Co-presented by the Contemporary Arts Center and Wave Pool, the Collective Action Studio will be infiltrating the CAC’s lobby with recipes and stories of Cincinnati’s refugee women from September 5–22.
The Collective Action Studio (CAS) is a community arts organization who creatively perform their philosophy that art is “a form of community building and nonviolent civil action.” Co-founded by Justin Hoover and Chris Treggiari, the CAS produce artwork, curate exhibitions, and develop educational projects that advance their goals to spread social justice and bring diverse people together through participatory activity.
In Cincinnati they will orchestrate the latest iteration of War Gastronomy, a mobile storytelling archive that has been previously disguised as a humble food cart. The currency in this network is a personal story of relocation – from cultural and geographical to emotional and psychological – told in the form of a culinary recipe. In exchange for a story, CAS prepares a selection of these recipes and share the ensuing dish with a variety of others as they recount the respective stories. In so doing, a collection of oral histories becomes a collective platform to see, hear, taste and smell a global menu of cultures in flux. For this project, CAS will work alongside an industrious group of refugee women from around the world who make up The Welcome Projec—translating the skills and experiences of their constituents into entrepreneurial start-ups.
The timing of this project coincides with The Welcome Project’s pitch night as an Impact 100 finalist on September 13th. If awarded an Impact 100 grant, The Welcome Project will be able to renovate and refurbish a storefront in Camp Washington into a teaching kitchen and marketplace so the women of The Welcome Project can cook and share their stories with Cincinnati on an ongoing basis.
More information on the Collective Action Studio can be found here
More information on The Welcome Project here
Support for this project is provided by Puffin West Ltd. and the Contemporary Arts Center