An Invitation

[Gwylene Gallimard & Jean-Marie Mauclet]

In terms of your home place, community or country, what are your associations with the concepts “water” and “shelter”? The beach? The lack of water? The cleanliness of water? The rain, or winter weather? Housing? The quality of housing? The cost of housing? The lack of housing? The architecture? All, or none? Any comment or suggestion we receive here will become part of our international project, The Future is on the Table.

The carts described above are proposed as a way to highlight these subjects, and if you like, you can address them in your reply. Any comment or suggestion may be acted upon by the artists when they come to Charleston in August and September.

[Gwylene Gallimard & Jean-Marie Mauclet]

After reading your note Rajni, I want to thank YOU, but also thank everyone who talked about their work, downloaded some pictures and expressed intimate relationships to shelter through their work. I would like to say much more but can't really at the time because my mind is in a mode that deals with logistics, organizing and emergencies. It will happen though. Thanks you all so much. Gwylene

[rajni shah]

I've already had the opportunity to respond to this question, being one of the lucky artists participating in 'The Future is on the Table'. However, on reading this discussion, I couldn't resist writing a little something extra here.

It's about land, about public space, about borders, about belonging, and about becoming. Because I realised suddenly the connections between all the projects I've been working on over these years. Since the day Gwylene and Jean-Marie sent me those stools, with their land-lines painted, their invitation to dialogue; through the many frustrating attempts to start projects which were foiled by money or time or commitments (and which of course left open the beginnings of conversations in all of our minds, to grow in other ways); through to my desire to pass the gifts on, to give the stools away during my first exploration of what was to become the performance installation 'Mr Quiver', an exploration of our relationship to the land(s) we live on through voice, movement, space-shifting; through to my obsession with the idea of sitting around the table, my latest piece of public work that literally places a table in public space and invites people to look, come, eat, speak, listen; and finally, through to this wonderful opportunity to come to Charleston in a few weeks and meet new people, begin new dialogues, explore the role of gift some more, eat, sleep, learn, become... So I thank you, JM and GG, for your ideas, your subtle influences, your commitment and your craziness. I look forward to entering your kitchen. And to opening up new spaces within it. You have already sparked so many journeys in my life. This will be yet another.

rajni.x.

[D.]

Here are photos of the earthlodge I lived in for a few months, one year ago. Life really does feel much different when you live your daily life closer to the elements. It’s quite a chalenge at first, though, and I didn’t get to spend a winter in one. But, August to November in central Maine, it provided some welcome experiences and awareness for me:

When I describe the basic design of this lodge, I use the construction of a child's swing set as an example. There is a center beam, with two forked log poles creating an A-form at each end. But for the lodge design, there is actually a third at each end, as well. The verticle walls made of elm and tamarack are strapped and tied to the main poles with saplings.

The exterior of the earthlodge. There are haybales to provide insulation, which are intended to decompose to sod:
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View into the interior of the lodge from the entry vestibule:
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View of the vestibule and the 4' 8" high doorway:
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Detail of construction attaching the vestibule to the main section of the lodge:
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The ceiling with straps holding the verticle s in place and two skylights:
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The galley kitchen- no plumbing- and the Jotul woodstove:
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The built in sleeping platform and shelves:
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A masonry chimney to prevent fire, But take your cinder bucket outside and away from the structure. The hot cinders pop out, I discovered without mishap, fortunately.:
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[Caffyn Kelley]

Yes Jean-Marie I love what you say here and the question "Yet, isn't the strength of art in its ability to open the doors of the mind to multiple connections, inferences, cross-thoughts ... irreverence, heresy, ecstasy as well?" It seems to make space here for my own reflections on water and shelter.

I could say that everything I write and make is about water. Water is my dream and my philosophy. Water flows to fit any shape. Its movement continues around, above or below any obstacle. Water has no beginning and no end. Water is threatened and endangered: ditched, diked, dammed, drained, poisoned. Yet beneath the pavement, under the landfill, and within our skin, water is there, singing its secrets. Water is humility, persistence. Water reflects and evokes all that is – even our own double, the watery soul we ache for and cannot have. Water is our kinship with all life. When I get engaged in a specific water issue in my home town, it seems to me that crucial dimensions of myth and metaphor are what get left out of deliberations about water quality and water commodification, and I see it as my sacred duty to remember this.

Shelter is a focus of a current project, which is about touching and being touched, or maybe better said as about amplifying the space for mothering and being mothered in a parsimonious culture that has no room for holding, nourishment, unity, protectiveness, being sheltered in each others’ arms. How might we build this kind of shelter and make space for this kind of homecoming? And how is a cultural pattern that despises the mother and prevents her from assuming power and maturity linked with homelessness, heartlessness, and the commodification of the earth?

[Gwylene Gallimard & Jean-Marie Mauclet]

For Gwylène and me, Water and shelter came up as focal points to "The Future is on the Table", when we realized that the proposal was so wide open in its socio-political implications.
My experience with politically charged art work is that it often ends up as propaganda, opinionated one-liners ... with humor often. Sometimes somber. always self-referential.
Yet, isn't the strength of art in its ability to open the doors of the mind to multiple connections, inferences, cross-thoughts ... irreverence, heresy, ecstasy as well? The artist's mind, as that of anyone moved by the exhilaration of research, constantly roams at the edges of the unknown, the limits of the feasible, the banks of our muddy history.
So, with "the Future is on the Table", we drifted quickly away from the political of 2001, (Bush's coronation), to issues of social justice .. like access to water and shelter. And we add, every time, as global human rights. In order to tone down direct, local militancy and increase the philosophical, the ethical.
One of our latest work had to do with the gentrification of one of Charleston's neighborhoods. We do not shy away from hot causes. What we do not want, though, is to end up with, again, one-liners, seemingly strong answers to obviously lingering questions.
Opening multiple entries to the subject at hand. Stimulating dialogue. Participating in mutual education. Thus identifying a temporary community of purpose and interest. Building identity beyond the trendy individualism which has given artists such a bad reputation, so many times.
All this has to do with the global and the local. Doesn't it? Jean-Marie

[nicole dextras]

Yes i think that Home is public space for most of us who live in cities because even if we live on private land- it is not our own. I experienced the fine line between private and public recently when i wanted to do a photo shoot of my work downtown. I found that basically everything is private other than the sidewalk and designated parks but all those landscaped spaces, many of which have benches tolerate a certain amount of public use, such as office workers having their lunch but undesirables are quickly removed by an unseen army of security guards. So Home is often a neighbourhood which one navigates daily as a nomadic dweller.

[Gwylene Gallimard & Jean-Marie Mauclet]

Thank you for sharing your beautiful work. It seems to me that you are talking about the use of public places. And may be a need to take temporary appropriation of them, to recharge them with their own history or their present use. This is dreadful to me to see how abandoned to developers are most of the streets in residential areas of the suburbs. Are those public spaces which only deserve to be clean? a sort of no-man's land for access to one's private space?
I like the scale of your handmade approach. Very human. Very well perceived. Thank you so much. Gwylene

[nicole dextras]

My concerns around, home, place and country are centered around the concept of belonging. These questions were central to my growing up as a minority French Canadian in Ontario. The sense of uprooted-ness i felt 30 years ago is now very common, as we all become more global. In the past, people felt that they belonged to the land and that gave them a sense of pride and stewardship. But a sense of belonging can also become a sense of ownership, which if provoked, can also lead to conflicts and aggressive acts. It seems to me that there is a fine line between these two and we are at a point where we need to start asking ourselves: How can we engender a sense of belonging to place, so that folks feel some kinship to it and want to take care of it, be it their neighbourhood, country or planet- without falling into the age-old patterns of divisiveness?
You can see images of my project: Belonging, sous le pont, here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/ndextras/sets/72157600099932419/ and you can read an article on my experience here: http://onsitereview.blogspot.com/search/label/art

[Caffyn Kelley]

Oh hi Haruko I am so glad to see you here. I was just thinking about your beautiful work on water and shelter and wondering if you would share some images with us here.

[Haruko Okano]

Water brings to mind "Ground Water" and "Water Table" Water is considered the primary sign of possible life in the universe. This earth is a precious gift in which we as a species are squandering not just for ourselves now but for future generations and other species.
It has taken a journey by canoe and backpack across Canada from Ontario to BC and living in a teepee for 6 months to teach me the value of what I am so priviledged to have access to. To keep this awareness and to continue being mindful I try to head out to the wilderness at least once a year. Being on the Wind River for 16 days in 2004 put me in touch with the fragile nature of the really wild areas of this country and the impact of climate change. We are fools to think we know better than nature. I have lost faith in the political system. I think the human race is regressing.