Debra Solomon: Shaping communities with Food

In 2004, Debra Solomon (artist/designer) began publishing her independent research on food, food culture, and the culture that grows our food on culiblog.org. Culiblog is an internationally recognized resource about food systems, sustainability, urban agriculture, food-related art/design, architecture, and urban planning.

An ongoing project, Lucky Mi Fortune Cooking is a free kitchen and culinary embassy in Rotterdam using surplus food, expertise and facilities flows from the Afrikaandermarkt neighbourhod. The free kitchen produces new food products from local flows through collective entrepreneurship, street food design and resulting in actual dim sumptuous foods and snacks.

In 2007 Solomon co-curated the Edible City (NAi-Maastricht) on food and the built environment and was food domain expert of DOTT07, a design biennial in Newcastle (UK) and was part of the design team of the award winning Urban Farming Project in Middlesbrough.

Currently Solomon is working with architects teams and local people on projects that are radical visions for community involvement with food systems and urban agriculture. With STROOM Den Haag and many local organisations Solomon is developing a 'real' edible city for the Schilderswijk in Den Haag. Aside from edible landscaping, the co-designs include open-to-the-public communal kitchen facilities and infrastructure aimed at bolstering social cohesion through local food-related micro-economies. Read more on her weblog, www.culiblog.org.

Recently rediscovered as a strategic tool for sustainability, urban agriculture (UA) is touted as an emerging trend in Western cities, lured back from hiatus after a brief appearance in the Victory Garden followed by decades behind dark glasses. Currently UA features prominently in artsy social cohesion projects and designer-rich urban regeneration schemes. But a truly visionary form of UA, one that takes into account both urban and regional planning, one that is deeply informed by local cultural heritage, and one that accesses the existing social networks of local communities and their food system infrastructure has not yet been realised. Once the location of local farms supplying the city with food, Amsterdam West has been the location of intensive urban development. UA’s biggest challenge in Northern European cities like Amsterdam and it's western suburbs with their agriculture tradition, will be its integration into civic planning and infrastructure such that city dwellers can access its benefits. UA’s second biggest challenge will be to grow, harvest and sow it’s own cultural heritage and to forge a sumptuously visual identity resplendent with vital programming and content relevant to existing (and future) Amsterdam communities.

www.culiblog.org

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Day to day observations

When important relationships rely on technological mediation.

Watching my folks, being somewhat oblivious to the camera

Get a room.

I have a folder on my computer filled with screenshots that I take whilst skyping my folks. In the shots, Mom & Dad are playing around, teasing each other, poking, messing up each other's hair, kissing and kanoodeling, drinking beer out of a bottle without the aid of a glass, like an orangutan.

Although they've lived most of their adult lives in the middle of Silicon Valley, down the street from the Packards, up the street from PARC, my parents have somehow escaped becoming technologically savvy.

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Absence makes the civil disobedience grow fonder

Not all things worth communicating fit the format of absence. Some of our most ubiquitous technological formats are still not up to the task of communicating with the necessary nuance.

Getting to know a community

Strategies for encounter, when forging relationships, even as research, requires real fascination.

Cuteness overload, it's a tool just like any other

A journalist friend of mine once told me, if you want folks to pay extra attention to what you have to say, illustrate with images of children or animals.

Not so idle youth

Is it possible to correct the notion that occupation and use of the public space is not an act of aggression?

Collaborating in a community

Formats for collaboration, when being part of the group is the only way to make things work.

Public Space in progress

On the way home from some meetings to possible collaboration with local groups on landscaping public space with productive planting, I happen upon the Westenbergstraat carpet cleaning day. A beautiful appropriation of public space, a close group of neighbours with an open door policy, and an instant group of collaborators for the planting project. In exchange for a community orchard they offered to share their location.

Permaculture relationships

Permaculture is a design discipline for emphasizing the relationship between natural processes. The term is a portmanteau for permanent agriculture and permanent culture and includes the production of healthy biotopes, soil fertility, food production societal well-being.

Permaculture is a design discipline for emphasizing the relationship between natural processes. The term is a portmanteau for permanent agriculture and permanent culture and includes the production of healthy biotopes, soil fertility, food production societal well-being.

The 3 core values of permaculture captured in 3 hula hoops: Process and systems we set into action should: 1. care for the earth, 2. care for people, 3. be shared fairly

Unfortunately due to some of permaculture's aesthetically challenged proponents, the practice did mainstream. This in turn kept it from being taught at architecture & design academies, art schools, and universities, and subsequently from benefitting from a goodly dose of critical response.

Issues affecting us now, i.e. climate change and Peak Oil are renewing interest in the discipline, which is fortunately experiencing rapid development and increased acceptance.

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Leaving the community

Rituals for leaving, when in an ideal situation, the group honours your departure

The Great Sendoff

The festive funeral of Dutch Fluxus artist Robert Jasper Grootveld on March 7th, 2009

The festive funeral of Dutch Fluxus artist Robert Jasper Grootveld on March 7th, 2009

Begin with flames, explosions, fire extinguishers, and masked men in red leather aprons.

www.iisg.nl/grootveld/index.php

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The Intimate Family Sendoff

When Grams died, my family celebrated her right then and there with a memorial which accidentally morphed into an adhoc, post-funerial fashion show.

When Grams died, my family celebrated her right then and there with a memorial which accidentally morphed into an adhoc, post-funerial fashion show.

Happy Funeral! Cousin Rebecca in Gram's silk cloud mumu.

My grandmother, Amelia Kroll Solomon died on March 24, 2002 at the age of 93. The entire family including her children (aka the Siblings) and their children (aka the Cousins - my generation) had been attending her for some months during the hospice, at home. I don't think that there was ever a time that we were all together like this, even during the many weddings that had taken place here in this house. Toward the end, all of us were there, tending to her, to each other, eating dinner together at a table set for 24.

The period of her dying at home was well-planned. The siblings took care of that. But at some point my cousins and I started becoming more integral in Gram's care and possibly due to our influence, after her death, the days leading up to her memorial celebration unfolded organically.

Grams was an artist, had a warm personality and was extremely well-loved. And she had an amazing collection of exuberant flowing hippy clothes. All of us girls; Grams, my cousins Robin & Wendy, Rebecca, Aunties Suzon or Sheba, we all used to play dress up with her fascinating wardrobe. Somehow rifling through her many closets and drawers and putting on her clothing was a way of getting even more of this generous woman. She always played along with us, also dressing up and twirling in front of each other and the many mirrors... even when we were adults.

The post-funeral fashion show, started accidentally. We'd been ordering the piles of her possessions obsessively for days and the clothes were in her bedroom stacked in piles on the floor, awaiting a destination. Escaping the throngs of family and friends at the memorial, my cousins and I started rummaging through the piles, putting on her clothes and joking around. One thing led to the next and suddenly our little dress-up party poured out into the garden. We were trying to replicate the outfits we remembered Grams wearing when she was alive, and although we may have offended the East Coast side of the family, our little show most certainly lifted the spirits of the Siblings. Darting between friends in family on the lawn still out there chatting reminiscing, mourning and laughing, it was an hilarious way to end a period of mourning, but no less a collective family expression of love.

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