Shared Conversations: a dinner with ARC’s across Canada
October 27, 2018 4:30 to 7:30pm
Locals Only
As part of Locals Only, Shared Conversations will bring together artist-run centres from across the country to host local meals and conversations. The event takes the form of a nationally synchronized community dinner with an aim to gather stories from other communities as a way to build a multifaceted dialogue around issues related to gentrification, intergenerational reciprocity, and food security. It will also aim to bring these ideas into direct contact with artist-run centres and their communities to explore new points of solidarity, community engagement, and an expanded view of artist-run activity. Documentation from these events will be an important part of the archive on our project website and we will aim to collect digital ephemera, including photos, recipes, and reading lists from local gatherings through the use of a shared hashtag. As part of this initiative, we will be eating and sharing at the same moments across time zones and geographies with friends at Open Space in Victoria, Untitled Arts Society in Calgary, Hamilton Artists Inc., Modern Fuel in Kingston, and this town is small in Charlottetown, PEI.
AKA
On October 27th, beginning at 4:30 pm local time, AKA will host a free community meal, inviting families, youth, elders, and artists connected to Riversdale and Locals Only. Over a light family-style meal of seasonal foods, we will gather for conversations around the role of storytelling in producing a sense of ‘the commons.’ The ways in which we imagine a common good, enact a common public space, and collectively care for the things we share in common can be understood across the stories we encounter every day. Throughout the meal, we’ll aim to record points of resonance and curiosity towards catalyzing new stories we can tell about the future of a neighbourhood where dignity, justice, and sustenance are plentiful and celebrated in common.
Hamilton Artists Inc (Hamilton)
On October 27th, beginning at 6:30 pm local time, Hamilton Artists Inc. will be hosting a community dinner as part of a number of nationally synchronized meals. This free community dinner is open to all and focuses on gathering recipes and stories in order to contribute to the ongoing dialogue around issues of gentrification and economic justice in Hamilton and beyond.
Modern Fuel (Kingston)
Modern Fuel will host a gathering of youth, community members, and artists for an evening dedicated to intimate discussion surrounding food culture and contemporary art on October 27th at 6:30 pm. Over a potluck-style meal, Toronto-based artist, Amy Wong, will present a performative artist talk titled Coming together, making space addressing the practice of healing through food, with a focus on community engagement as a form of resistance. Amy Wong is an oil painter who navigates mixtape culture to claim feminist space. She is also founder of the Angry Asian Feminist Gang (AAFG), a collective of Diaspora cultural producers dedicated to dialogue centered on Asian feminist concerns. Her practice ranges from painting-based installation to collaborative projects that explore the politics of making noise, and conditioning spaces that allow for thinking through together. In an effort to explore new points of solidarity with the wider Kingston community, Modern Fuel has also invited both local organizations and Queen’s affiliated groups as participants and respondents of Coming together, making space. We look forward to discovering the ways in which Coming together will offer visions of what healing might look like through the practice of collectivism and food sharing.
Open Space (Victoria)
On Saturday, October 27th at 3:30pm, Open Space will host Gather, a community meal and discussion around food and community organized in concert with artist-run centres across the country. The event will take place as part of a nationally synchronized community dinner with an aim to gather stories and build dialogue around issues related to gentrification, intergenerational reciprocity, and food security.
The meal will be catered by Songhees Foods and will offer the Victoria community the chance to gather together to discuss, dream, and brainstorm ways of supporting vibrant, sustainable, and accessible food systems and arts communities on these territories. It will be free and open to the public.
this town is small (Charlottetown)
A Food Skill-Share Picnic will be a free public event in one of Charlottetown’s biggest green spaces, Victoria Park. People are asked to bring a potluck item that reflects their cultural up-bringing and the recipe for that dish. At the end, we will have a recipe swap. The platform for the picnic would be a giant picnic cloth and 2 small temporary tents. (10ft × 10ft) One tent for potluck items and the other for food demonstrations of various economical food skill sets such as baking with sourdough, dehydrating, vegetarian /vegan cooking, spice blending etc… P.E.I. is lucky to be able to collaborate with the local Food Security Network. The National Farmers Union. The Certified Organic Producers Co-operative. The Coppers Institute and many other working groups to lead discussions and action items on raising awareness about food security, intergenerational skill sharing, diversity and community building through food.
Untitled Artist Society (Calgary)
As part of the nation-wide Locals Only shared meal event, on October 27 at 4:30 pm MDT, Locals Only: Sustain, Maintain, will bring together a small community of Albertans to share a meal and discuss ideas around local Indigenous food sources, recipes and traditions, and how they have changed and grown in the context of Indigenous perseverance and resurgence. Lead by Danni Black/Sui Taa Kii, the meal will include three generations of Indigenous, Métis, Inuit and non-Indigenous Albertans—youth, adults, kookums—who will share a meal made by Calgary-based Odawa/Ojibwa chef Liberty Rivers, and to share stories, share recipes, share being together in Mohkínstsis.
Danni Black/Sui Taa Kii, is a Niitsitapi Two-Spirit filmmaker, writer, and grassroots community organizer. She founded the Treaty 7 Film Collective, writes for FREQ magazine covering Indigenous focused topics, and was one of the chosen artists for the City of Calgary’s Indigenous Artist Residency where she researched Indigenous youth and their relationship to their language growing up in urban settings.
