Week 9: Practical Research – Public Engagement – Gurrl Dinner
Gurrl Dinner:
Responding to the importance of recognising the audiences we wish to engage in our individual speculative projects, Kate Garramone, Emily Geary, Sarah Percival, and myself decided to use the collective Summerhall space as a location to host a workshop event. We situated this activity as an opportunity to understand more about the processes that contribute to coordinating public engagement programmes. Although health and safety restrictions associated with Summerhall made engagement with the broader public impossible, we understood this opportunity to experiment with promotion, participant activation, methods of participant engagement, and develop a practical experience with event coordination, as a way to further our consideration when we approach our individual projects. The development schedule is 20 days long, with the first planning meeting occurring on the evening of Thursday the 20th of March, and the event taking place on Sunday the 6th of April between 6:30 pm and 8:30 pm.
We began by developing a theoretical framework for the event. Analysing our own individual SCIPs we found very little crossover between our individual projects, so instead, inspired by Adan Benmakhlouf’s discussion on friendship as a methodology, we decided to proceed with a theme that we all enjoy as individuals, separate from the conceptual relevance to our work. We decided on a dinner party themed workshop where instead of serving food and drink the attendees are presented with art-related stimuli, such as a performance piece or an art-making activity. I was interested in the linguistic crossover between the ways that both food, art, and ideas are discussed. As a group we identified words like ‘Consumption’, ‘Digestion’, and ‘Taste’, which provided a humorous framing for the presentation of the event which was emphasised when we chose the Title ‘Gurrl Dinner’. This makes reference to a trend, originating on tik tok by user Olivia Maher where she deemed her meal ‘girl dinner’ as a result of its simplicity, placing convenience and comfort over appearance and nutrition. The naming of the event worked in tandem with the spatial requirements in determining the key audience, being, individuals who understand the pop culture reference, who are typically in the 18-25 age group, and students at the University of Edinburgh, (as these are the only individuals who are permitted to be within the space). To ensure that all requirements are met the event will be invite only.
We recognised the event has contrasting themes of refinement and humour and decided to emphasise this by planning absurdist activities within the format of a menu/ three course dinner, dividing the event into a ‘starter’ a ‘main’ and a ‘dessert’. We decided that we would consider these aspects outside of the meeting to understand what conceptual elements of the courses we wanted to emulate within each section. For example, the starter should be a short introduction that draws the participants into the event, whereas the dessert should be a final form of satisfaction. Additionally, we decided that the aesthetic appearance of the event should be deeply intertwined with the curatorial theme, as a result the central activity space will be in the form of an arranged table scape, combining conventional meal-time décor, alongside disjointing and incongruous items to allude to the non-conventional arrangement of the ‘dinner party’.
At the end of the meeting we decided that we would spend our time until the next meeting considering the material requirements of the event and finding event/performance ideas that could be included within the courses.
