After giving a talk about the project at the university where Tamara teaches, several art students volunteer to help us put the restaurant together.
The students
Some of the students come by to see what we are doing. We ask them to help us paint a sign that will hang over the entrance. The sign is made from a board used for rolling dough and a cutting board in the shape of a pear.
The board says: KITCHEN (кухня) and the pear: EAT (кушать)
Ayoum and her friend decide to make cushions for the benches
They show us some of their artworks
This entry was posted on February 12, 2010 at 1:18 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
THE BORROWED KAZAN 
July 10, 2011 at 10:32 pm |
[…] Similarly, in our “Borrowed Kazan” project in Osh, Kyrgyzstan, we spent the whole day cleaning o… We washed the windows, tables, and shelves; dusted walls and cleared cobwebs, painted shelves, and cleaned the floors. I remember how all the surrounding vendors were watching us clean with curiosity. To observe how the seemingly distant foreigners and potentially frivolous artists were engaged in the most mundane and possibly gendered labor of cleaning could have been an unusual sight. Moreover, for some, this was a moment of endearment. The neighbor who was selling peppers and making pepper mixes nodded his head several times with approval. Others periodically came by the space and watched us engage in cleaning yet another segment. One woman pointed to one area that we missed. In hindsight, I consider this act of cleaning as important as the rest of our artistic interaction with the vendors and passerby in the project. This practice enabled our neighbors to see our project as something familiar and recognizable; something that they can relate to and intervene in. The act of cleaning brought us into the same space as collaborators. We were no longer foreign and outsider. […]