Many have suggested simple solutions to the French Paradox, the apparent contradiction that the French can eat rich, fatty foods while maintaining a lifestyle much healthier than many their counterparts in the western world. Could it be all the red wine? Or maybe its something in their genetics? The answer, as Will Marshall explained in his introduction to the Open Jar Collective’s “Feeding Creativity” event, is likely much more complicated than that, and is a clear indication that our attitude towards food has a fundamental effect on our everyday lives. From how we socialise, to how we interact with our surrounding landscape and, importantly, how we create, Will understands that our relationship with food shapes us as individuals and as a community, capable of bringing us together and prompting what he calls “unexpected interactions” across all sorts of social and cultural boundaries. For him and the rest of the Stove team, the prospect of opening a cafe Dumfries town centre is much more than a simple business venture. On the contrary, the Stove sees its future cafe not just as a place to drink nice coffee but as lively hub that will bring the community together, be it to participate in the events or activities facilitated by the Stove network or just to enjoy good quality local produce, sourced from across the region.
The Project Cafe in Glasgow, one of the cafe’s cited by Open Jar in their exploration of Creativity and Food
o fulfil this vision, the Stove has enlisted the expertise of the Open Jar Collective, a group of Glasgow-based artists who specialise in all things food. Open Jar have been carrying out extensive research to in order formulate an operational plan and identity for the cafe, analysing similar projects undertaken by other arts organisations in the UK (Glasgow’s Project Cafe was offered as one such example) and meeting with local producers such as the Loch Arthur Farmshop.
Feeding Creativity represented another stage in this process, a 2-hour event held at 100 Midsteeple in which they invited anyone with an interest in food and creativity to have their say about what they’d like to see from a new eating spot in the town centre – and to share some tasty soup and bread in the process.
Attendees included caterers, health workers, business owners and civil servants amongst other professionals, all interested in leveraging the cafe’s prime location and the region’s ample culinary resources to enrich the town and the lives of its denizens alike. Splitting into groups, they identified problems currently ailing the town and suggested some ways these could be addressed, resulting in a sort of mission plan that might inform the functioning of the cafe in its finished form.
Chief among these was the need for a place to meet after shopping hours that isn’t a pub, giving young people a chance to get out of the family home and giving community groups somewhere amenable to convene on a regular basis. Another was the desire for a knowledge centre where townsfolk can share their passion for food, be it cooking skills, growing techniques or healthy eating advice.
All in all, Open Jar were met with an enthusiastic response and left with plenty of ideas to work with, ending the night by assuring that further public consultations are in the works. With the cafe due to open in time for Guid Nychburris, the Stove is keen to get as many people excited about food’s potential to bring about positive change as they can in the coming months, ideally resulting in a space that the people of Dumfries can feel invested in and responsible for, and which gives the town centre a whole new lease of life. If Feeding Creativity is any indication, it’s off to a great start.
Last November as part of the Dumfries Christmas Light’s Switch On, members of the Young Stove took on their first project, creating an interactive artwork on the High Street. Developing ideas for a less commercial, more natural Christmas, the group decided to gift live Christmas trees to those attending the Switch On in exchange for a Christmas wish of goodwill.
Report on the Young Stove Christmas Lights project by Young Stove member Michael Moore
Originally two worries I had about the project was “Would we have enough time for the event to be a big hit?” and “Would the public really get a feeling of the non-materialist Christmas?” I was happy to find I’d been worrying for no reason as within an hour and fifty minutes all the trees had been “re-homed” and the Glowing Gifts with their attached wishes were all sat ornately on and all around the stand.
Far from people simply saying something and getting a tree I found that the majority of people involved were both really interested in understanding how to get their tree to flourish and even struggled to choose of a thoughtful wish/hope. People really thinking about what they would give if they could was brilliant to see.
The only thing I was more impressed with than the public interest was my fellow Young Stove members. They were straight into interaction with the public from the get go and never showed a second of stress even when the public crowd gathered around our stand waiting keenly to see what the event was about. All of the members went into a fantastic operational mode where no “ordering” was needed. We all interacted with each other as equals and there could be no question of a lack of respect for anyone present that’s not just supposedly rare with young people, but also rare with people generally!
I’m impressed and happy to see all the work that was put into the project become a success but I’m happier still to be part of a group of creative and ambitious people working in a naturally co-operative autonomous way. It’s really great to see individual artists collaborating happily to create an event in bringing the community together even on a cold dark winters day.
I’m excited to see what we think of next and I’m (almost) hoping it’s nothing too easy to make happen as it seems its sometimes better to be overambitious!
To see the full set of photos from the event head to our Flickr page here
Dumfries, in common with most Scottish towns, has a particular lunch time snack – the toasted Panini. First referenced in a 16th Century Italian cookbook, Panino (which comes from the Italian pane meaning bread) is traditionally a grilled sandwich made with slices of porchetta, that is popular in Central Italy. Panini became trendy in Milanese bars called Paninoteche in the 1970s and 1980s, and then subsequently in New York. Paninaro came to mean a fashionable young person who was very image conscious.
Through the dominance of American fast food culture, Panini have become ubiquitous in Scotland, alongside white sliced bread toasties, and french baguettes. All of these breads are made from highly refined strong wheat flours which are very difficult to produce in Scotland. Due to our shorter growing season, the wheat grown here has a much lower protein content which is fine for baking but lacks the elastic gluten required for conventional bread making. Scotland’s most successful cereal crop is Barley, once used in almost every home to bake bannocks.
According to the NFUScotland, out of the 2 million tonnes of Scottish barley produced in 2013, 55% was used as animal feed, 35% went to Whisky malting, and only a small proportion was sold as pearl barley or milled as flour for us to eat.
Bere(pronounced ‘bear’) is a form of six-row barley which has been grown in Scotland for thousands of years. Bere is quite possibly Britain’s oldest cereal grain still in commercial cultivation and was likely to have been brought here by Viking settlers. It has adapted to growing in soils with low pH and in areas with long daylight hours which makes it particularly suited to Orkney, Shetland and the Western Isles. It grows rapidly, being sown in the spring and harvested in the summer. Beremeal was one of the earliest flours to be used to make bannocks.
Robert Burns once described southern Scotland as a “land o’ cakes”. He didn’t mean desserts, but oatcakes and barley bannocks that would have been baked on an iron girdle over the fire.
“In Scotland, amongst the rural population generally, the girdle until recent times took the place of the oven, the bannock of the loaf.” F. Marian McNeil, 1929
In The Scots Kitchen, F. Marian McNeil suggests that the name bannok occurs in 1572, and derives from Latin panicum, probably through the influence of the Church. It may have referred originally to Communion bread.
Bannocks can range from soda breads, scones, or pancakes to a sweet fruity tea loaf in the case of the famous Selkirk bannock, but they usually have some barley meal in them. After testing numerous recipes, I think the best turned out to be F. Marian McNeil’s “Modern Method” using Beremeal from Barony Mills in Orkney (which is available through Greencity).
Bannocks o’ bear meal, Bannocks o’ barley,
Here’s to the Highlandman’s bannocks o’ barley.
Wha, in a brulzie, will first cry a parley?
Never the lads wi’ the bannocks o’ barley.
Bannocks o’ bear meal, Bannocks o’ barley,
Here’s to the Highlandman’s bannocks o’ barley.
Wha, in his wae days, were loyal to Charlie?
Wha but the lads wi’ the bannocks o’ barley!
Bannocks o’ bear meal, Bannocks o’ barley,
Here’s to the Highlandman’s bannocks o’ barley.
Robert Burns, 1794
“Back in October I got the chance to take part in Parking Space set up by the Stove and Sleeping Giants. Such a great weekend meeting all the people there, having a great time skating and filming and just soaking up the good times. The whole idea that every level you went down was a new event to watch and take part in really made it for me. Here’s some stills from a video in the works from the event I filmed with Mutual Motion.”
Watch Callum’s short film created as part of Parking Space here:
____
Keep up with Callum and his film and photography work online:
Stove member Stan Bonnar shared with us his recent open letter to the Scottish Parliamentary Cross-Party group, on creating spaces and environments for thinking, discussing. How do we nurture culture? Stan used our AGM back in October as a stepping stone in his letter, and so we asked him if he would kindly let us share his letter on our blog.
For more on Stan, please have a look at his interesting flickr account here which includes an alternative artistic reading of his letter
__
“i attended the agm of the stove artists collective in dumfries the other night. after all the formalities were over, they had organized a group discussion on public art, and this was facilitated by two groups – dot to dot active arts (blyth, northumberland) and the open jar collective (glasgow). also there were mark lyken and emma dove (who are currently artists in residence at the stove). this meeting of minds took place in an underground car park (closed to cars but not to skateboarders) and the various spaces of this dark cave were illuminated – some by moving images projected onto sheets, some by sculptural installations.
all these artists are actively and intimately involved with people. i would describe their art practice as mindful listening – cupped hands held open in places where people are – people fill the cup with all sorts of ideas and things. some of these leak away – filtered through fingers, but some remain for people and artist to see more clearly, and perhaps to make something of – a work of environmental art, of social art? but i also see the work of these artists as indicative of a greater search for cultural equanimity that started after the second world war. a continuing response by the individual to the excesses of technological globalization. but what drives such a human response – an ethical impulse – a quest for fairness?
human beings are naturally universal, by which i mean that our ideas and impulses are the very fabric of the universe. if the universe has a capacity to be unthinking, then so do we. if we are ethical and mindful, then the universe is ethical and mindful. we extend as the universe, and the universe extends as us – we are things like any other.
i will now try to take you on a trip into the universe as i understand it. i want us to consider the following quotation which is the current wikipedia definition of quantum entanglement: “Quantum entanglement is a physical phenomenon that occurs when pairs or groups of particles are generated or interact in ways such that the quantum state of each particle cannot be described independently—instead, a quantum state may be given for the system as a whole.
“Measurements of physical properties such as position, momentum, spin, polarization, etc. performed on entangled particles are found to be appropriately correlated. For example, if a pair of particles is generated in such a way that their total spin is known to be zero, and one particle is found to have clockwise spin on a certain axis, then the spin of the other particle, measured on the same axis, will be found to be counterclockwise. Because of the nature of quantum measurement, however, this behavior gives rise to effects that can appear paradoxical: any measurement of a property of a particle can be seen as acting on that particle (e.g. by collapsing a number of superimposed states); and in the case of entangled particles, such action must be on the entangled system as a whole. It thus appears that one particle of an entangled pair “knows” what measurement has been performed on the other, and with what outcome, even though there is no known means for such information to be communicated between the particles, which at the time of measurement may be separated by arbitrarily large distances.”
for me, the phenomenon of quantum entanglement/measurement seems to show that the nature of things in space and time is very much comprehended from the point of view of something, like ourselves, who is entangled in the system. it’s not possible to become physically disentangled from a physical universe of space and time, especially if we ourselves are by our very comprehending, projecting the physical universe. so what is the universe really like beyond our comprehending of it?
for me, the phenomenon of quantum entanglement shows that the universe is the extension of pure singleness, throughout which we things project an infinite array of differently entangled realities of spacetime. the point is, that no matter where or when we look, we are looking at that thing with which we are entangled, which is ourself. we are our own differential comprehending of pure singleness.
i asked the question earlier concerning what drives the human ethical impulse – the quest for fairness to which social artists are compelled. the answer is clear that it is our pure singleness that drives such a quest. but how do things come into existence from pure singleness?
here is a representation of pure singleness…
…because of our nature as spatio-temporal things, this space is the closest we can get to actually describing pure singleness. for us it is the pure singleness of ‘space’ which has no property other than that it can extend for a ‘time’. as ‘things in space and time’ is how we comprehend our own pure singleness. but what constitutes a thing?
if singleness has the property that it can extend as our understanding (and then as the comprehending of that which we understand), then our ‘thinghood’ is the symmetrical extending of pure singleness. what i mean by this is simply that there can be no extension without that which is extended from. a thing is always a symmetrical alterity of otherness – that very system of a particle mentioned in the wikipedia definition of quantum entanglement. a thing is always the symmetry of otherness, and although i comprehend myself as an individual, i am actually nothing but my difference from you.
there is no ‘thing-in-itself’ as such. a thing is not for example the cat which strolls past me on the pavement on a sunny day. rather the thing is pure singleness extending as symmetry of the universe – nuances of which are the cat, the pavement, the sun and me. nuances which constitute the thinghood of the things that i comprehend.
but as i hinted earlier, comprehending is nothing more than our comprehensive grasping together of a basic understanding that we have with otherness. understanding-with is the sheer symmetrical extending of pure singleness as the alterity of otherness. understanding-with is the basis of the universe. the cat, the pavement, the sun and i are all nothing but our difference from each other, and we create and recreate each other in the
very moment of our understanding-with. this is the very spacing and temporalizing of pure singleness.
if i become conscious of the cat on the pavement, then for a few moments i will cultivate my understanding-with of the cat/pavement/sun/me thing. i might then nurture that initial cultivation by bending down to speak to the cat. if i then find that i am not only absorbed with this cat but with cats in general, i might join the cats protection league and be absorbed into a culture of cats and cat related things. in other words, i become ‘cultured’. the point is that there is no thing that is not cultured to some extent, and a thing that is cultured has been cultivated to be so. culture is the way of things.
if culture is the way of things, how best are we to nurture culture? by what means do we ackowledge the cultivation of things as cultures? do we simply celebrate cultural differences? of course we do, but this can be a hugely broad and insensitive brush stroke. rather, it is important to acknowledge the details of sophisticated cultural practice – literally for example, the manipulation of the nuts and bolts of a mechanics’ workplace.
many artists such as those whom i mentioned earlier, are deeply entangled with the cultures of others. they seek to interrogate, nurture and extend these cultures because they are very sensitive to the way of things. their work in these social contexts is at once public and intimately detailed. we might look on the scottish parliamentary cross party group on culture as a place where cultural things become entangled – but the ultimate purpose of such a group must also be to nurture the cultures of others. if it does not, then it runs the risk of becoming nothing more than a showcase for the arts establishment.
there is no limit what art is and where it can be found. at its most fundamental it is about the languages of cultural things and how they develop. the CPG on culture must be sensitive to artists working with ‘nuts and bolts’ and enable them to become entangled with MSP’s. both groups are working to nurture cultural things – but artists also nurture the languages of things.
all over scotland, MSP’s and artists occupy the same localities, and these are where new CPG working parties should be founded.”
Mark and I are about five weeks in to our residency with The Stove. One London taxicab and twenty-four conversations in said taxicab later, and we’re starting to get a feel for the place…
A little bit of background on that. We had heard that The Stove was planning to hold their AGM in an underground car park… Ok then. But not just an AGM, in fact this usually empty car park will be filled with games, projections, skateboarders, a cinema… Ok then…
These are the sort of wild off-hand statements that we have become accustomed to expect at Stove meetings, in amongst chat of salty coos and wooden-spoon themed offerings to gypsy kings. Hang on a minute; what’s a salty coo? Well, after a little more explanation, we are beginning to grasp the nuances of the rich, diverse and genius ways that The Stove Network is engaging with a town in flux and a wide geographical area with a rich and beguiling history.
We came away thinking, firstly, “These guys are bloody brilliant” and, secondly, “What can we do in an underground car park in 2 weeks time?”. As mentioned in the last blog, we wanted to find a way to start exploring the theme of human migrations and find a way to get people chatting about home – the good bits and the not so good bits.
What sort of warm, friendly and familiar space could we create within an underground car park? The sort of space where people feel happy to open up and chat? The sort of space where we can set up all of our kit and record these conversations in an unobtrusive way? The sort of space that somehow keys in with the themes of “home” and of “travel”…?
A mad week of logistical grafting later and the taxicab arrived, driven all the way up from Chingford in Essex by a lovely chap called Wullie J, and was given a whirlwind makeover in time for its Parking Space debut.
We weren’t sure what to expect, both of the wider Parking Space event and our small part within it. We agreed we would be happy if 5 or 6 people came in for a chat and so were absolutely delighted to have a total of 24 folks through the shiny black doors within 2 days, each with their own different story to tell. Each visitor marked the places that they spoke about on a map of D&G and we plan to follow up some of these places to film during our residency.
In terms of the wider event, the space was bubbling with activity as curious visitors slowly made their way down through each level of the car park, lured by the unusual sounds that ricocheted and tumbled together through the space, invitations to street games, dancing lights and projections upon pillars and walls, not to mention the people hurling themselves in to the air mounted upon small wooden chariots [skateboards]. A feast for the senses.
A few of our visitors in the Gab Cab
To be privy to the AGM side of things was also fantastic for us. The personal value upon which everyone present felt for the organisation (and for each other’s work) was palpable, much of which was expressed through talks and images and emerged further through the Public Art discussion facilitated by Dot to Dot Active Arts and The Open Jar Collective, fittingly chatted over a plate of hot stovies and a glass of wine. A really valuable evening to be a part of.
We’ve lots of ideas and inspiration to explore over the next few months and we are planning an Artist Talk in December to share some of these. We will also be talking about some our work to date, sharing some of our “Hame” work in progress (including some Parking Space rushes…) and screening our previous film, Mirror Lands.
