, a polymath who brings tales of the ground and disposition of Sydney Cove. Attendees are encouraged to bring along their own stories of dissent and dispossession in the Rocks area, to be exchanged after Michael’s talk over an appropriate baked treat.
RSVP required as places are limited. Society members will be given preference.
Email: bakery@makeshift.com.au
If you also wish to become a member of the Sweet Damper and Gossip Society, please send an email with your contact details and a brief outline of your interest. Members will have the opportunity to recount stories heard at meetings to others on bakery open days (Sat 22 Oct 2-4pm and other times TBA), and will receive an official badge.
Subscribe to the Delirious mailing list at www.deliriousbakery.com for information on future meetings and open days.
Before Try This at Home opens on Friday night at Object, we’ll be at the Helen Lempriere Travelling Art Scholarship finalists’ exhibiton at Artspace on Thursday (7 Oct), 6-8pm. Come on down – one more chance to see Land-escapes, & if you’re quick you might catch a pikelet with sugarbag honey.
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7 October – 23 October 2011
43 – 51 Cowper Wharf Road
Woolloomooloo NSW 2011
Sydney Australia
Gallery Open
11am – 5pm Tues – Sun
IMAGE: Tessa Zettel & Karl Khoe Land-escape I (detail), 2011
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