Making Time is a travelling live art project and an unfolding exercise in redirective practice; an open kitchen laboratory where participants are invited to share strategies for preservation – of food and of the self. Alongside informal workshops on pickling, bottling and making jam using a variety of locally grown, seasonal foods, the shapeshifting mobile kitchen also hosts conversations on our relationship to time, to each other, to making and to unmaking.

As an experiment in non-institutional learning, this ongoing project builds community knowledge and agency in relation to food security and sustainment, asking how kitchen crafts may themselves be preserved or deployed in an impending age of unsettlement and urban adaptation.

Read relevant texts by Abby Mellick Lopes here and Tony Fry here

Making Time was devised by Makeshift for P4 (pilot) and first exhibited – in pilot mode – as part of Now Right Now! at Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts, Perth (2010).

Since then, it has been remade and presented in new forms by Tessa Zettel & friends for ANTI festival in Kuopio, Finland (2012), Performance Space’s ‘Matters of Life and Death‘ program, Sydney (2013), the Arts NSW Visual Arts Fellowship finalists exhibition at Artspace, Sydney (2014), Parckdesign 2016: ‘Jardin Essentiel‘, Brussels (2016) and (no)action(no)space, Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart (2016), as well as the occasional informal outing. In 2017 it also became a handmade book.

Get in touch if you would like to contribute, or have an idea for where we could go next..

 

Past iterations

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At ANTI festival (Finland 2012), Making Time / Ajan säilöntää occupied a disused community kitchen for workshops where participants shared recipes, gathered ingredients and collectively titled each batch of preserves. Jars like ‘Hoping for delicious change is coming’, and ‘Hard times well-pressed, soak when you raise them up’, were eventually given away from a stall at the local marketplace.

For Performance Space (Sydney 2013), a custom-built preserving cart joined Eveleigh farmers’ market, opening out each weekend amongst the stallholders for sessions like ‘Native munthari chutney with Aunty Beryl’ and ‘Bec’s drunken peaches’, alongside discussions interrogating ‘time’ and ‘making’. All jars were then offered to market-goers in exchange for preserves of their own. These activities sat neither wholly within nor outside of the monetary system governing the market, testing in real time another way of being, framed by the transferral of skills between different generations, cultures and communities.

At Artspace Visual Arts Centre for the NSW Visual Arts Fellowship exhibition (Sydney 2014), the kitchen hosted public workshops in the Woolloomooloo community garden and the Reg Murphy Activity Club, producing batches that included Secret Survivors of the ‘Loo‘, ‘Salted lemonsea of plenty‘ and ‘Lillypilly street finds for scurvy & stress‘, and ending with a Jar Swap in the gallery.

For Jardin Essentiel (Brussels, 2016), we spent a morning pickling vegetables including nasturtium capers from the festival’s medicinal garden.

As part of the (no)action(no)space exhibition and publication project at Akademie Schloss Solitude (Stuttgart, 2016), ‘Making Time/Making Trouble: The Lively Arts Reading Group’ hosted regular readings of Donna Haraway’s new book, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, while preparing traditional German sauerkraut, to be sent to places in need of trouble.

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More info on places we have been..

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ANTI Festival

ANTI – Contemporary Art Festival is an international contemporary arts festival presenting site-specific works made for public space. ANTI Festival presents live, sonic, visual and text-based art from today’s most exciting and innovative artists in the Finnish town of Kuopio. Free of charge ANTI Festival is a meeting place for artists and audiences fascinated by how art shapes and responds to the places and spaces of everyday life.

Makeshift was represented at ANTI by Tessa Zettel with support from Sarah Rodigari and Susie Nelson. More info here

Tessa Zettel’s participation in the 2012 ANTI Festival was supported by the NSW Government through Arts NSW

This project was assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

 

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P4(pilot)

P4 (pilot) was a Live Art program developed by Performance Space and Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts (PICA) in partnership with CIA studios and PVI Collective. The pilot program presented four simple creative parameters for artist and audience engagement with forms of live art practice: Practice, Publish, Participate and Perform. Performance Space and PICA worked together to facilitate six new works by Australian artists, and a project by British collaborative duo, FrenchMottershead that took place in Sydney and Perth from between October – November 2010.

The program addressed the ephemeral, experiential, socially engaged and often unquantifiable practices of live art makers in Australia and was committed to furthering the understanding and recognition of Live Art as an important and interdisciplinary layer of contemporary arts practice. The program was intended to be administratively light, empowering the artists to work within their own DIY methodologies to create new works with variety of public and non-public outcomes.

P4 (pilot) was assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. P4 (pilot) is presented with the support of British Council.

 

This work was commissioned by Performance Space and Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts in 2010 as part of P4, a live art initiative supported by the Australian Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body, and the British Council.