LUISA SPINA

A society is similar to a house divided into rooms and corridors. The more the society resembles ours in its form of civilization, the thinner are its internal partitions and the wider and more open are its doors of communication (James Hillman).

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Background

When I started the residency at Fusion Arts at the East Oxford Community Centre in June 2015, I was looking for organisations in the area that help refugees and asylum seekers. I have been long exploring the idea of separation in my work and I felt this particular issue as one I needed to explore. I knew the charity Open Door was was operating in the community centre as a drop-in service and I decided to approach them and offer my help in the kitchen to prepare their weekly free lunch. I found a welcoming environment in which people could feel safe and share their stories and experiences naturally. It was a real pleasure to be there and I was learning other people’s cultures and personal stories through food. From this place of exchange and positivity I started to question the way I was approaching the work I was trying to do. So far I was addressing negative aspects of being in certain situations. I strongly felt I had to look instead at what we have in common and find ways to share the insights I could draw out from the experience of cooking together.

About

After a long process of reflection and various trials, 'Small Gatherings for Big Thoughts' became a process-based cooking experience that invites people to reflect on 'bigger thoughts' of how we can come together with our differences and build together new possibilities. Although the process is open to everyone, it is restricted to a small number of people to facilitate intimacy, exchange and a deeper level of dialogue. Its form is simple because it aims to be highly inclusive, but at the same time it touches on several complicated aspects related to free movement, environmental issues, food consumer choice, dialogue and democratic processes. It considers how the personal can become political and touches on the notion of the local and global within a capitalistic context. 

During the process inputs are given to participants to make connections between themselves and the ingredients brought to the table and everyone equally shares the responsibility to make decisions of how and what to cook. Through food we can reflect on how the tendency to want to preserve our cultures can contribute or not to forms of separation. Does living together in harmony means to let go of our identity, cultures or heritage? I believe that confronting ourselves with different people and situations can help us to make boundaries porous. The gatherings create a light-hearted space in which participants travel across the world trough imagination. By meeting strangers, we enrich ourselves through the memories connected to ingredients. Through imaging together and reliving experiences we connected and got to know different cultures. Through the alchemy of cooking together, a sense of humanity in continuous movement and transformation comes alive. In this arena, where personal and intimate moments are shared, encounters are brought together to reveal their interconnectedness to the world. Small Gatherings for Big Thoughts is a poetical act, a ritual to initiate a world without frontiers by giving value to our imagination and to the ability we have as human beings to shape the substance we share. It gives the a opportunity to reflect on how coming from different parts of the world, we can participate all in creating new possibilities without hierarchy, preconceptions or expectations to build a common ground. 

In 2016, the project was chosen to represent a new community engagement crowd funding campaign at Royal Society of Arts in London leading to a commission by the International Academy of Greenwich to devise ‘Small Gatherings for Big Thoughts’ into a creative learning workshop for children. Between 2015 and 2017 It participated in various festivals such as Fringe Arts Bath, AntiuniversityNow! and Spark Festival and it was exhibited in different venues in Oxford and London.