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CALL OUT FOR PARTICIPANTS
‘6 JARS’
a project by makeshift (Tessa Zettel & Chay-Ya Clancy) for
Try This at Home, Object
8 Oct 2011 – 8 Jan 2012
This is a co-op without borders. A weekly jar swap. Fill 6 jars with something good and delicious, Keep 1 jar and forward on 5. Your participation will manifest tenfold expanding outwards from your house onto the streets and flowing onwards, creating community and filling our cupboards. The revolution is here. In our kitchens and in the jars we carry in bike baskets into the hands of new friends and ones we don’t see enough.
http://6jars.org
An invitation
You are cordially invited to become part of the revolution. It begins in your kitchen. Six volunteer households in the vicinity of Object (ie. Darlinghurst, Surry Hills, Redfern etc.) are required to form a pilot ‘6 Jars’ collective, making a commitment to circulating jars of homemade food or other household goods over the course of the exhibition. Each week the group will meet to exchange jars – everyone going home with an assortment filled by other members.
Up for negotiation as the project unfolds are decisions about the contents of jars (organic, local, wild foraged/urban gleaned, vegan?), how and where weekly meetings take place (your place or mine, and is someone cooking?), and what equipment/resources people are willing to share (blenders, ovens, food processers, backyard produce…).
Some aspects of the group’s journey will be tracked on a blog and in the gallery space. We would particularly like to include people who are willing to document their involvement via photographs and/or short written updates for the blog. However your interest in the project and commitment to trying something different and seeing it through for the three months of the exhibition are the most important criteria for selection.
To get involved, email us right now at mailbox@makeshift.com.au with a brief description of why you’d like to be part of ‘6 Jars’. … You could also come along to the artist talk at Object (Project Space) on Saturday 8 October at 11:30am.
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A little more about 6 Jars
‘6 Jars’ is a system for sharing time and resources within micro neighbourhood-based groups, posed as a viable alternative food source for bottled/packaged goods. It was devised by Chay-Ya Clancy in Melbourne in 2010, and now comes to Sydney in the form of a durational social experiment for Try This at Home. The basic philosophy is that all processed foods and most household products can be made from scratch. This means you know exactly what is in it, are directly involved in the process of life by creating what you use, save money and can choose to source ethically, sustainably and locally. It is also easier to make a large quantity of something rather than make all the different things that you use. This is where the 6 jars ethic of sharing comes in: you make one thing and share it with a few houses in your local area and in return you get 5 more jars of other things. Read more about the idea and Melbourne group here
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We are bakers now! Delirious ones. And you can be too … Get involved in our newest project for Primavera 2011, ‘The Delirious Bakery’, an underground bakery in The Rocks cooking up site-specific tales of dissent and resistance alongside homemade sweets. It’s housed in a Pop-Up Space behind 77 George St. that’s presently occupied by The Red Room Company, but was previously home to a Chinese gambling den, a basement storehouse and a puppet shop.
From now until Oct 23, The Delirious Bakery will launch and host a new secret society, occasionally opening its doors to passers-by for general trade (check website for open days). Made up of invited guests and members of the public, the ‘Sweet Damper and Gossip Society’ will meet in the Bakery for regular ‘low teas’ in which tales about the darker underside of The Rocks are exchanged with each sticky wattleseed bun. These sometimes slippery, contested and confronting histories will later be imparted to others from memory.
Other operations of The Delirious Bakery may include sharing sourdough starter cultures, jams, recipes, language and cooking equipment. The Delirious Bakery would greatly appreciate any in-kind support from local producers of flour, eggs and other good things.
Join the Sweet Damper and Gossip Society mailing list for news about upcoming meetings and open days, at www.deliriousbakery.com
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The first of several exhibitions we’re involved with coming up in the second, overstuffed half of 2011 is …
The John Fries Memorial Prize for which our work Land-escapes (below) is a finalist.
The exhibition runs 10 August – 20 September and you can find it at Blackfriars off Broadway, which is: 1 Blackfriars St, Chippendale, NSW. Opening night is Thursday 9 August, 6 – 8pm.
photo courtesy of Viscopy
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For any of you currently on the other side of the planet … we’re part of an exhibition on now at the San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery. Urbanition is the first of their Sister City Biennials, for which the curators Justine Topfer & Meg Shiffler invited a group of artists to “create works addressed to civic leaders of San Francisco and Sydney that propose visionary solutions to make each city more humane, green and liveable.”
You can see it there for another month or so (and later in the year at CarriageWorks in Sydney). Details on our project below:
The Restless Quarter
“The Restless Quarter is an open-ended document of mobility and change, an expanding propositional archive of the city broken down and reconstituted so that that it can shift according to climate change events (meteorological and geopolitical). Assisted by strategically located participants, The Restless Quarter collects – and borrows from – existing mobile structures and itinerant services found on the streets of San Francisco, Sydney and elsewhere. It asks those in the business of (de)futuring our cities to confront what design theorist Tony Fry has called the impending “age of unsettlement†and begin welcoming ways of living that are dynamic, responsive and opportunistic. What kinds of infrastructures, social networks and support services might The Restless Quarter require or self-generate, and which bus do I catch to get there?”
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SISTER CITY BIENNIAL: URBANITION
San Francisco Arts Commission Gallery
401 Van Ness, San Francisco
April 28 to July 2, 2011
CarriageWorks Arts Centre, Sydney
Wilson St., Redfern
August 4 to September 3, 2011
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We have a new work in this exhibition at Sydney Uni’s Tin Sheds Gallery, opening next Thursday night, 6-8pm. We’ll also be taking part in the symposium on April 9, and have written an essay for the publication. Definitely a worthwhile conversation to be having in Sydney right now.
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Tonight between 5 – 6pm you can catch us in the food cart cooking up pikelets. There will also be a picnic discussion with our special guest Sally Parslow, local resident of The Rocks. There’s a new microsite for the project – http://www.makeshift.work/gwagopatabagun/ – and we’ll be posting more on the journey and the events here soon.
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Read a cute little write-up on Colony Collapse by Rachel Fuller at Concrete Playground.
And for those who’ve been meaning to visit, there’s only one week left! Quicksticks… (it looks something like this)
The bees live in their hive, inside the orange meat safe. In theory they can fly in and out of the gallery whenever they like, through a pipe leading outside, however Sydney’s still-cold winter has kept them pretty much tucked up in bed. If it’s sunny you might spot them hanging out next to their hive or amongst the blueberries and ‘Happy Wanderer’. Come and talk to them, they’re super sweet!
 
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We have an exhibition opening at Firstdraft Gallery in Sydney in 2 days time. It’s called Colony Collapse and concludes our studio residency at the new Firstdraft Depot. There will be a hive of native stingless bees, amongst other things (drawings, constructions etc.) relating to the development of our forthcoming project for the Museum of Contemporary Art‘s In the Balance exhibition. Also opening at the same time are shows by Bronwyn Carter, Luke Thurgate and Baden Pailthorpe.
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Colony Collapse
Tessa Zettel & Karl Khoe
Colony Collapse continues Tessa Zettel & Karl Khoe’s ongoing collaborative project to micro-farm pockets of the city, cannibalising leftover building materials (and other devices of protection/preservation) in the construction of makeshift experiments in urban self-sufficiency. At Firstdraft the artists investigate the possibilities for small-scale mobile honey production in the gallery and beyond, as they prepare to build a hybrid native beehive-food cart destined for Sydney Cove. With food crisis, suburban sprawl and the colony’s precarious histories (and futures) on their minds, Zettel & Khoe invite audiences in to smell the flowers and talk to the bees.
As part of the Firstdraft Emerging Artists Studio Program supported by Australia Council for the Arts
Exhibition opens: Wednesday 7 July 2010, 6-8pm
Exhibition continues: to 25 July 2010
Artist talks: Sunday 25 July 2010 at 4pm
f i r s t d r a f t
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116-118 Chalmers St.
Surry Hills NSW 2010
t: +61 (0)2 9698 3665
open: Wed to Sat, 12-6pm
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Well, the shifting garden at 4A has now packed up and shifted elsewhere (or a variety of elsewheres actually). Thanks to everyone who stopped and had a look, took home a beetroot or kale seedling or a seed packet, or sat down for a cup of tea and a lotus chip and a chat about gardens, cities and other good things. Thank you also to the marvellous team at 4A – Aaron, Summar, Ping, Yu ye, & Sam who did their best to keep everything nicely watered. We’ve amassed quite an archive of photos and will be posting them here over the next little while, in the meantime here are a few from the final weeks.
  
  
ABOVE RIGHT: lotus chips and taro cake at the closing party.
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A nice little article on the Garden (by Lucy Fokkema) on the Throw Shapes blog – read it here.
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