Live Dining is a participatory performance piece that changes, adapts, and evolves in different contexts. With each Live Dining performance, Nicole Fournier, alone or with the participation of others, installs and occupies a kitchen and dining room in an existing or “created for Live Dining” green space. Participants get in touch with edible plants and weeds, harvest right in the space, sometimes right from their seat, conducting intimate, domestic actions that are typically performed indoors. Preparing food, cooking, eating. Everyone works and eats together, creating a sense of intimacy and security in an outdoor public space.
At Artivistic 2007, Live Dining took place in the field near De Gaspé and St-Viateur. Participants discussed urban land usage, weeds as food and medicine (foraging and harvesting red clover and burdock directly from the site), and alternative agricultural spaces. The work is about occupying land and integrating people with nature (wild and cultivated) in a context of non-monetary exchange and production; giving, receiving, and sharing with others; inhabiting public spaces; and the diversity of plants, people, and communities.
Nicole Fournier is a visual and interdisciplinary artist, with a 20-year practice that has been informed by social and biological ecology, and since 1996, exploring the personal, social and political, organizational and systemic interconnections between nature, culture, agriculture, food, body, gender, controlled and wild behavior, and utility and non-utility. Nicole Fournier’s Live Dining project connects to site-specific intervention, ecovention, installation, public art, conceptual art, land art, and performance art traditions, while at the same time playing an activist role in addressing food security, biodiversity, issues of urban agriculture, foraging, and healthier systems of agriculture, such as polyculture as opposed to monoculture.
Photo by Alfonso Arzapalo.
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Rather than think in confrontational terms of “occupying” land (good sense of being there / bad sense of thinking that we can only “occupy” — confront existing “lands” — title owner’s), we can think of “streaming” our individual and community economies towards ownership. It is possible for renters (rent = mortgage + management – fee + expenses + profit) and present home owners to unite our monthly expenses and strengths together for individual and collective ownership. The article Extending our Welcome Participatory Cohousing Economy explores options for urban dwellers to reestablish local ownership.