Various terms describe the practice of which Proyecto Paladar is a part. Suzanne Lacy called it "new genre art" (1994). "Social practice," a term borrowed from sociology, was adopted by academic art programs, at the California College of Arts in 2005, then by Lacy for her own program at Otis College, and soon thereafter by Harrell Fletcher at Portland State University. Such work often includes the notion of social engagement. By the time Claire Bishop wrote her foundational text, "The Social Turn: Collaboration and Its Discontents" (2006), she contended that "social practice" was widely accepted. Pablo Helguera, in his well-regarded book Education for Socially Engaged Art (2011), notes that the term "socially engaged art" is not universal, but lays out his reasoning for using it, which is that the basis of such work, for him, is in relationship building and cocreation; that is, in the engaged part of the art-making.

I use the term socially engaged art rather than social practice, new genre, or another term, in order to indicate art that engages a community or group in a sustained manner, with an artist working cocreatively with them to determine project objectives and appropriate creative means and methods of reaching them.¹ Through participation and collaboration in a socially engaged project, information may be shared or skills imparted. Factors contributing to possibilities for building community knowledge through socially engaged art include duration, cocreation, dialogue, and a polyphonic understanding of truth.

Equally significant, and often overlooked, is what takes place after the physical manifestation of a socially engaged project has ended—documentation plays a key role in disseminating what was learned. A project that I curated for the Havana Biennial in 2012, illustrates this. Proyecto Paladar was developed by Craig Shillitto, in collaboration with a great many partners, for the main contemporary art center in Havana, the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam. It took the form of a pop-up restaurant operating during the Biennial's first eleven days, serving dinner to over 800 foreign visitors and residents. In the subsequent years, it has continued to generate understanding and exchange, thus serving as a prime example of how ongoing knowledge can be generated.

Shillitto researched everyday challenges faced by citizens of Havana, and concluded that one of the key difficulties was finding good, fresh food, and working inventively with what was available. Since Cubans have been fairly isolated (though this is changing), with little opportunity to learn about life in other places, and since US citizens have a similar ignorance about the everyday lives of Cubans, the Biennial seemed an excellent chance to foster greater understanding by making exchange the artistic form of his exploration of local food availability, distribution, and preparation.

 

Urban Farming

The difficulty of finding fresh food in Havana is in part the result of the relative self-sufficiency of the agricultural sector (only relative, because some items, like wheat, are still imported), along with problems in the food distribution system. The withdrawal of Soviet subsidies in the early 1990s compounded the historical reliance on imports, due to large-scale farming of commodities like sugar and tobacco since the colonial period (1512–1898). Indeed, many of the difficulties faced by the agricultural sector in the wake of the revolution (concluded in 1959) were the legacy of colonialism. When the Soviets pulled out, the Cubans were left with Russian tractors and transport trucks that slowly wore out, with no means of replacing parts, and little access to industrially produced fertilizer and pesticides, due to a lack of hard currency with which to buy them. Because the food system had been based on Soviet-style industrialized farming, this caused widespread disruption, leading to severe shortages and near-starvation rations. In response, two key actions were taken.

In Havana, the organic farms using companion planting and natural pesticides that were begun, to this day fill much of the gap left by the Soviets, with farms close to or even within population centers, though there are still shortages. Official government land ownership continues, but with the important exception that workers' cooperatives run most farms with the sanction of the government, provided they meet production quotas. The political revolution was followed by an agricultural revolution that in essence remade much of the farming system in the image of organic production and a high degree of ecological sustainability, as well as radically improving the average per capita nutritional intake.²

In the face of economic crisis, people started to take matters into their own hands by forming illegal private micro-businesses. In 1994, the government made a heavily restricted exception to the general rule that all enterprises had to be state run. Included were informal eateries called paladares, run by families out of private homes. These tiny restaurants were important alternatives for tourists looking for better-quality food and a culturally authentic experience, unmediated by the government, which were both generally lacking in government-owned establishments.

 

Exchange #1: Planning and Building the Restaurant Installation

Proyecto Paladar was structured around three basic exchanges, or dialogues. The first was planning and building the temporary restaurant structure, the second was knowledge-sharing and collaboration between US and Havana chefs, and the third was between US and Cuban diners.

The first exchange was the most challenging, and required many partners, both Cuban-based and US-based. Partners included US chefs interested in the project, who helped Shillitto determine what would be needed to build and outfit a restaurant they could use; non-US-based shipping companies; and frequent visitors to the island who were well-versed in its customs and bureaucracy, such as project producer and art dealer Alberto Magnan.

On the Cuban side, Shillitto partnered with Artex, the government-owned restaurant and hotel company; ten paladar chef/owners; the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo Wifredo Lam (a museum), Organopónico Vivero Alamar (an organic farm); and received information and assistance from numerous others. Because building materials and kitchen equipment were scarce in Cuba, and because of the US embargo, all equipment and some supplies had to be shipped from third countries, and all in-kind donations had to be secured from companies not based in the US. Due to these restrictions, Shillitto chose to build the structure from shipping containers, which could be readily found at the port of Havana. However, he faced challenges, such as having to rig his own water system, connected to a disused cistern, in order to supply the restaurant, and creating his own access to the natural gas supply.

For nine months prior to the project, over four trips to Havana, Shillitto discussed with partners, cocreators, and participants what was needed; what was possible given the bureaucratic and practical conditions in Cuba (such as the embargo and food shortages); what would be useful or transformational; and what Havanans might find interesting or engaging. It was an interdisciplinary process with chefs, farmers, bureaucrats, art administrators, builders, and others sharing insights. Knowledge exchanged ranged from construction techniques to bureaucratic systems. For example, in New York a new restaurant faces regulatory hurdles, inspections, and the acquisition of permits from the Department of Buildings, the Health Department, and often the Department of Environmental Protection. For Proyecto Paladar, the historic preservation commission that runs Habana Vieja (Old Havana), where it took place, was in charge. It was very tough to get a meeting with the head of the agency, but once that was accomplished the regulatory path was clear. On the other hand, it was up to Shillitto and his partners at Artex to ensure the safety of what they were building. The difference between the systems exemplified the contrast between a diversified, entrenched bureaucracy designed to operate consistently under different democratically elected leaders, and the centralized organization of a socialist government.

Dialogue propelled the project's progress and creativity, and was the means by which the artist built support among chefs, government officials, and museum staff. It was not merely talking, although that was its most obvious form, but also involved an active push and pull between the interests of the various players. For example, the populist nature of the project was developed by Shillitto, expressly including diner/participants from many walks of life.

Proyecto Paladar was designed in response to the overall Biennial theme of Social Imaginaries, as conceived by Wifredo Lam Center Director Jorge Fernández Torres. Politically, it was important to Fernández to have aspects of the Biennial reflect the populist rhetoric of the Cuban government and a socialist philosophy (Fernández Torres, 2013). This is one of the reasons that he offered his own prominent institution as the site for the project. Shillitto insisted that there be some kind of control over the site of the project during meal service, so as not to be overrun by hundreds of people at the same time, overwhelming staff and diluting the one-on-one dialogue that was at the core of his concept of exchange.

The ability of each participant or collaborator to influence the other and to compromise was the result of give and take, until the group as a whole could arrive—often through periods of disagreement or dissensus³—at a common course of action that sufficiently addressed the interests and goals of each participant. The possibilities for dissensus were magnified by language differences, wherein slippage of meaning was not uncommon.⁴ This happened multiple times, on the level of organizational and construction decisions large and small, throughout the planning and construction process. Interestingly, conversations outside the core group were also brought to bear. The US and Cuban chefs, for example, played a significant role in influencing the final form of the kitchen.

Literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin's writings about dialogue are useful here. In analyzing his work, Morson and Emerson write:

It is clear that dialogue so conceived involves the constant redefinition of its participants, develops and creates numerous potentials "in" each of them "separately" and between them "interactively" and "dialogically." It is also clear that no single interaction could exhaust the potential value of future exchanges. Both dialogue and the potentials of dialogue are endless. No word can be taken back, but the final word has not yet been spoken and will never be spoken. (1990, 52)

One of the tricky things about assessing the impact of a socially engaged project is that its effects are hard to demonstrate because, as captured in the quote above, its cocreators and participants continue to develop their thinking, actions, and ideas over time, along divergent paths. In Proyecto Paladar this was evident in the way that chef-participants carried ideas forward during and after the main events of the project. Some US-Cuban partners started new businesses together, such as Douglas Rodriguez and Enrique Nuñez. Others, like Pierre Thiam, looked for ways of replicating the criticism of food distribution systems and simultaneous valorization of healthful cooking and traditional food ways in other contexts—in his case, in Senegal, building on his own work and interests. The project acted like a seed planted in the mind, which grows whether it is watched or not. Rather than having a specific, predetermined conclusion, viewed in this way a socially engaged project may not be finite at all. Instead, each actor takes away what they learned and did for use at a later time, perhaps in different circumstances. From this perspective, the project may be seen as ongoing. New conclusions and truths may emerge, just as new actions may be undertaken that are the direct or indirect result of the agent's participation in the artwork. Various players may have different ideas of what happened or is happening, each seeing the project from his or her own perspective. Some chefs saw Shillitto's project as a simple exchange of skills, while others embraced its underlying critique. Different stakeholder vantage points yield different, and sometimes conflicting, truths, resulting in the project growing and developing in unforeseen and unpredictable ways. This extended project life is different, given the context of a socially engaged art project, than in more conventional art projects. The fundamental, formal building block of socially engaged art is relationship building. In other kinds of work, such social ties tend to be side effects, rather than among the key objectives.

The ongoing state of creative generation described here is contingent upon the dialogue that comes from cocreation; it's the fuel that keeps the engine of a project's ideas running, as with Proyecto Paladar. The sustainability of the project is not the point; rather the objective is sustained engagement over time with a set of ideas and actions. One project may run into another, as the artist initiates new actions with different groups and communities. Shillitto used the Havana project as an expression of his interest in the interchange of cultural knowledge through food, and how food globalization has impacted both local and global distribution systems. An artist's practice, viewed this way, becomes a sustained arc of endeavor with identifiable inflection points, rather than a series of discrete and finite artworks. Shillitto has gone on to do and plan projects exploring these themes in different ways at the Queens Museum (This Ain't Havana, 2014), at Art OMI (Bar(b)acoa, 2016–2018), in Quito, Ecuador (2017), and in Dakar, Senegal (2017).⁵ Sustainability may come not in the continuation of a single inflection point/project, but in ongoing variations with new people and stakeholders over the course of years.

During the building process, too, there was constant dialogue and improvisation, as the US team relied heavily on the knowledge of local builders, who often had surprising solutions to a lack of materials or tools.

Likewise, the visitors taught the locals new construction ideas and techniques. For two weeks before the project's opening, long days of building were a constant collaboration as the team cocreated the final product, a pop-up restaurant.

 

Exchange #2, Between US and Cuban Chefs

The second exchange in Proyecto Paladar was between US-based and Cuban chefs.

Recognizing that the ingenuity of private citizens had in large part been responsible for the restoration of better conditions, and in light of the relatively recent interest of people in the United States to eat locally and organically for reasons of sustainability, Shillitto felt that US-based chefs had something to learn from their Cuban counterparts. The business skills of the US chefs, forced to compete in a challenging industry, might prove useful to nascent Cuban entrepreneurs. A horizontal, one-on-one dialogue might be found in an exchange, with the likelihood of mutual learning. Shillitto made repeated research trips from New York to Havana, where he spoke with farmers and paladar chefs. In response to their needs and interests, the project began to take shape.

Each of the eleven active nights of the project during the Biennial featured a chef partnership resulting in a dinner. US-based chefs arriving in Havana were taken to their Cuban paladar-chef partners' restaurants to meet and decide what they would cook together on their assigned night. Most of the chefs spoke some of their partner's language, but when they didn't, translation was provided. They discussed what food was available and how it could be acquired for signature recipes they might teach one another, or hybridize based on local availability. They shared ideas, cooking techniques, and strategies for sourcing ingredients, a task that generally took as long or longer than preparing food for 75–100 people. The next day they sourced their ingredients together, visiting government-run markets, which generally had a limited range of fruits, vegetables, and meats. They also visited marinas, where black-market fish and seafood could be found, and organic farms within the city limits, where a broader array of fruits, vegetables, and fresh herbs were grown and sold. On the third day, they cooked.

Dinner was served in a structure made out of five shipping containers housing a working kitchen flanked by two dining rooms, with an elevated "chef's table" terrace on the roof above the kitchen. There were ten chef pairings, ensuring that the project had a fairly broad reach, and also creating a large enough cohort of chefs that the exchange of ideas would remain active and vibrant. Although the exchange was relatively short-term within the context of the project, many of the chefs remain in contact. Shillitto and I have heard from all of them that the experience of their exchange fundamentally changed the way that they think about food and the work that they do. The inquiry that the project inaugurated is thus an ongoing one, with the project cocreators continuing to share the knowledge they gained.

Cocreation is a key formal feature of socially engaged art, fostering productive exchange and the development of shared goals and practices. Cocreation occurs when the artist approaches a community with a basic idea of what he or she would like to do, and engages with interested community members to identify areas of common interest, or potential shared problem-solving goals. Claire Bishop describes this well, if critically:

Artists are increasingly judged by their working process—the degree to which they supply good or bad models of collaboration—and criticized for any hint of potential exploitation that fails to "fully" represent their subjects. . . . Accusations of mastery and egocentrism are leveled at artists who work with participants to realize a project instead of allowing it to emerge through consensual collaboration. (2006, 180)

This was the manner of Shillito's approach to the US and paladar chefs. The cocreative process is marked by the sharing of ideas and objectives, where the artist invites community members into the creative process. The radical sharing of authorship in much socially engaged art is as crucial to its impactful outcomes as is the relationship-building that typically takes the place of object-making or performance-creation. The artist sacrifices personal acclaim and credit in order to reap the benefits of the increased impact and broader-reaching results that are his or her goal. When the project objectives are social change-oriented, as they often are, this strategy is effective, important, and worthy.

Cocreation is also related to duration, not only in that it requires time for the artists to effectively collaborate, but in that it allows for long-term impact beyond the scheduled life of the project. If there are a number of people sharing authorship, each can take his or her experience, and commitment to the project's ideals and goals, and separately pursue them at the conclusion of their work together, as happened with the chef participants here. Cocreation happens synchronically or diachronically, e.g., with the creative team working together, at the same time, in the same place; with the creative team working separately, as individuals or in smaller groups, at the same time, but in different places; or in different places, at different times. This potential for diachronic creation and action is most pertinent here, because if the creative team can act independently over time, there is no reason that the project's end need mark an end to their engagement, nor that the project's stated limits of engagement should delimit the reach of any one individual. In other words, the knowledge shared during the project has a strong likelihood of continuing to spread and become influential over time and beyond the project's original scope of activity and/or activism. The engagement with Proyecto Paladar was for some chefs, like Pierre Thiam, the outgrowth of their own food-related activism, yet it also served as a lesson in how activism might be pursued in unlikely places using unaccustomed forms, like art. Seen this way, real creation often happens at a remove from the artist, who becomes the architect of a framework for interaction, or the designer of a system.

 

Exchange #3: Between Biennial Visitors and Cuban Diners

The dining experience was also an exchange. Each dinner was served to half Biennial visitors and half Cubans. Visitors were welcome to watch through large, open-air windows as the chefs prepared the evening meal, and the service staff—also a mix of US-based restaurant professionals and Havanans—cleaned and set up. Around 5:30, diners who had made reservations began to arrive and share a cocktail at the bar. Although some museum and government officials were among the diners, the project team also invited the families of the paladar chefs and other staff, day laborers from the construction team, and a variety of others who were not privileged, such as hotel staff, taxi drivers, and museum security guards. This ensured that on the Cuban side at least, the diners represented a cross section of society. At the meal, Cubans were arrayed on one side of the long tables, non-Cubans on the other, in order to encourage exchange and dialogue. Servers were bilingual and translated when there wasn't enough shared language (English or Spanish) to go around. Both sides enthusiastically embraced the opportunity, describing their lives and experiences in a way that belied the habitual stereotypes promoted by their respective governments. Close relationships were sometimes forged, with one notable pair—an American art collector and a Cuban soap opera star—exchanging shirts like the captains of opposing soccer teams at the end of a championship match. The chemistry was often magical. Here, too, relationships were formed that continue, and diners almost universally reported being deeply moved by the experience of the project.

Visitors' participation was planned in advance, with their donations to the project supporting free or subsidized seats for Cuban diners. This ensured that the Cuban diners would come from all walks of life, regardless of ability to pay. The range of participants had an opportunity to connect differently than the typical transactional capacity, across a service counter. By inviting them to break bread together, Shillitto was making a radical statement about the mutual interest between the people and their ability to get along.

Proyecto Paladar exemplifies how duration—the ongoing generation of multiple outcomes—can function in socially engaged art in order to encourage the interdisciplinary generation of knowledge. Duration was crucial for the kinds of extended dialogues that resulted in all of the partners feeling that their voices were being heard and their needs were being met. Although the project nominally took place over ten days, the duration was nearly a year. That the process was based on dialogue ensured that it was not simply the idea of one artist, executed by many, but was indeed cocreated with the many project partners in a spirit of mutual learning.

Duration is the basic condition on which the most successful socially engaged art is founded. In order to create work that is meaningful to a group of people, it is necessary to spend time with them, to listen to them in order to understand their needs and interests. The attenuated timeline accommodates slow and methodical relationship-building, allowing for the requisite level of trust and understanding to ensure that a group project works well.

It is not easy to produce effective documentation of such duration. Video narratives, for example, tend to telescope the process rather than emphasize its long-term development, and photographs record only single moments. But it is the longer timeline of such projects that makes them conducive to producing knowledge and developing interdisciplinary understanding. Shillitto's project included a book-length study and three short videos that addressed the project's evolution, in an effort to offer a well-rounded picture of just how important the attenuated project timeline was to his success.

The extended duration of such work demands that different kinds of questions are asked of the work, as observed by Grant Kester:

When does the work begin and when does it end? What are the boundaries of the field within which it operates, and how were they determined? At the most basic level, can we even agree as to what constitutes the object of criticism? Because we are dealing with an unfolding process, rather than, or in addition to, a discrete image, object, or event defined by set limits of space (the walls of a gallery) or time (the duration of a performance or commission), these questions become decisive in the analysis of the work. (Kester 2013)

To most people, the experience of a socially engaged art project tends to come through its documentation, as only a limited group is able to be present at a specific place and time to actively participate. Oftentimes, this documentation will focus on an event or series of events that mark an inflection point for the project's goals, or the culmination of the project. One might see video of a final performance, photos of a public gathering or of an art installation. However, these are only traces, or relics, of the experience of working with the artist(s) or otherwise participating. Sometimes, an artist deems such material secondary to in-person experience, choosing to minimally document the work if at all. An example is Carsten Höller's 2001 Baudouin Experiment, where 100 people were invited inside the iconic Atomium building in Brussels, a World's Fair relic, to do nothing for twenty-four hours. In order to make the piece as unscientific as possible, no documentation was permitted; rather participant's memories served as the only record (Bishop 2006, 183). Others, like Shillitto, view documentation as an essential component of the work. Occasionally, documentation is the primary focus, but in the socially engaged realm, documentation generally works in tandem with the events documented and is reliant on them for its meaning and significance. When one goes to a museum, although the aesthetic experience of being moved by the art is personal, there's a real object to look at, a physical reference that one can visit again and again in order to evoke a similar feeling. With socially engaged art, on the other hand, the aesthetic experience, which actually happens within the individual, is often the only real takeaway. The impact tends to be unseen, however strong and transformative it may have been, and it cannot be easily replicated.

Likewise, the often long-term and deeply involved process of developing the project in collaboration with any number of partners, which is often cited by participants as the meaningful part of the work, can easily be rendered invisible. Shillitto took special care to document construction and other behind-the-scenes activities, in order to show the actual breadth of engagement, beyond the ten official nights of the participatory performance. Because project development often looks like a bunch of people sitting around in meetings, it's not very sexy to document; so in the absence of special efforts to discuss artistic process, it often goes unremarked. The very key to the success of socially engaged projects, then, which is sustained dialogue and careful cocreation over time, is minimized. This may be partially circumvented with good documentation. A well-rounded approach, including a website, print publication, and videos can provide those who were unable to experience the work firsthand with a sense of the significance and even raw details of what happened. The Proyecto Paladar book, Ten Dinners in Havana (Grady and Shillitto 2013), provides eyewitness accounts and texts written from various perspectives in an effort to reflect different stakeholder viewpoints. It includes texts by the chefs, the head of the organic farm Shillitto worked with (Miguel Salcines), an art critic (Christian Viveros-Fauné), a political journalist (Loren Jenkins), and the Director of the Biennial (Jorge Fernández Torres).⁶ Documentation allows for reintegration of the artistic process, dialogue, and cocreation into a work ex post facto if it is done in a well-rounded manner. In other words, the "artwork" is not limited to the culminating event; that is only a part of a broader matrix of communication strategies that, along with the notion of polyphonic truth, allow the work an impact with the potential (not always realized) to transcend its apparent temporal and physical limitations.

What was the outcome? Diners and participants alike continue to discuss the project's meaning. The paladars formed relationships with the organic farm, and many now use it as their exclusive produce source. Each of them learned important efficiency strategies that make them more effective in their businesses. The US chefs returned home with a new appreciation for their access to any kind of produce, and a renewed commitment to use sustainable products wherever possible. But aside from the impact of knowledge sharing, the takeaway was the aesthetic experience of the exchange. Having the opportunity to make a real, personal connection with someone from another country and culture is always meaningful. We'll never know exactly how each and every one of the 800 diners was impacted. But having spoken to quite a few, it has deeply affected the way they view the citizens of countries with whom our government may disagree. This new sensitivity undoubtedly affects the decisions they make in their interactions, and in some cases their philanthropy. Finally, Shillitto has remained in contact with and continued to engage with project participants in ways that have continued in a long-term arc, inflected by a project at the Queens Museum in summer 2014, and another at Art OMI set to launch this year, with still more planned for the future.

Notes

 

Work Cited