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The Meadow Network  2008-
A Fieldfaring Project

 

We created The Meadow Network, an ongoing series of newspapers, as a form (and forum) for an ongoing investigation of the inter-relationships between rural and urban life. The project is rooted in a broad series of interviews with city residents from diverse backgrounds, which we began conducting in October 2008. We visited city farms, open markets, senior centers, gardening stores and public parks, talking to people about where they came from, their own memories and their personal connections to rural life. How do they hold a concept of “homeland”? What traditions of growing, preserving, festival and bartering do they remember or hold on to or re-create? How do they see these as manifesting in their life in the city? The trajectory of The Meadow Network investigations were one of convergence—the city (or market, garden or farm) as a single point, where paths come together.

 

Issue #1 • Among Farmers and Gatherers • October 30, 2008

Published in conjunction with the exhibition, The Gatherers: Greening our Urban Spheres at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA. 

 

Issue #2 • Drawn From Rural Backgrounds • December 19, 2008

This issue was produced in collaboration with myvillages.org (Antje Schiffers + Wapke Feenstra) and published in conjunction with the exhibition, The Gatherers: Greening our Urban Spheres at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA. The drawings and texts in this issue were generated during conversations held at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and the Golden Gate Senior Center. This issue contains material by Renato Reyes, Cynthia Hooper, Carli Fullerton, Allison Smith, Brin Webster, Matthew Bryant and D.J. 

 

Issue #4 * PEI, The Ferry and Away • May 22, 2010

This issue was created for Dig Up My Heart: Artistic Practice in the Field, curated by Shauna McCabe presented at the Confederation Centre for the Arts in Charlottetown on Prince Edward Island. The texts in this issue were gathered through email correspondence with Melissa Batchilder, Shane Bryanton, Lucy Hogg, Zachariah Wells, Ker Wells and Peter Willis. Illustrations by Nicholas Sazani and Susanne Cockrell. Thank you to the Seed Fund in San Francisco for supporting this project.

 

When we were asked to include The Meadow Network in the exhibition Dig Up My Heart, it presented an opportunity to take on the project from another vantage point. Prince Edward Island is a place we have never seen, about as far from our home in California as one can get on the North American Continent. We knew of no-one who lived there, and few who had visited. In thinking about working “remotely”, it made sense to use distance as something of a common denominator. 

To create this issue of The Meadow Network, we asked Shauna McCabe, the curator of the exhibition, to put us in touch with people from the island who had “left” it. We wanted to interview those who moved away, to cities across Canada or abroad. We were curious about what they remembered and learned from the communities and culture of the island. What traditions, memories, or customs had they “held” onto? Working entirely through email, what emerged was a range of reflections on a home with fixed boundaries such as living on an island. From these beginnings, a range of exits and movements unfolded.

More than one of our correspondents described growing up with a feeling of two worlds. On one hand, the dense specificity of the island they were raised on, on the other, larger world of “away”, of all that lay beyond its shores. For each, there was a point of embarkation. Issue #4 of The Meadow Network trades the common space of convergence for the individual choice of departure.

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