One of my favorite aspects of the Media Arts and Practice PhD program at USC is its approach toward art and education in that it uniquely integrates the personal and the articulation of embodied experience within intellectual and artistic domains. What emerges is an appreciation for the deeply different contexts and cultures from which each of those within our community are coming from. This in turn affects how we relate with one another in the classroom, consider the human processes from which ideas develop, and help cultivate and strengthen a language and ethos that encourages the very “iMAP” approach, more concretely, its pedagogical methods, which has nourished and given grace to our own lives and practices thus far. While preparing (and consuming) food as an expression of kinship and care is of course culturally situated and to a degree, performative in its expression, it is undeniable that the act of gathering, being in a shared space together, brings forth necessary insights about my own cultural identity that I could not have found on my own. For that reason I am grateful for these opportunities to practice the labor of care and in doing so, realize the mutual dynamics inherent in its receipt, which appears to be the central message– the language of mindfulness, perhaps also of listening and nothingness, practices of solitude to always be cultivating in the waiting, the “meantime” of living life itself.
We like to tell stories through our food while drizzling pomegranate syrup on hand-printed mercimek koftes of love. It opens up for new methods, like pairing crisp, iceberg lettuce with spiced lentil balls, nestled in between the colorful bites of spinach and carrot in japchae noodles. It sparks joy– ha, I mean memory– and feels good for my gut like the kefir my friend would home-make in my college apartment, since replaced with plastic tubs of yogurt and “everyday life” practices. . . It’s remarkable, and far too rare, to access multiplicity from within, a rechanneling that breaks through LA’s architectural sedimentations and market-driven economy of time that can easily lead one to lose their true selves within the neutrality of professional culture and latent assumptions of empty space. To call brings forth an answer. And to that, I ask, what does it mean to create a space free of such boundaries of culture, of age, gender, and typification of life experience, and cultivate an alternative ethics made to inspire, for pleasure, as protection, and of course also to work, as much as play?
Co-hosted with my colleague and friend Zeynep Abes
新泳 is newswimming 