让先人给让先人给我们指点迷津 Let’s get some help from the Dead

日期 date:  2012年4月4日（清明），星期三下午二点 / Wed 4 April (Tomb sweeping day) 2012, 14:00

地点 location: 家作坊 HomeShop［地图 / map］

用费 cost: 44

人 类的延续，就是生命一个个轮回交替，为生者死，为死者生。今年我们会设计一个人形种植园（一直到5月20日），这象征着人的身体与自然的物质转换与平衡。 中国传统的清明节祭扫，会用各种食物祭奠先人，因此我们还尝试恢复清明节中另一个重要的部分——寒食节，因此今年我们除了会焚烧一些特殊的纸钱，还欢迎大 家来这里跟我们一起吃冷食过节。

For human survival, we receive other’s life for maintain our own life. Today is the perfect day to appreciate their work on food production even after the loss of life. We will design the body sized garden (continued on 5月 20日) burning giant building and eating cold food to celebrate together with the dead.

organized by 植村絵美 Emi UEMURA, 方丹敏 Barbara FANG and Michael EDDY

日历餐厅介绍 About Calendar Restaurant:

日历餐厅是在种植季节期间每月开放一次的餐厅。它始于2010年7月至10月的一个艺术项目。自 2011年种植季节起,我们希望在日常生活和植物生长的时间表（这也是日历的来历)下探索这种实践。在日历餐厅,消费者变成厨师, 从我们的田园中采摘新鲜蔬菜, 并分享各自的经验。一起做好饭后, 大家围坐在一起，还会讨论一些更复杂的话题：健康、食品安全、社会、政治、天 气、中医、老北京烹饪、食物设计和储存－当然，这些看上去严肃的讨论并不会影响我们品尝美味。2011年我们的种植场地由小毛驴农场赞助，日历餐厅由家作坊支持、2012年我们的种植场地由 潤田農園赞助，日历餐厅由家作坊支持。
 
Calendar Restaurant is a restaurant that opens once every month during the course of the farming season. It was initiated within the context of an art project from July to October, 2010. When farming started in 2011, we simply wanted to explore this practice within the framework of daily life and timeline of vegetables’ growth (that is where the calendar originates). In this restaurant, customers become cooks, working with fresh vegetables from our garden and sharing stories of their experiences. Once food is ready we sit together at one big table to discuss complex food issues: health, food safety, social systems, politics, weather, Chinese medicine, old Beijing cooking, food design and preservation ― but not to the point of making the taste muddy! This year our farm plot is supported by Runtian Farm and the restaurant is supported by HomeShop. Calendar Restaurant is organized by 植村絵美  Emi UEMURA and 方丹敏 Barbara FANG

日历餐厅 时间表 春夏 2012 Spring Summer Calendar Restaurant Schedule

３月２０日（春分）开始農耕 Start farming
４月４日 星期二（清明）让我们为先人做点什么 Let’s Get some help from the dead
５月６日 星期天　（立夏）日历餐厅开放日Calendar Restaurant Open
５月２０日 星期天　(小満） 想得瓜就种瓜，想得豆就种豆  Planting seeds for your wishes
６月２日 星期六 (芒种）儿童乐园 Child land
６月２３日星期六（夏至）传统中医食物  Chinese Medicinal Food
７月休 holiday
８月５日（立秋）星期天 日历餐厅研究计划 Calendar Restaurant Research Trip
８月２４日（七夕）星期五 情人餐 Dinner for Love

Film : Into Eternity by Michael Madsen (79min)

English and Japanese subtitled

Date: Saturday 31st March 19:00~ / Saturday 7th April 19:00~

location: 家作坊 HomeShop［map]

cost: 60yuan (with Hot sandwich and drink)
money will support running cost of HomeShop and a Japanese documentary filmmaker who works on nuclear power issues in Japan

The 2011 earthquake and resulting nuclear power disaster in Fukushima, Japan showed that the world’s resources are finite, while causing long-term dysfunctions of current social systems in the cities, where life with Cesium will have to be confronted for extended and indeterminate periods of time. And who imagine that nuclear waste are stored for 100, 000 years!

Recent HomeShop visiting friend Vera Tollmann has written a review:

nuclear waste must be securely stored for 100,000 years due to its potentially lethal radioactive radiation. But where? How are we to relate to such an immense period of time? Is anyone at all in a position to take on the responsibility for this length of time?… more

Contact: NGO fu-jin Network Beijing and HomeShop

Walking around the church grounds, one step after another is fluffily soft; feeling microorganisms living underneath. Someone mentioned that perhaps a graveyard is the most nutritious and healthy environment to grow plants, on which no one has spread chemical pesticides. Sometime in the 16th century, the cemetery of St. Andrews church in Coniston, England was established to accommodate the practice of burying dead bodies. No records of death were kept, and it was long before the current church was constructed in 1819. According to the vicar Mark East, the first appearance of gravestones was around this time; in order for the family of the deceased to express wealth and living history, a visualization of death was constructed and carried on as a conventional wisdom.

“There is no wealth but life,” were the words of John Ruskin, the great thinker and early pioneer of ecology, who from 1900, the year of his death, also sleeps at grave #172 at St. Andrews church. He had spent his later years in Brantwood, his house overlooking Coniston Water. During this period, he published a monthly series called “Fors Clavigera: Letters to the Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain”, which took a form equivalent to the Blog in today’s terms, predicting the effects of industrialization on the natural world, and devoting his writing to his social reform crusade.

Although the issue of social inequality was addressed to the factory workers around the time of the Industrial Revolution in Britain, it hits a sore spot in current society. Coniston presently engages with tourism on industrial scales: the town is surrounded by nature, and 40% of the local population is composed of holiday homes; sheep farmers are subsidized by the government to maintain heritage varieties; people are generally “well-off”, so consequently isolation in one’s own individual interests cuts off engagement in village culture, and it interferes in local food production and distribution. In this context, small local farmers went into bankruptcy because of the price control of multi-national corporations, better able to service the high turn-over rate of tourism. Urban agriculture and the allotment system are very popular community models elsewhere in England, but in a place like Coniston they are not the custom.

Well then, how can we (artists) revitalize the idea of village food production, and maybe thereby revitalize the village? Together with Grizedale Arts, we proposed to the Church Council of Coniston the idea of growing vegetables on John Ruskin’s grave at St. Andrews Church.

“…six feet square, if no more can be had, — nay, the size of a grave, if you will, but buy it freehold, and make a garden of it, by hand-labour ; a garden visible to all men, and cultivated for all men of that place. If absolutely nothing will grow in it, then have herbs carried there in pots…” (John Ruskin 1874).

Taking his words seriously, this project is more symbolic rather than provocative, by growing food by hand to enrich the village with a group of locals.

to be continued…

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Grizedale Arts is a residency organization based on a farm in the centre of the Lake District in England. It tries to develop the way art thinking and art practice impact on society, through projects, exhibitions and events developed through an extended community of artists and creative people associated with it. Emi Uemura is a resident artist for Grizedale Arts 2011.