Convection Conception: a birthday party for bread

For my final project of Digital Processes, I  staged a performance art event a la Rirkrit Tiravanija. It was a birthday party. for bread.
 The facebook invitation read as follows: 

Who's birthday? BREAD!
When? Monday June 9th at 5:30
Where? Wriston Ampitheater
Why?

Why? Because bread is life.

This idea began with the desire to share with the collective 'you' my passion for baking bread. I feel a possesive, maternal, and deeply spiritual connection to bread's yeasty goodness. Upon further research, I learned that the word "companion" literally breaks down into "to share bread." Bread sustains us, brings us together, and and plays an integral role in our social, cultural, economic lives.

I invite you to come break bread with me and join in the basic, but essential ritual of consuming delicious bread babies

I bought party hats, plates, napkins, and a tablecloth in preparation for this event. I awoke at 6 am the morning of June 9th to begin baking the loaves for the 5:30pm event. The total came to 1 loaf of french bread, 1 loaf of rosemary, 2 loaves of challah, 1 loaf of focaccia, and two loaves of wheat.  To my genuine delight, people came!!!

The birthday party was a great success. I can;t begin to express the joy I felt upon seeing everyone in party hats. Moreover, I truly felt that the gathering of people around a common, shared food item encapsulated Bourriaud's concept of relationalism. The art wasn't so much the bread as it was the people who shared it, and the social component that permeated the entire piece.  

a lot has changed in 4 years

I am fascinated by the forum of the bathroom wall.  

During my time attending New Trier, a MASSIVE public school in the middle of a very wealthy part of the "North Shore" of Chicago, I experienced the beauty of these ladies' bathroom forums. Dialogues, criticisms, gossip, quotes and commentary were all things I recall seeing whilst sitting on the loo. It was the criticisms that really excited me though, the real mean stuff. Luckily for me, it was everywhere. (I attribute the surplus of negative commentary to the way that attending such a large and impersonal school made people crazy, in combination with the easy accessibility of bathroom walls and sharpies).

I was back at home this past weekend, and with Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics in mind, decided to utilize these stalls as my "Arena of Exchange" in order to provoke more of those  juicy critical comments (or whatever people decided to respond). On a blank sheet of paper I wrote:

ANONYMOUS HATE MAIL

(write the meanest thing you can think of)

I prepped ten of these sheets and snuck in to the school.

HOWEVER

So much had changed - in the bathrooms (everything else was the same). New plastic doors had been installed in the majority of bathrooms to replace the old wooden ones. I suspect that this replacement was made in an effort to decrease the graffiti that I so loved, since permanent maker is easier to clean off plastic than wood. I really had to search to find stalls that had any writing at all

When I finally did find some writing, the content was just as shocking to me as the new doors. They were positive messages! I really had to hunt to find something the least bit mean (pictured above).

 

 

Still, I forged ahead, planted all ten of my "arenas" in ladies' bathrooms around the campus, and waited. I let two class periods pass before going to collect the results (an ample amount of time considering the size of the student body and amount of traffic that travels through those stalls). Then came the next shock:

All of my Anonymous Hate Mail forums had been torn down.

I found them all in their respective bathroom's trash can. Such blatant rejection of my prompt both frustrated and inspired me. I chose to focus on the second reaction as I gathered my things and left the school. Clearly something has changed within the past four years at New Trier High School. Either students are making a genuine effort to promote positive relations, or custodians have gotten much much better at purging restrooms of negativity. Whichever it is, I left the school feeling hopeful.