Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere

When: Saturday, September 19, 2020 @ 1pm

The first event of the series begins with a workshop led by artist Anna Tjé who invites people to embark on the journey of their favorite fruits from seed to consumption by using “exotic” fruits as a metaphor for the self to build a virtual community through conversation, tasting, and creative writing.

Join us as we draw on our experiences to imagine relationships with selected fruits in a virtual healing space.

This is an interactive workshop. Participants will receive an activity packet after their registration. We encourage participants to complete their activity packets and bring their answers and selected fruits with them!

Anna Tjé is a community organizer and a transdisciplinary artist-researcher based in Paris, France, who uses spirituality, speculative fiction, and science fiction to question the notions of intimacy, trauma, and resilience of the Black female experience through performance, video, installation, and poetry. She creates immersive spaces that deconstruct the survival mechanisms of healing in “subcultures” and interrogates the social constructions of past-present-future space and time, and mythology in relation to various forms of queer eroticism, family ties, and narratives. Pulling from her personal archive – often-time using her Cameroonian cultural heritage – and from the works of black women feminists and queer activists and theorists, she organizes cheerful spaces and creative writing workshops with Atayé, an art collective and online magazine she co-founded, that focuses on Cultures, Social Justice and the Future.

Please pre-register for the event through the Zoom link

Conversations in the Neighborhood: Let’s Talk about Food

2020-21 Virtual Gainesville Community Series

Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere in collaboration with the City of Gainesville-Office of Equity and Inclusion

Organized by Alexandra Cenatus, Assistant Director for Programming and Public Engagement

Overview

Food allows people to create social ties. The theme of Conversations in the Neighborhood’s first series focuses on food, which under normal circumstances brings us together in families, among friends, and in larger communities. The series addresses questions raised by food consumption and production at a moment in which a global pandemic challenges our physical and social connections. By gathering artists, community members, local farmers, government officials, and humanities scholars, we ask: How do we consume food in Gainesville? How do we tell our families’ stories about food? How does migration impact the ways we eat in Gainesville? And how do we think about the work that goes into producing food in Gainesville?

Food sustains our bodies, but it also reflects our cultural upbringing and economic position, reveals who we are, and links us to certain people and places in Gainesville. Through consuming food, we become part of a global web through which food and recipes travel – literally and through stories we tell – to reach our tables. Conversations in the Neighborhood invites you to explore these links between the individual, local, regional, and global.

Conversations in the Neighborhood invites community members to gather monthly on Zoom to share meals of comfort and taste new flavors. It provides an opportunity for participants to connect with each other while sharing knowledge about food and cooking across generations. These discussions are open to everyone to engage with new or familiar food in a space where food is revealed to drive social development.

Sponsors

Conversations in the Neighborhood: Let’s Talk About Food is funded by a Community Project Grant from the Florida Humanities Council, the Office of Equity and Inclusion in the City of Gainesville, the University of Florida (UF) Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere (Rothman Endowment), UF Chief Diversity Officer, UF Center for Gender, Sexualities & Women’s Studies Research, UF Department of Spanish and Portuguese Studies, UF Center for Latin American Studies, UF Samuel Proctor Oral History Program, UF Center for African Studies,  UF African American Studies program, UF Languages, Literatures, and Cultures, UF Center for European Studies, UF International Center, UF Center for Arts, Migration, and Entrepreneurship, and UF Office of Sustainability.

All events will be held virtually. They are free and open to the public.