FEED Symposium
Coordinated by Chelsea Estep-Armstrong and Rachel Signer - New School for Social Research, Anthropology
FEED's Symposium takes shape by embracing the notion that public markets are dynamic centers of cultural, political, and economic exchange. The conditions of space both influence and frame the essence and character of knowledge production. Thus, it is no accident that our conversations will take flight within the Cuchifritos gallery, framed in a stadium made of recycled materials. The space itself is seen as a crucial participant to our conversations.
We have invited a diverse range of professionals, creative thinkers, activists, and academics to discuss their work in NYC with respect to food, innovation, history, and the design and uses of public spaces. The symposium is an experiment in scales: we will travel with our discussants as they share insights into their specialized fields, while simultaneously tracing the pathways back to being grounded in and about the Essex Street Market. The symposia are conceived of as informal conversations with plenty of room for audience participation in the themes and patterns that emerge. .
The FEED Symposium proposes to view public markets as sites of critical and creative exchange between institutions, disciplines, and community members alike. Our conversations will open up productive spaces for an exploration of our histories, our multiplicitous presents, and the potentialities of our collective future/s.
Alternative Food Economies
"Permaculture, bee keeping, rooftop gardening & urban agriculture."
Saturday September 19th 2009 at 4:30 pm
Speakers : Andrew Faust, John Howe, Annie Novak
Andrew Faust is the Founder of The Center for Bioregional Living, has been teaching ecological design and Permaculture for over 17 years. Over two years ago he moved to NYC, after homesteading off the grid for 8 years in rural W.V., and hit the ground running teaching numerous classes, speaking on various panels, designing edible gardens, consulting urban and rural clients and volunteering in his local community garden.
John Howe : I started beekeeping seven years ago. I was an English as a Second Language teacher-in¬training at the time after a long career as an elementary school computer teacher. One Fall eight years ago a honeybee landed on my table at an outdoor café in Manhattan. I was fascinated and I had an epiphany of sorts . I knew then and there I wanted to keep bees. Googling on the computer started me off and the Internet enabled me to get it all together so that I had three hives with bees the next April. I have never looked back. I have also returned to my roots as an elementary teacher, by offering bee presentations at schools all over the City. This has been a very rewarding synthesis. I am married to a beautiful lady and have one grown son, a software consultant who sometimes helps with the bees. I have lived in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn (near downtown Brooklyn) for 30 years, but grew up outside New Haven Connecticut. I moved to NYC to attend Columbia University and have never left. I got my BA in Anthropology and a Master’s in Education. Also a certificate in English Language Teaching from the New School.
Annie Novak is a cofounder and farmer at ahref="http://rooftopfarms.org/">Rooftop Farms, a 6,000 square foot organic vegetable farm installed by Goode Green atop a warehouse in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Annie is program director of field-to-fork education program Growing Chefs. Growing Chefs has partnered with Slow Foods, Edible Estates, Health Corps and schools across New York in farming, nutrition, and edible landscaping. A lifelong vegetarian, Annie spends several months of the year traveling and investigating different ways people grow and eat their food around the world. She’s followed blueberries and cows through New Zealand, sheep and hops through Argentina, quinoa and llamas through Peru, cassava and fish through Fiji and the Cook Islands, and cacao through Costa Rica and Ghana. She is the Children’s Gardening Coordinator at The New York Botanical Garden and active with the New York City Greenmarket. Annie has appeared (talking about plants and food, of course) in New York Magazine, the Today Show online, Edible Brooklyn and the Martha Stewart Show.
The Politics of Contested Space
"Housing rights, minorities in the city and spatial power."
Monday September 21th 2009 at 1 pm
Speakers : Marisa Franco, Carl Lipscombe - both from Right to the City
Contextualizing the Market
"Historical dynamics of food in the Lower East Side"
Tuesday September 22nd 2009 at 1pm
Speaker : Gabrielle Bendiner-Viani
Public Space and Public Health
"The urban ecology of the Lower East Side, Environmental education; stories of buildings and food"
Wednesday September 23rd 2009 at 1pm
Speakers : Tara DePorte, Christian Hubert
Christian Hubert is an architect and writer whose design studio is right near the Essex Street Market. Since the 1980's, he has designed lofts, galleries, and apartments for artists and collectors, both in New York and Los Angeles, and has taught at architecture schools on both East and West coasts.
His interests in food and urban life lead him to the market almost every day.
His most recent teaching includes a seminar course at the New School entitled "The Architecture of Food and Space"and participation in the Terrefarm summer workshop at the Metropolitan Exchange in Brooklyn.
The Making of Public Space
"Institutionalized space in contrast to spontaneous and organic spatial assemblages, and psychogeography"
Thursday September 24th at 1pm
Speakers : Charity Scribner and Michael Cataldi
Charity Scribner (b. 1965, United States) is an Assistant Professor of English at LaGuardia Community College (CUNY) and a Faculty Fellow at the Center for Place, Culture and Politics at the CUNY Graduate Center. She is the recipient of a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2009-10. With this support she is organizing a public arts and education collaboration with LaGuardia students and the visual artist Thomas Hirschhorn.
From 2002-07 Scribner taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where she held the Class of 1954 Career Development Professorship in European Cultural Studies from 2005-07. She has received research fellowships from Balliol College-Oxford, the Humboldt University-Berlin, the Institute for Cultural Studies-NRW in Essen Germany, the Fulbright Foundation, and the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).
Scribner’s research and teaching focuses on contemporary literature and art. Her first book is Requiem for Communism (MIT 2003), a study of the aesthetic response to the collapse of communism. Scribner is a contributor to several academic journals, including the New Left Review, Critical Inquiry, and Grey Room. Her second book manuscript is under review at the Princeton University Press; it examines on left-wing terrorism and postmilitant culture in Germany.
Serving as Platform Organizer for Documenta 11 (2001-02) in Kassel, Germany, Scribner organized a series of public programs on art and ideas in Berlin, Vienna, and New Delhi. She completed her PhD in Comparative Literature at Columbia University in 2000 and was a student in the Independent Study Program at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1997-98.
Michael Cataldi (born 1982, Philadelphia) is an artist whose work intervenes in the public sphere. Cataldi’s site generated projects, ranging from ad hoc architectures to improvised play structures, propose the re-imagination and re-use of space and place. As one of the Initiating artists of the University of Trash, Cataldi, together with Nils Norman, and numerous other collaborators built a temporary university within the exhibition space of Sculpture Center in Long Island City. The Universities architecture, inspired by Utopian experiments and historical sites of resistance, hosted over fifty events through an open call in which anyone could become a teacher or a student.
The Virtualization of Markets
"Community memory experiment, architectonic of markets"
Friday September 25th 2009 at 1pm
Speaker : Guy Reziciner
Food and the World Market
"Fair trade, free trade and food in the global economy."
Saturday September 26th at 1pm
Speakers : Michela Calbrese, Mebrak Tareke
Michela Calabrese is the Stakeholder Director at interrupcion* fair trade, a global organization that is working to build a sustainable future through responsible consumption, sustainable development, organic farming and fair trade. In 2004 Michela joined interrupcion* fair trade after graduating from The New School University with a Masters in International Affairs and Socio-Economic Development. She is one of many interrupters* working to build a model of trade and global interaction between consumers, businesses and producers that positively impacts the social, economic and environmental sustainability of the world. Her day to day work entails sales of fair trade certified produce from interrupcion* member producers in Latin America to the US and Canadian market, as well as a marketing campaign that interrupts* consumers to educate and inform them that ‘their purchase is power.’
Mebrak Tareke has a Masters in Social Anthroplogy from the London School of Economics and Political Science. She is currently freelancing as an editor, writer and translator for international organizations. She also blogs, photographs and writes poetry. Mebrak is a self confessed people, art and education junky. As far as Fragmental is concerned, Mebrak is interested in how post modern Anthropology could inform the visual arts in terms of deconstructing and rebuilding the contentious concepts of culture, space and time according to cutting theories that rely on the fast changing faces of diverse urban settings and people residing in densely populated places like New York city.
Feeding Nostalgia
"Limits of desire, seduction & consumption in the production of public space."
Saturday September 26th at 3pm
Speaker : Julia Nevarez
Julia Nevarez has a degree in Environmental Psychology, interested in the study of relational space, globalization, and technology. Currently teachesin the Sociology and Anthropology Department, Kean University, NJ, lives in Harlem, NYC.
