Concoctions (2020)
By
Carmen Wong
Photograph of ship’s masts superimposed on top of a jar of jam. Image credit: Carmen C. Wong.
An improvised ‘jam’ of recorded sounds and snippets of food conversations within a Cornish boatyard: a scene of constant adaptation, and home to a motley crew living across 30+ vessels.
At the top of the pandemic, a new pay-what-you-feel food-surplus shop opened on-site the boatyard where I live, in response to COVID-19 self-isolation measures. My partner and I began making preserves using already rescued food that would have been wasted.
"Concoctions" came out of a commission with Exeter's Hyperlocal micro-commissions, which we'd been keen to make since the jams we made were already fuelling conversations with usually reticent neighbours, and enabled us to distant-collaborate with sound artist Jodie Saunders to help edit and mix our recordings. Soundboarding and assistance by Yann Coiffier, and Jake McTighe.
We kept the project very simple: our main 'audience' really were our neighbours - the commission widened this circle of listeners perhaps only slightly. Several of our interviewees wanted to remain anonymous (which led us to agree that everyone would remain so), and the transcript (useful in communicating notes for editing) created a rather poetic text that could include audiences who may not have access to the work otherwise.
A wonderful outcome to project of jam-making and audio-jamming has been an-ongoing collaboration on a long-term enterprise/project called JARSQUAD (https://jarsquad.com/), which I hope to include in the Social Arts Library.
Whilst the food-shop did not last beyond a few months (after lockdown eased), this project-within-a-project helped provide perspective on other food projects I would like to work on, many of which resemble food cooperatives.
More information: https://soundcloud.com/artsandcultureuniofexe/concoctions-jam-collective
