Come witness the tortoise! Come witness the trades! Come trade with the Trading Tortoise—a roving installation and good ol’ American Roadtrip—the brainchild of artists Monica Choy and Souther Salazar. Trading Tortoise opens its arms to any items of sentimental or creative (or any other kind of) value to you so that you may barter for a piece of artwork or item collected by Choy and Salazar from their American visits (alternatively, they accept written stories and tales).

Open Field is one of the Trading Tortoise’s very first stops after the two installation curators and designers took off from the West Coast a few weeks ago. Let us give them a hearty welcome by contributing local flare to barter, swap, and bargain!

Bring several items to trade just in case more than one barter is possible. In addition to your bartering goods, feel free to bring Fourth of July leftovers, a blanket, and a baby because Sunday, July 8th is also going to be Picnic Day on Open Field.

From tradingtortoise.com

Trading Tortoise will roll onto the field Sunday, July 8th from 1-3 pm.

Grounded in studies of food, design, culture, social practice, and engineering – to name just a few – the Walker Kitchen Lab Collective spent the last two weeks questioning, defining, creating, researching, prototyping, discovering, experimenting with and trying to determine the nature of the kitchen. Tonight’s “Kitchen Lab: an Unveiling” at Walker Open Field from 6-9 pm, invites you, the public, to come interact with, play and explore the many Kitchen Lab toolkits that have been created by the collective.

What’s a Kitchen Lab toolkit, you might ask? Physically speaking, it’s a box inside which you will find objects, utensils, ingredients, instructions, etc., etc., relating to various themes or ideas about the kitchen, the hearth, food culture, and beyond that encourage play.

I’ve gathered some tasty tidbits from the Kitchen Lab collective’s daily documentation about their process and projects, research and development,  and personal reflections on the many Kitchen Lab speakers and workshops. So let theses musings, illustrations, questions and ideas pique your interest (and perhaps your appetite) for what’s in store for tonight’s unveiling!

Excerpts from the Kitchen Lab Collective’s Daily Documentation:

-fondue is a highly social experience

-p.s: we also tried melting the cheese in the oven!!

-it was a relationship with food that I previously didn’t even think to bring to this class

-In the spirit of Kitchen Lab and inspired by a number of talks (but Amanda Lovelee in particular), I’m proposing the Kitchen Lab Jam

-Alright, end of the documentation-dry-spell for the Scent Box.

-Go go go go, and then pass or fail. But we can’t fail. So let’s just keep going.

-Speaking of containers, I would like us to agree on some language around describing the containers.  Are they Kitchen Lab Experiments? Kitchen Lab Projects? Kitchen Lab Activities?  Kitchen Lab Cabinets?  Pantries?  Appliances?

-This pragmatic perspective of the business of being a chef and opening a restaurant provides another perspective to our understanding of the landscape of food.

-Wee wire baskets hang off the pegboard to hold our smaller smell miscellany for your perusing pleasure.

-I think the Open Field is asking some of the same questions I am.

-how do we reconcile “mobile” and “hearth”?

-A pure, simple concept can strike through all of the complexity and expose the heart of what we want to say. What is this heart, this question we’re asking of our audience?

-post-it note brainstorming

-I liked that people were jumping from group-to-group making suggestions and the Flat Pack began to have that studio feeling where you just ask a question out loud to the room in general and someone will usually answer it.

-Reflective, insulating material!  Could you get more perfect than that?

-Making the invisible visible. Social sculpture. Beloved community. Humanizing.

-the flow of how people worked and where they sat was not what I expected

-I woke up early today to get to Ax-Man

-Because the containers relatively un-kitchen-like it’s hard to imagine them working as a kitchen.

-Two people (at separate times), after hearing my complaints about less than enjoyable bites, became determined to create a meal that I would enjoy. (They failed to do so, but I appreciated the effort.)

-Food is clearly great for participation–talking over a spread of free food tends to dismantle barriers to casual conversation.

-the value of humor

-Sympathy and vulnerability lower our socially defensive barriers and allow us to relate to each other and build community.

-the Alice in Wonderland scene with the bottle labeled “Drink Me” and cake labeled “Eat Me” prompted us to think about the role of the senses as bodily, and the role that the senses have in making associations to place and memory in the kitchen

-Our main goal through this project is to teach the community the alternative ways to cook and serve in a new form.

-I needed to be reminded that it is not enough to write that an audience was “engaged,” but write how, why, what were they doing that indicated so.

-We don’t have to introduce people to every single tea culture, that’s not the goal of the project, but just introduce them to something new.

-the goal for good instruction-writing is to have sympathy for the reader, shift your domain to theirs, enter their shoes and imagine how they may understand your words or images.

-memory, instead of note-taking, is the best kind of filter in determining what information is really important

-When someone cuts something in half, the other person chooses their piece – all these years, and I thought mine was the only family who practiced such a ritual.

-functional kitchen, full cycle, policy.

-unbeknownst to me, I have been sorting out  my Food Biography.

Just a *few* of the scents we've been working with

Our Kitchen Lab project, the City Pantry: A Cabinet of Scents and Memories, is wading its way into thick description. We’re in the midst of smell. Collecting it, translating it, containing it, writing around it. In the last three days, we’ve gone to dozens of yard sales, chain supermarkets, co-ops, ethnic food markets, and hardware stores on the search for canning jars, peg board, bungee cords, scents and memories. We’ve concocted smells ranging from the backyard to the river, to the gas station. We’ve also invited friends and strangers to collaborate in the process of writing the city through its scents.

Wednesday, my collaborators Sara N. and Jimmy went to two St. Paul landmarks—Candyland and Midway Bookstore. The guy at the bookstore told them that he couldn’t smell the books. What he did smell was asphalt, the exhaust, tar, cigarettes, and the busy intersection.

The City Pantry's internal architecture, waiting to be filled with scents and memories

Friday, Sara and I went back to St. Paul, first to Ax-Man with Jimmy, then to Grand Avenue. Stogies on Grand was to be the first of several stops, but was as far as we made it. Sara’s friend Jessica was working that day. She unscrewed almost every jar in the store in the process of walking us through tobacco and memory.  Over the bridge of her glasses, Jessica schooled us: “You take a cigar like you take your coffee. If you like it black, you’ll like it more intense.” Some of the tobacco bites with fermentation. It’s peaty—a deep scotch undertone that gets to your gut.

Jessica pinched a ½ teaspoon into her left palm, rubbed it with her right palm, and bruised the tobacco as if muddling herbs.  She told us the first time she smelled cherry tobacco she couldn’t stand it. Then someone bought some and took it into the smoking room. As he lit his pipe, Jessica was transported to memories of her grandfather. This was his smell.

Each story about smell calls up other smells.

Jessica’s memory called up one of my own—the first time I smelled pipe tobacco in a schoolmate’s house in the middle of Pennsylvania. The estate was filled with opulence and middle-school awkwardness. The smell was grounding—a soft, round olfactory cushion.

Fresh scents from the garden

I find myself increasingly attuned to smell, and brainstorming the olfactory.
How do we recreate the scents of
Spring rain
Hot asphalt
Garlic when it seeps through the walls
First love
Pollen in the spring. Honeysuckle.
Grandma’s house.

Jimmy and Sara stopped at the co-op to buy spices in bulk.  Among the teas were tiny dried tea roses. Saccharine, pungent and reminiscent of Victorian parlors.  Upon return to the studio Jimmy paged through a musty old book, Sara unwound a rope of black licorice, and the roses seeped through the plastic bag.  Out of these actions, the smells mingled to evoke a Midwestern grandma’s house. After that, for each member of the collective, they fanned the book, and held out the tea roses and licorice while participants waved their noses before the objects.  For most of the collective, it was uncanny.

What memories/places/people/times might these scents evoke?

Yet it’s interesting that not all scents are universal; in fact, they call up uniquely personal and evocative recollections.  Thinking about grandma’s house, I remember my paternal grandmother’s house in Mexico City. Abue’s house was the smell of moth balls, tomato and onion simmering on the stove, overripe fruit, and wood. Later, the tenants.

Come on down to Walker Open Field Thursday night from 6-9 pm for “Kitchen Lab: an Unveiling” and play with the City Pantry as well as all of the other Kitchen Lab projects that explore ideas such as heat, water, and curiosity. Hang around for an Acoustic Campfire performance by Mixed Precipitation’s cast of Picnic Operetta!  As a collective the Walker Kitchen Lab has been researching, developing, prototyping, discovering, exploring, questioning and philosophizing what a kitchen is and what it can be. What would you put in your Kitchen Lab?

Better Together: A Collective Drawing Experiment

Public Program Organizer Samuel Hanson Willis checks in with us on Open Field and summertime

Name: Samuel Hanson Willis
Occupation: Family Medicine Physician and Creative Problem Solver
City/Neighborhood: Windom Park/Minneapolis
Open Field Activity: Better Together: A Collective Drawing Experiment
Description: Draw: “BECOMING BETTER.” Connect with the Open Field community by sharing your ideas about what “becoming better” means to you through the act of drawing. Your drawing will be added to a collection of images by others and assembled into a digital flipbook. As the project evolves it will be visible at www.doctorsam.us/art.html. Check the website this fall to watch the idea take shape.
Dates of Activity: June 23, 2012 & July 28, 2012 from 2- 5 pm.

1. Fill-in-the-blank: _______________ is what we make together.

 Life is what we make together. (more…)

ARTSWAP Attendee, Open Field 2011.

Off of the ice—from the aptly named Ice Art Swap—and into the hot sun, Art Swap is about to hit Open Field. The concept of Art Swap is simple: bring  art and swap it for a different piece of art! The one unchanging aspect of the project: the art swapper must pose for a photo with the object they brought and the object they received in exchange (see image).

Local artist and community organizer Angela Sprunger is the woman behind the Open Field Art Swap activity and adamantly believes that you should bring whatever you consider to be “art.”  Sprunger, an Open Field veteran who answered some questions for us last summer when the Art Swap team first joined us, also has a drawing in the newly-minted mnartists.org coloring book  which is now available in the Walker Shop.

Art Swap roves around the Twin Cities, and will also grace Open Field on three Saturdays: June 23th, July 28th, and August 25th, 2012 from 2 to 5 pm. Bring art to swap!

The Big String Thing

“Be ye a finger or be ye a thumb,” you are all cordially invited by Mike Haeg to participate in a life-size string figures—including Cat’s Cradle—on Open Field this summer in which each finger shall be a person.  As an artist and social engagement maestro, Haeg is interested in simple shapes and shared spaces. Last year, he orchestrated the Walker’s very own MASH pole and arrow exchange—the WALKER pole—in which participants contributed and traded distance markers for locations real and imaginary.  Mr. Haeg conceptualized and is the first and only lifelong mayor of Mt. Holly, his home in Shakopee, a location that likewise marries the real and fantastical. His artistic projects, like his humble abode and town, reflect his passion for craft, playful interaction, and man’s propensity for silliness. (more…)