Fieldfaring is a social art project that investigates the overlay of urban and rural systems upon the lives of specific communities. The project explores anthropological issues regarding people and places through the lens of social economy, history and local ecology. Susanne Cockrell and Ted Purves are Fieldfaring. They are based in Oakland, California.

CW: It seems that your activities in generating interest and knowledge in food based practices are fundamental steps to empowering communities to make the transition from consumers to providers of their own basic needs?

Ted Purves: For us, we are interested in how any given person connects to these practices, like food production, through either their own personal history or through some other form of cultural memory. Perhaps it was their parents or grandparents or people they met or can remember, or it might have been something as simple as a children’s book they read or a movie they saw. It’s about people connecting to histories and re-imagining how they might manifest their own personal or local economy and lifestyle.
Susanne Cockrell: People might connect to the idea and reality of growing food as something new and even trendy, but it’s more about returning

CW: Yes, but the difficult thing of this ‘returning’ is that the youngest generations now feasibly no longer have any direct familial link to what was once a common knowledge.

TP: This is true, but fortunately we live in times where people can become connected to past knowledge through channels beyond the personal and familial.

SC: In returning there is an implied activism. People observe something happening in the social environment, in their neighborhoods and cities and begin to join in. They see a model in practice that gives them a kind of access. I think schools have been very successful in connecting curriculum and food production. There are now many examples of successful garden/food programs at elementary and middle schools across the country.

People’s Grocery in Oakland is another good example of food being at the heart of community and social change. PG’s mission is to develop creative solutions to the health problems in communities that stem from a lack of access to and knowledge about healthy, fresh foods. They bring a mobile truck market into urban neighborhoods that are not served by stores that sell produce. They are also starting their own farm/CSA to further integrate local production into their project.

Another interesting example is the art/media collective Public Matters’ work in LA. They have worked with urban youth in making nutritious foods available at local corner stores in poor or marginalized neighborhoods through a combination of social organizing and through the creation of short video infomercials. Social activism is essential for building awareness and organizing communities.

Another thing to note is that the hand-made or homemade has reemerged as significant in daily life. People want to make things and enjoy the fruit of their own labor. It’s practical, its self reliant and its about making the world reflect their values. It’s seems a fairly common response to our global information saturated world and the fact that more and more people work in information economies.

CW: Fieldfaring projects are often highly participatory. Does your initial role as facilitators alter once a project has kicked off?

TP: Our initial role is as creators or architects. We often become facilitators as a project develops because the structure of the projects opens up places for others to join in. In a project like Temescal Amity Works (TAW) we actually produced other people’s projects in our space and responded to the public’s interest in the project to see how we could make the project useful to them.

SC: In this way the project was designed to change as more people got involved and this was one of our hopes, that authorship would spread laterally and become diffused. The facilitating role never dissolves completely.

In the end, TAW was a three-year project, and we began to feel more like administrators in the last year. In fact, some community members wanted us to turn the project into a non-profit organization in order to better serve the community – in their vision of the project. This would have made the project almost solely administrative and we were interested in doing other projects.

CW: Have you observed that your projects find participants and an audience from any particular demographic? Are participants typically already established gardeners and cooks or do you also glean the attention of newcomers? 

TP: I think this was fairly mixed. For TAW, the initial audience was those who were interested in gardening, as well as those who had recently moved into the neighborhood and were looking to connect with a larger community. Many were new renters and homeowners and those engaged in urban homesteading and co-housing.

SC: Yes, many were cooks, but also lots of them were folks interested in alternative economics and community building. We still get emails from newcomers who want to get involved; they hear about the project and are interested in similar ideas. Essentially they are looking for ways to connect with the community, some of them are instigating their own community projects, others just have backyard fruit trees and the fruit is going to waste.

TP: On another front, the project area for TAW is a culturally diverse, but this was not as reflected in the participation as we would have liked it to be.

SC: This idea of demographics though, talking across a wider cultural experience is something we are more explicitly investigating in our current project, The Meadow Network. In it we are foregrounding specific questions like demographics or diverse experiences in the initial design of a project will allow these issues to be more clearly addressed as the work unfolds.

TP: This takes us back to the “architecture” of each of our projects. When we conceived and structured TAW our main interest was in looking at history. Specifically, how can a history of a community be brought forward through the lens of social economy?

SC: …and how land itself holds memory and organizes human actions and practices across time. For instance, The East Bay has many histories of agricultural activity due to its microclimate. And there is a particular stream of experimentation in the Bay Area around social lifestyle and diversity of traditions that is based on the history of immigration and industry in California.

CW: Essentially it seems that Fieldfaring’s focus is centered on setting up frameworks for the sharing of practical knowledge. Do you have much of a sense of what happens at the conclusion of a project?

SC: TAW was active in the community at a time when there was a resurgence of social activism around urban farming, slow food culture and localism. Though Amity Works stopped being active in early 2007, there are related projects operating in Oakland and San Francisco, some driven by individuals, others by non-profits. One of note is called Pueblo, a youth initiative funded by the City of Oakland. They run a summer program that organized urban youth to pick backyard fruit and give it to the elderly.

In the art world in different cites, there were other artists cultivating pursuing similar ideas during the period that TAW was active; Fallen Fruit in LA, Fruta Gratis in Santa Rosa California, Nance Klehm in Chicago. Some of these groups are still quite active.

CW: Three of the four projects on fieldfaring.org have been made specifically for gallery exhibitions, given the focus on production (home/community produced food) and discussion that pertains to actual practice and it's potential for continuation, can you talk a little about why you 'exhibit' projects?

TP: All of our collaborative works have interrelated themes but the museum-based projects begin with a different mindset. Museum spaces are fundamentally different than public ones, so it has made sense to us to calibrate our projects to work best with a given opportunity. Primarily, museums and galleries are a good place to see things, as such our exhibition projects start from a strong image of what we want to see happen, a certain kind of interaction or visual result. For instance, for Sonoma County Preserve, we wanted to see people’s homemade preserves find their way into a museum (along with the people who made them), the hope here was to bring them into contact with an institution that is also concerned with preservation, storage and display. We were interested in the social, and visual interactions that might arise from such an event. It is less about investigation and more about making something visible.

SC: On the other hand, our community projects are initiated because there is something we are interested in researching. There is something we want to know and we want to invite the community into dialogue with the questions we have. With these sorts of projects we pick an open form like a newspaper or storefront that welcomes an open-ended inquiry. While TAW was our primary community project, work has begun on the second one (the Meadow Network), which we described earlier in this interview.

CW: If a lump of funding fell from the sky, what project would Fieldfaring ideally like to undertake? or perhaps you are already meeting your ideals?

TP: Buy a small piece of property and work on these questions in a less itinerant way with an amazing group of people.

SC: Create a journal that would bring together voices of makers, cultural producers and everyday people who are finding new ways to create and think about collectivity and the commons in rural and urban situations, including storytelling that might offer models and tools for all of us.

CW: We hope you get a chance to do both of those things! Thanks for talking to us.