Artists as Cultural Leaders
Artists as Cultural Leaders a series that looks at the energy, innovation and care brought to places and people through contemporary art, curatorial approaches, and cultural programming. Artists as Cultural Leaders is a series of presentations and discussions by contemporary practitioners who share visual arts skills & strategies in the evolving landscape of visual and artistic leadership. The series looks at spaces, hospitality, care, exchange, and the social and physical environments of creative thinking and doers. Commissioned by Roscommon County Council and Creative Roscommon curated and produced by Sarah Searson
Recorded live at King House Boyle.
Series 1 Features
Jennie Moran
Kate Strain
Cathy Fitzgerald
Artists as Cultural Leaders
Jennie Moran, Hospitality and Cultural Practice
Listen back! How a creative practice creates moments of connection. The wonderful Jennie Moran @hiluncheonette speaks freely and generously about her work as a cultural producer, her wonderful career in creating hospitality, exchange, and her work with organisations, and students. Jennie talks about her work in creating unconditional welcomes. She speaks about studies in gastronomy, the theory, system and philosophy of hospitality. Artists as Cultural Leaders is supported by Culture Ireland and developed by Roscommon Arts Service. In conversation with Sarah Searson, artist Jennie Moran speaks about philosophy, culture, and the infrastructure of hospitality to create opportunities for shared connection.
Artists Biography: Jennie Moran
Jennie started a nomadic hospitality project called Luncheonette in 2013 which operated as the canteen in the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, and was named Irish Café of the year at the 2019 Food and Wine Awards. In 2022 Luncheonette was invited to Artsadmin in London, to take part in a hospitality-themed research residency and consultancy project called Say Yes to Who or What Turns Up, using an old café as a site of unconditional welcome. She has completed a Masters in Gastronomy and Food Studies at TUD and is publishing a book entitled How to Soften Corners about the impact of hospitality in institutions. She provides mentorship in holistic hospitality to creative organisations and lectures at NCAD, and occasionally UCD School of Architecture, Cork Centre for Architectural Education (UCC) and TUD. www.jenniemoran.com
Supported by Roscommon County Council Arts Office and Creative Roscommon
Hi everybody, just to say a very warm welcome and thank you all for your support of this program, which is really about knowledge exchange. The title was Artists as Cultural Leaders and the program is funded by Roscommon Creative Ireland and Roscommon Arts Office, and obviously we're in the beautiful King House here today. It's managed by Tish and the team, so just a big thank you to them for hosting us here, and this room that we're in is part of a studio from a man called Erwin Springbrum, and basically his family have very generously given a lot of the contents for this exhibition here. So it's lovely to be in a creative space and also just to mention that the two cases there have alarms on them, so just to be careful because that whole alarm system will start ringing. They're actually gems in the case.
Speaker 1:So this programme kind of really came about. It's a series of talks and then there'll be a couple of get-togethers and Naomi Draper's in the room. But I uh which is welcome to Naomi, who's done a lot of work in curating in Roscommon but we had gone to meet some artists um just before Christmas, and Martin is here as well. He was part of that um, and I suppose we were kind of really conscious that there's so much talent in Roscommon and so much potential and that a lot of people maybe might have home studios and are working from home, that it would be a really nice thing to maybe bring people together and to talk about things that inspire them, maybe people who approach their careers in really interesting ways or don't particularly frame themselves in whatever way, but are doing really exciting things that are inspirational. And that leads me to Jenny. So, um, jenny is the second of three talks and the next talk is with Cathy Fitzgerald.
Speaker 1:Um, um, and Jenny Moran, who is an artist and activist, a cultural producer and all sorts of things has had such an interesting career. I'm just really delighted that you've made time to come and visit us here today. I'm really grateful, and we're going to talk a little bit about her approach to her work and the things that you've been doing, maybe things that inspire you and what you're looking at been doing, maybe things that inspire you and um, kind of what you're looking at. Um, I wonder, um, jenny, if you could just tell us a little bit just about kind of you were. You're a graduate from ncad and you came through with a very nice cohort, but you've had a uh, a life and education since, so just a little bit about the pathway to where you are now.
Speaker 2:Yeah, um, thank, thank you, sarah, and thanks for this invitation. And I was remembering getting a funny web text kind of email from you in December or January which it said you know in this subject was artists as cultural leaders. I totally thought it was a spam. This is very grandiose title for a series of talks, so it's lovely to be here under that title and a lovely honour.
Speaker 2:I studied first of all craft when I finished school for a year in Thomastown, which was a gore. I left home pregnant and went to study in this college in a mill in an island in the middle of the river in Tamles Town, which was the most romantic experience ever like pregnant and met all these friends that have totally went on to study in NCD with and become very important, and then went straight into NCD from that to study sculpture and finished that in 2005 and worked full time as an artist from the time of finishing in NCAD um straight up to the time of going back to NCAD um in 2013 in a roundabout way, um, where I converted my studio practice into a functioning college canteen, um, and so in the intermittent time I worked full-time. I had a gorgeous studio in in Temple Bar and I was kind of busy with things, but I hated it. I hated having a studio practice and I felt so grossed out by the art world at the time and I really, like I felt disgusted to be part of it which is an extreme response, I think but I was miserable and I kind of felt like I have these hands and I have like skills and knowledge I thought at the time very green just out of college but I hated the thing of being around in a studio where you're supposed to feel kind of this elevated thing of being an artist, because I didn't feel it. And then I started.
Speaker 2:What I was trying to do the whole time with an art practice was find excuses and reasons to bring people together where they didn't expect it, because I think I felt it then and I would really think it now is that to have a creative practice gives you kind of a superpower in bringing people together and creating opportunities for humans to connect with each other. And I think now more than ever, or, or, you know, the longer we're all here, um, I mean, I think the thing that makes you different when you die to when you're born are the connections that you made and then so the richer they are, the better the life. And then so I think that with a creative practice, you're putting bits of your heart and your soul and you're taking risks and you're planting that out into the world and inviting people to see if it rings a bell with them. And I find that really, I think that's to me if it is a privilege, or if there is something elevated about a creative practice, it's that service I think that you provide, of putting really intimate bits of yourself out and inviting people to have a go of them.
Speaker 2:And so I was using my studio practice and my art practice was trying to find ways, ways like so I typically was working in traffic, islands, or like djing on the last night link bus home, or like these moments where, like it's that you don't expect to maybe have a transcendental um exchange with someone, but why not um?
Speaker 2:And so it's this idea of kind of create like that, if a nice beautiful thing happens and exchange happens in a place, there's an important dust or residue left behind afterwards and sort of try to highlight that dust. And so I used food then, because it's less weird to sit opposite someone if there's food in between you. So I was using food as a strange device for creating a decoy and because lots of places just need that dust and the the more comfortable people are, the better they'll shed that important dust, and so if there's food, um, it just makes it less weird to be trying to collect dust off people. So I was using food more and more and then I had I ended up getting the keys of the then semi-derelict basement canteen in the art college that I had studied in and bringing everything from my depressing studio experience into this room and making lights and furniture and smocks and bowls and playlists and relationships instead of having the studios.
Speaker 1:There's a long answer yeah, no amazing though, what you achieved in NCAD and I was chatting to Jenny last night. I was just saying it's amazing, like it's so obvious. A lot of these colleges are locked into kind of contracts with Supexo or different kind of catering companies and it's just so obvious. Nourishment, joy and food sharing and the conviviality, the hospitality all of those things that you created there actually made a centre for NCUD and people came externally especially to go to that canteen. You really created something amazing. You were saying almost every day there was a new thing to learn or a new person to engage with, and that was kind of your philosophy, or kept it buoyant, in a way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, there was an urgency about it Because it was this like NCAD is in what was a powers distillery, so it's a really, really old building and it's in this beautiful, tightly knit community in Dublin 8 that's the Liberties, and NCAD was always, always the minute you cross the threshold into the college you'd be asked what you wanted and why you were there, and so when I was trying to set up the canteen there, I was.
Speaker 2:It was really adamant that people would be allowed in from outside and never questioned, and so it was kind of this, trying to make it be a better neighbor as well. And then, um, the thing was that it to me it was an extension of an art practice. So it was. It had to be a business, yes, and it had to be able to pay staff properly and suppliers and everything, but it first of all had to be stand on its own as an art project. And so I mean, I was like, in across all of it, I was, you know, I knew how to scoop out the grease trap. I knew like, um, I knew all the disgusting and it's in the basement of, of a, so everything ended up down there like it was just. Um, I knew it was only a matter of time before there would be a dead body at some stage just like it was just it was.
Speaker 2:it's this huge engine of a really, really busy, stretched educational institution and I just wanted to, um, to soften it or like to, to allow there to be an unconditional welcome. Um, and so it was gorgeous. Students of the college would volunteer for an hour and then they'd have their lunch or whatever, but they would bring in their family's recipes for things and then the families will come in and eat the food, and so this kind of thing starts happening, that this educational institution has to take a little bit more careful note of the people going through it, because it's eating their family's recipes and the whole community around it, the staff and the students, all felt part of it, and people would bring, like the fashion staff, so, the smocks for the students to wear when they volunteered to keep everything clean, and then the people bring in food from their gardens. And so there was it was like a lovely community project and with it had a kind of cooperative feel about it, and so I did it for eight years and it was quite busy.
Speaker 2:Um, maybe we were in there. Yeah, there were maybe like 500 people over the course of the day, and so this was kind of um, like an unexpected form of an of an art practice, and so I just see I think it's nice to highlight that because you know I was getting to be an artist, but just on the terms that I created for myself, I didn't want to be in a studio, I wanted to see 500 people a day, um, and it felt really fun because it was like people the average spend like two euro or whatever so and then this thing is growing like massively out of all these little two euro cups of coffee, um, and so all these people are having jobs out of it, and then all these like lovely you know, gorgeous um small suppliers are like there's a solid order, consistently growing ordering happening. So it felt exciting to have an art project that was supporting other things. Yeah.
Speaker 1:And it was a beautiful place to go. It really was amazing. It was really wild, yeah, and you produced a book from yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm just after picking this up as the sample um, this, the. I left then after COVID, which was heartbreaking in 2021, because I forgot to leave like it was. So it was like being at a rave or something. It was just like it was so huge and there were so many um, there was so much excitement and chaos and stress and joy that it just the time kept going on and I never meant to stay for eight years and then I realized, oh, it's been eight years and I should go on because I it's called luncheonette and it's supposed to be kind of an emergency response unit for hospitality, like supposed to be able to go from place to place, like an ambulance where places need hospitality, and it forgot to leave NCAD. So then it was really important to leave and I was heartbroken going, but the director of NCAD, sarah Glenny, suggested that we make a book with the ncd illustration students and so, um, this is a book, just this sort of, about this project of an unlikely college canteen, so it's sort of stories and, um, some recipes as well, especially the ones that came from students.
Speaker 2:And because it wasn't supposed to you know, I knew that I was going wasn't supposed to, you know, I knew that I was going to make it work. But you know it need not have worked because I had never employed people, I'd never run a business. You know, I wasn't a chef. There were loads of reasons why it wouldn't have worked. And then also there were loads of reasons why it would fail financially.
Speaker 2:Because it was kind of like I was saying to you last night it was like the sixth thing on my list was the um profit. But because of that um, it was profitable because there was such it, because it really resonated with people as a kind of a creative project that people were very, very um committed to it and people would just get their lunch there every day and loads of people from outside would come in, and so it was kind of safeguarded by the fact that it wasn't profit um driven. And so it was kind of the one of the ncad. It had lots of going, gone through lots of the big catering companies that couldn't make it work. And then, weirdly, you know, this non-profit driven enterprise was financially viable um, and and that was.
Speaker 2:You know it was by the very virtue of the fact that I forgot about you know, or I wasn't worried, um, yeah, about the financial aspect, but then, you know, I found it also really liberating to be able to talk about money and art at the same time and be like, okay, you know, you like this idea of introducing an exchange where albeit like it could be money or it could be, you know, give, when you give an hour um, that there's a kind of an, a choice not to be part of it as well. Um, because I think part of what annoys me about the art world was this idea that it's beyond money, um, and it's crude to talk about money, and I was like it's not crude, it's really it's. It's exciting and fun to be able to support people out of an art project.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was amazing. And after that you kind of have continued to do really interesting projects with food in collaboration in lots of different contexts. So, like you were saying about a project you're doing, let's say, with the abbey and down to the sail, things like that, but you've also worked with a number of like kind of longer term residencies as well. So that's such a rich element of what you do and I can imagine really exciting to be able to kind of then have the freedom of mobility after being anchored, yeah, like for like eight years you know yeah sort of wake up.
Speaker 1:You're kind of oh my goodness, where's my? But now you're moving around and you're kind of taking that freedom. I wonder could you talk about some of the projects that you're working on?
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's been lovely. I came out of NCAD and then for a little while I moved into the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin. That was only going to be a temporary thing, but it was just a way of leaving one thing and going to another. And then I went to London to an organisation called Arts Admin who are a collaborative arts production kind of company in London, just near Whitechapel or near Brick Lane, in really exciting kind of Bangladesh community area, and it was a residency that was, um, based on hospitality. So I was there in, by by coincidence, a closed down cafe, using that as a site of inquiry, and it was to work with the arts organisation on hospitality and kind of looking at every single aspect of what they did through the lens of hospitality. And so it did involve running a cafe in the day-to-day situation in the middle of London. And that was really funny because oh, and it was, was the sort of we knew and the agreement was with the, with arts admin, that the cafe was to be a site of unconditional hospitality, um, but I mean to me that was just, you know, a cafe. That was the way I would operate anyway. But in London that was very confusing to people, um, people would come in and say, wow, this is so unusual the atmosphere in here. It was just sort of like, no, that's normal, that's just um, it's just maybe not usually found here, but uh, it was. And then working with so the the point of me being there for three months was to create awareness of hospitality and from the perspective of every single visitor into the place and from looking at everyone who worked in Arts, admin and their different roles and how this idea of an unconditional welcome would be incorporated into their day to day positions, would be incorporated into their day-to-day positions. So that was fascinating and it also involved helping them with their tender process to get someone to run the cafe who would be interested in the stuff that was happening in the building, because the huge studios and theatre and everything.
Speaker 2:But what led me to that was that I did a master's in gastronomy during COVID and then as part of that I wanted to learn more about the theory and history and sociology of hospitality and like, what is that system and why do we have it?
Speaker 2:And then I've become really obsessed with that and also the crossover between those weird laws, which is, you know, say yes to who or what turns up to your threshold, um, and how that sits with a creative practice.
Speaker 2:Um, I think is really relevant because, like, if, if I you know, to go back to what I was saying about like a creative practice laying out opportunities for shared connection, like, what's it like for people to visit your practice and, um, how much space is there in your, in your home or in your practice for the people to have an impact? You because that's the thing about hospitality is the word hospitality comes from Gostas, this Indo-European root, and it's not the guest or the host, but this weird relationship of trust that exists between the two. It's like I promise not to kill you, and you can come into my home, but you're not to harm me or my family, and you can come into my home, but you're not to harm me or my family, and that shouldn't make sense. But it has been put in place in every single society all over the world and I think it's kind of the best of us is the impulse for this unexpected, ill-advised trust in the stranger.
Speaker 2:Trust in the stranger, yeah, so I think that's really relevant to risking bits of yourself out in the world, you know is um is asking people to be careful with it, and you being careful with the people who impact it as well, or who um visit it. And so I um have been reading and writing and learning loads about that, because I find it very urgent to think about, you know, because more and more we need to wonder what will we political, but it's more to remind people of the stunning beauty of that system of welcoming strangers and agreeing to suspend suspicion and so, with your reading and your research, what are you coming across?
Speaker 1:that's kind of feeding, giving you hope or giving you grounding in that.
Speaker 2:Well, it's been a real journey because, you know, when I started the first port of call and I won't go like terrible, pretentious, you know, deep, dive into the whole philosophy, but, like the first port of call, if you start looking into this, is um, very handsome, charismatic Jack Derrida, who's just saying well, you just say yes to who or what turns up. And if you, if you question that, you know you're disgusting, um, and it's impossible, but you have to do it. And I was. I had so many fights with Derrida when I was running the canteen because I was just like, fuck you, derrida, you've never run a cafe. You know, you've no idea. You like, you're not supposed to expect any exchange, you're supposed to give, like, the best that you have and not expect nothing in return. And I was like, have you ever paid? You know suppliers, or do you worry about the practical implications of that? And then the more and more like.
Speaker 2:Then there's other beautiful writers. There's a French feminist, lucie Regari, and she writes this beautifully about hospitality and the mutuality of it. And she says you know, instead of like, being like, being like, oh I'm, I'm such a powerful, gracious host, come into my house and I'll give you everything. She says, no, you leave the threshold and meet someone in a place where you both have no power and she says, for example, go like in, say in an, in a nature, everybody is a guest and so, actually, instead of this sort of patronizing, come into my home and you know, live the like, be the same as me.
Speaker 2:You actually greet someone as if they're the person that you cannot live without, and so it's not a charity, but it's. It's someone who's bringing you new ideas and, um, new ways and because in the the reason that we have these systems, that people needed to leave their towns and villages and be a stranger in another town and village, and it had to be okay for them and they had to feel safe. But as important as it is to leave your town and village, you also needed the people coming in with the things and the ideas and the new fangled stuff. So, like I kind of feel now in my practice, I'm trying to find as many ways as possible to highlight the kind of beauty of those ideas of hospitality which celebrate, like that, the fact that the stranger is someone you can't live without. Yeah, that's beautiful, yeah, and that it's an exchange, it's not a charity.
Speaker 1:So what are you kind of? What's in the horizon at the moment?
Speaker 2:I am writing loads and giving papers and things like that, but that's not. I mean that's. I love that but it doesn't really. It seems like a separate universe, so kind of trying to find ways of bringing that into the main universe. So I have a lovely bursary from the Arts Council at the moment to develop kind of public facing, maybe even bits of theatre, around these stories of hospitality and how you can make them visible and important and enliven them. And it's lovely.
Speaker 2:I do bits of food, but not in the day to day. So I work with the Abbey Theatre and with the Museum of Modern Art in Dublin and you know there's a new show or an exhibition and finding ways to because finding ways to make people, to make those places less stuffy by introducing food and distractions and so like in the abbey I'll read the play and make food out of aspects of the play and give it to people. And then there's ridiculous stuff to talk about for people instead of it being. You know the moment after play when you're supposed to talk about the play, um, and it's awful. Not the play is awful, but that conversation. You know you just kind of want to run into a taxi, um, and instead there's kind of some terrible or there's a ridiculous spectacle in front of you that is a distraction. So I kind of working with food to make um, kind of doing the same thing, like finding excuses for bringing people together, but this is in a different shape so can I ask you just a little bit more about that?
Speaker 1:like, say you were working on octoroon, for example in the abbey? Yeah what did. So that was quite a there was.
Speaker 2:It was a very interesting play, yeah, um, but I'm wondering if you could talk about the play and then your your response um, well, an octoroon was amazing thing to get to respond to because it was so bold and really really nerve wracking, because it's a play about race that was written, I think, in the 1850s I'm terrible with dates but it was supposed to be kind of an anti-slavery piece of theatre written, but of course that hasn't aged well. And now it's and it was revisited. Um, and everyone was terrified because it's it's handled really really boldly and bravely. Um, and so begins with this um, a young black actor in his underwear painting his face white, and so pigment was a big thing in it. So I was thinking about that, and then the Abbey were really interested and so nervous about what I might serve, so they were saying keep in touch, let us know what you're thinking. So they didn't think that it was a good idea to um, get go down the road of celebrating color and pigment. Um. So it's also very atmospheric and swampy and I wanted to make um slimy food and I wanted to have a frog's legs sticking out, but we kind of they that was a step too far. So, anyway, seaweed. Um, and there was also something about bananas and it was a third thing as well, but I'm doing something with um, there's a marina car play opening next week and um, the first one I ever did was a Marina Carr play that was Portia Coughlin, which was really dark, and it was all about twin, a grief over a twin, and so I had fun planting.
Speaker 2:I wanted to get this special shop on Mead Street where you can buy eggs with two egg yolks, but I didn't. That was the first initial thought, but I didn't. That was the first initial thought, but I didn't do that. But I stuffed two little almonds into a medjool date and covered it up and gilded it in gold as a reference to the little twins in the womb. But yeah, that's fun and that could go. There's a temptation to make that ridiculously because no one's expecting their dinner, so you don't have to give people sensible food, so it's good fun. Yeah, being a total nonsense.
Speaker 1:And I'm really interested as well. You're doing a lot of work with in NCAD, kind of teaching the next generation, and are you giving a module on hospitality?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's brilliant, it's, it's lovely. Yeah, because I really missed. I hate the idea of not seeing them all, and so I taught oh yeah, they suggested that I come back to lecture. Um, so I have a module with first years called coexistence club, which is all about care and setting up a new society in a different. So we just did it in november and we got the keys of the old fruit and vegetable market off cable street, so it's a huge, big empty market, and so they had to set up this new society, um, and so there had to be someone in charge of food and someone in charge of, oh, toilets and someone in charge of health and someone in charge of disobedience, and it was beautiful. The work that came out of that was stunning. And then I also have a module that I put together called creative hospitality, which is working with older, like third or fourth year students and thinking about their practice as a site of hospitality, and so the food is part of that, but it's not the main thing.
Speaker 1:And you're kind of pointing towards a mindset that kind of moves people away from that individualism that you kind of get. It's that young artist in the studio and you're kind of in your lofty whatever and you totally mix that up and brought that kind of new energy into the art college. They're so lucky to have you doing that. It must be so rich for them.
Speaker 2:But I am mesmerised by NCAD. First of all, imagine giving someone who had been a previous student the keys of your canteen on the back of the fact that, like I made soup for a few months when they had no canteen and then the director used to come down and get the soup and I said really flippantly, oh, I should open up that kitchen downstairs. And then I ended up with the keys of it. Um, which is kind of wildly risky. Then I did go through tender processes and everything.
Speaker 2:But it's such a remarkable leap of faith, I think, and like I knew I was going to do whatever it took, but I mean they didn't. And again, you know to to allow me to transition from feeding people to educating them in a more formal way is gorgeous. So I really appreciate the trust that they've put in me. For that hospitality module is um opening up now to something that is the through creative futures academy that is open to the public as well. That would be next year, and then you know, the wild um ambition is that it will become its own masters then, yeah, at some stage.
Speaker 1:So that's exciting, very exciting yeah, but you can see how important that is, like the skill of of just even thinking that way, thinking about society, thinking about including people, and you know what you can do to open to, to be hospitable yeah, and it's also a little bit about protecting yourself and like, because you know, thinking okay, unconditional, like how possible is that?
Speaker 2:And how do you? How do you guard? Like, if you're putting bits of your heart and soul out into the world, what do you mind? And then so it is. It's sort of it's about, I think, like protecting you in your creative practice so that it doesn't eat you up in your creative practice so that it doesn't eat you up.
Speaker 1:Well, even going way back, like you, you're like I was looking back at your website and some of the early projects that you did as an artist, if you, like you know, were in hospital settings, the kiosk. Were you involved in the kiosk, jenny, and as part of a group, hope Inherent? Yeah, you set up a kiosk on Jenny and as part of a group, Hope Inherent? Yeah, you set up a kiosk on Cable Street Bridge.
Speaker 2:yes, I mean, everything you've done has been sort of about people, engagement, inclusion and fun yeah, but as well, like it always was really awkward and frustrating for me to think about, because it always fell between two stools, like I was never really happy, just as an artist like I'm not now a chef, you know it's always between things um which I think like can feel really awkward and um annoying, but I think eventually is actually a good sign because you're doing something that doesn't have its own pre-allocated space.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think that's what's really inspirational about what you do, because it's you've you've worked outside the frame. You know, in a way that um sort of graduating from our college and then that sort of pre sort of a pathway, you know you've broken that, you've done your own thing, you've been very brave and, um, fearless in a way than what you've done. I mean, I think it is a big deal to take on all the things that you've done, and where did that come from?
Speaker 2:maybe, um, there's something about like working with what you have if you have a precarious income as well from an art practice and using pooling back to like this funny, this kind of beautiful education of a fine art degree. This a kind of beautiful education of a fine art degree which is kind of like. I loved thinking of it as a service. So I thought of my practice as a kind of a response or a certain like a service based practice. So I'd like go into a hospital and think, okay, what does this need? And it needs stories, um, to be told. So then I would embroider stories onto the hospital, bedlam, um. So it was this kind of weird fine art version of a service practice. Yeah, um, and so maybe that's why it was easy to convert to like a business then, because it was about filling in some kind of a gap um, and also trying to think about, like, maybe other practices or things that have inspired you.
Speaker 1:Is there anything that kind of comes to mind about other projects that you are observing or things in the ether that you're really alert to that you're going to think, wow, that's really an interesting way of approaching things.
Speaker 2:I'm really like this not really a project, but I keep.
Speaker 2:I've encountered beautiful lectures and writing by this man who's based in Dublin, michael Cronin, and he's working in translation, which sounds like very particular, and he has a book called Angéilge agus an Eicólaíos, or Irish and Ecology, but he's looking into translation between humans and non-humans and I keep thinking of him and reading.
Speaker 2:He's got loads of lectures online and stuff, but he's very and non-humans and I keep thinking of him and reading. He's got loads of lectures online and stuff, but his ideas are so beautiful and there's something very heartbreakingly sad in his realism and so I feel like I'm thinking now about hospitality in relation to, you know, between humans and the earth a lot and because you know it's, there's a an imbalance of the reciprocity there, and so I'm loving his writing on that, um, and he I got to program a food discussion tent in IMA in September and I invited him and you know there's no it's, and how you put memories into soil and how you leave messages and things, um, so I'm into that at the moment, deep time we were talking earlier as well a little bit about um kind of space and um designing space and um.
Speaker 1:It sounds like what you're doing. I don't know if you can talk about the work that you're doing in the project, but so yeah, but it sounded really interesting to bring. You're moving on from the food and understanding kind of how spaces become hard or soft, how they um extend a welcome or kind of almost reject people. Yeah, it's a very interesting space.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's lovely and I've been working with Project Art Centre last year because they had a show that they were partnering with the Junk Ensemble and looking at women and power and it was kind of rooted in ideas about witches. But then in the end I got to work with women in Cooking for Freedom, which is an organization that helps arrange spaces for people who live in direct provision to cook together, and so we were meeting and cooking together with this amazing Afro-Brazilian dance artist called Alessandra Azevedo, and it was about like food and power and kind of non-linguistic forms of care, because there's something about cooking for people which is a little bit like dancing with people. You know sometimes there's nothing to say but you know you find those forms of communication are better. And as an extension of that or as a no, there's a relationship with project.
Speaker 2:But I've been asked to design a quiet space for their foyer which is just for anyone who wants to look after themselves for a minute for any different reason, and that's about like, because sometimes those art spaces are a bit unpleasant to go into and can be intimidating, as can, you know, lots of reception spaces, hospitals, and it's to create a softness in this thing. So I'm looking to do that out of willow and natural things um, where it would be quiet and soft. So yeah, that's. It's like feeding people, but without food yeah.
Speaker 1:And so, in your sense of things, do you feel almost like now that you've almost come in sort of full circle in a way, like do you feel like you've just made your own path, or like how, how do you perceive, or you continue on, just you will follow what comes to you, or yeah, I mean, I really don't know, after April, april, yeah, I have no, no future.
Speaker 2:So that's which is tough. You know, that thing of like when I had the canteen, you know, I got up in the morning at the crack of dawn and raced in there, and so by eight o'clock, you know, I'm giving people porridge and there's no wondering every day what will I do, which was lovely. So I missed that a little bit, you know, because every day having to drive something and invent things is tough, I think so it's bittersweet.
Speaker 1:Yes, you're sort of re-entering into a new phase. Yeah, yeah, yeah it's, it is exciting, but it's um and I'm not worried, but it's a bit mysterious, yeah well, you've done incredible work, jenny, really inspirational, like, really, um, like, I've been following you, so like a yeah, not sound of a fangirl, but it has been amazing to watch all the different things that you've done, and done with such grace and beauty and real genuine warmth in everything that you've done. So congratulations, thank you.