July has been and incredibly full month! We kicked off the summer with our “social experiment on community exhibition,” which is still up and can be visited during our public hours: Mondays from 6-8PM @ 1160 Broadway, 5th floor.
On July 10, we had the second of an ongoing series called, “Social Supper @ SALT,” as an extension of the conversation from June’s GoodMeet@SALT on finding sanctuary.
We gathered food from the various stations set up around the room, to encourage us to move around and mingle. Good food; lovely fresh fruit platters and peach mint soup, home made pizza and thai peanut noodles. After filling our plates with all the yummy food we circled up for an introduction and all answered the question, “Where do you find sanctuary.” Some knew exactly where they found it: in long walks in good books in friendship. Others thought a while before answering: in meditation and prayer, with tea, in the living room.
We heard from Glenda Reed on “The Living Room” project as she showed us video and photographs of people improvising their bodies as moving and breathing living spaces.
Michele Brody shared a very special tea ceremony with us. She had an array of wonderful organic teas set up to choose from. After finishing the tea, she dried out the tea bags for us with an iron and invited us to write our reflections on the bags. We took some time to write about what tea and sanctuary and this social supper meant to us and afterwards hung up the bags on the same lines that we used for the “social experiment on community exhibit.” Michele will be back to collect these bags and use them as art material for a window installation at the Tenement Museum in the Lower East Side.
Joe Garrad puts up his tea bag reflection
Claude invited us to journal about Sanctuary: How do I get there and why is it so hard to get there? in one of the several interesting notebooks he provided for us. Those journals may appear in our next Social Supper.
Joe Garrad showed us a video that he created in order to translate a child’s (Jonah Ramey 8 ) recollection of his dreams through video footage and images. It evoked both smiles and mystery.
We listened to the debut album project of Devin Martin and David Wesson, The Emergence: an album created by mailing beats and tracks back and forth from Brooklyn to Boston to chronicle stories of homelessness and waking to realization that our purpose might be greater than the immediate selfishness found in the lives around us. The project’s aim is to give away 1000 CDs in exchange for your contact info which Devin has plans to use to create a shared network of people’s passion projects.
The entire night was filled with great conversation and new friends and we are looking forward to hosting the next Social Supper@SALT and will post more details soon!
- Glenda Reed and Christina Ferwerda talk while Julie Hugh enjoys the lovely fruit platter!
For 4 Mondays in the summer, SALT opened its doors from 10AM-5PM for Open Office Hours, a beta co-working group hosted by Erik Fabian of Double Happiness. Come in and use the space all day for a donation of $5-$10, coffee and WIFI provided. These co-working days will continue until August 10th. Come and tell a friend! You can RSVP for Aug 3 or Aug 10.
SALT was full of people sharing creative ideas and collaborating!
Lucid NYC used the SALT artspace for an event coordinated by David Friedlander on July 16th. It was part-symposium, part-party, and all but banal where three speakers, experts in their fields, spoke for twenty minutes. Daniel Pinchbeck, Dickson Despommier, and Amanda Parks all shared intriguing ideas on future innovations and thought processes, including 2012, vertical farming, and robotics.
Chloe Bass and TJ Hospodar of The Work Office performed SOUP KITCHEN: a Dinner Party for Un- and Underemployed Professionals at SALT on July 20th from 6 – 9pm. Thinking of people close to them affected by the recent cutbacks and layoffs, the two artists sought to fill this need by offering warm, home-cooked meals to anyone hungry. Some responded to the invitations sent out by Chloe and TJ, as well as The Work Office, but most were passersby pulled off the street with the promise of “FREE FOOD!” The artists wondered, “Can we beat the odds by eating communally? Considering our neighbors? Sharing our resources? And how much sharing is too much?”
Excerpt from the project statement: SOUP KITCHEN adopts the structure of a true soup kitchen: meals cooked in bulk, food served cafeteria style with very little individual control over portion size or item choice, and tables where one may be forced to sit with (and interact with the eating habits of) strangers. Who is willing to attend a soup kitchen? Who only feels comfortable at a dinner party? SOUP KITCHEN walks the line between economic reality, perceived status, and dining preference.
It was a pretty diverse audience group and many Soup Kitchen attendees participated in the SALT’s “social experiment on community” by contributing and arranging drawings. Those being fed were able to give back to the space in an unorthodox but beautiful way, hopefully giving them a sense of pride and purpose in a situation where they would normally only be takers.
SALT is being blogged about! Check out:
The Neighborbee Blog and Asphalt Eden for more SALTy goodness!
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