The Word on the Street

Dr. Mikey Tomkins

Since 2010 I have been using combinations of hand-drawn maps, walking, and talking, along with events that incorporate food production, shared meals, costumes and performance to create the Edible Map project (figures 1- 4).[1] This project focuses on the cultural aspect within the word agriculture, and explores what kind of practices and rituals might emerge within an “edible city” as a near-future vision (figures 1, 2). I am less interested in refiguring the physical built environment as a master planner and more interested in how space is enacted and lived in. I want to provoke discussion around change. Through the work, I wish to ask questions about how food produced in the urban environment might also generate ritual, new customs or narratives. Hence the use of walking and talking as tools for engagement where I spend time at ground level with residents, and treat them as experts within their own neighbourhood. To accompany this approach, I have begun to create costumed entities that enact food rituals through performances. The entities walk the streets of the city to celebrate, protect and narrate our city harvest. This is not simply a nostalgia for a past folk art, imported to the city, but a way of breaking through the frustrations and responsibilities of the present moment (particularly under pandemic and economic pressure) to transform the city into a place of fun, play, and what-ifs. 

For example, in the UK there are traditional figures called straw jacks,[2] 3-metre high costumed people that wander the villages to celebrate the first wheat harvest. In Japanese culture, this might be represented by a manifestation of a yokai or kami, thought of as a combined animal-human-demon connected to other agricultural rituals from fertility to harvest.[3]These are moments where the hard reality of feeding ourselves daily, mixes with more esoteric or subjective desire for spirituality, myth, and creativity. The latter seems almost the opposite of the stricture of scientifically planned modern cities and hyper-efficacious industrial agriculture, yet we have always lived with and celebrated such incongruous juxtapositions. I have worked across continents on different aspects of this project; here, however, I shall focus on the Shieldfield neighbourhood of Newcastle, within the period of September 2018 - October 2020.  

Methods

My initial method of engagement with a project is peripatetic, through wandering and wondering around a given neighbourhood ground-truthing the site. Ground truthing is the process of reconciling your direct observation on the ground against existing spatial data such as online maps. In the space between the empirical observation correlated with remoted sensed data, I create a reinterpretation of the existing city map through the lens of urban food production. Given that the maps are set in an imaginary near future, where food production is essential, it is a playful exercise, sometimes surreal, where I begin to imagine what a city full of food growing might actually look like. Everyday tarmac springs to life with gardens (and gardeners), or tower blocks become vertical farms. I fill its parks, rooftops and empty buildings with food growing practices that range from urban allotments to indoor aquaponics. The outcome is a hand-drawn map that combines existing spatial data with a new interpretation of the site. The map is then printed and used on a series of walks. Some walks have been organised as part of an artist residency, or a group show, for example, Hackney, 2010-2011 (figure 1) and Newcastle 2015 and 2019 (figure 4). While others are stand-alone walks, for example Peterborough 2015 (figure 2).

On average, walks take one and half hours and follow the same route. They are not guided tours, and my preference is to introduce the conversation of UA amongst the small group of walkers, rather than present it as a lecture (figure 3). I don’t collect ‘data’ on the walks; instead, I prefer to let them exist in their own right. But at the end of the walk, I always invite walkers to sit and talk through their experiences of the near-future as presented in the map, and record these conversations. In this sense, the Edible Map can be sacrificial. I have seen walkers stuffing maps into pockets and bags with little concern for its status as “art”. Perhaps they just don’t like the drawing? Or perhaps, as I hope, walking and conversing is much more engaging than a piece of paper. 

Shieldfield, Newcastle

I had previously drawn and exhibited an Edible Map of Central Newcastle and undertaken a series of walks through a joint show at Newbridge Gallery in 2015.[4] In 2018 I was able to reengage with Newcastle via an existing project called Dwellbeing,[5] working jointly with a local gallery Shieldfield Art Works (SAW).[6] I have always felt that the mapping and walking aspect of the project benefitted me more than the community in the long term. While I stand by the idea that walking and reimagining could be an agent of change in and of itself, I wanted to empower communities towards more self-sustained actions beyond my own act of engagement. This would ideally be in the form of implementation of a food growing project, although initially there was no suggestion or budget for such an outcome. 

The walks and Edible Map of Shieldfield (figure 4) became part of a joint show at SAW, 17th May – 6th July 2019.[7] In June, a week of walks was advertised for residents and other interested parties (figure 5). I often find these walks nerve-racking. The map is created in my studio, alone, and is under my control. However, the walks are events where I lose control. For example, will the weather turn against me? Will someone get run over? Will the police get called? Will people turn up? The last is a big issue in the sense that the work needs engagement. This engagement is not always easy, and I have experienced anger from some walkers who have felt annoyance when they realise that the food growing practices on the map don’t exist (yet) and that they have to do the work to imagine them. On the whole, walkers decide to take part because they are intrigued by the ideas of local sustainable food production. 

Unlike the paper map, which can be exhibited, walks are performances where space gets reimagined through encounters with others. No two walks are the same in this sense. I have experienced groups that are almost silent in their reaction, while others “take over”, uninterested in the various points of interest I wish to point out. On one walk in Newcastle there was a healthy debate between one walker who felt that food growing needs to happen autonomously, and commented with frustration, “People feel hemmed in [by regulations] and can’t just go out and make their mark on the City”. However, another walker expressed feeling disempowered, stating, “What can I do? I can’t do that much. It needs to be a structural thing, top down. Policy change”. This participant wanted to get supermarkets involved in growing food rather than smaller market gardens. There was also tension between crisis and permanence.  Some wanted to get on with growing food now arguing that we are already in crisis, while another argued, 

“The shit has really got to hit the fan before I need to do something about it ... we get told all this stuff about climate change … it’s really bad but we just carry on so it does need to get enforced from above … but then, there’s an ‘anti’ about things getting enforced from above … so basically I don’t know! is the answer!” [she laughs].

 All of this requires me as the author, to let go of my map as a sedentary artwork, image or text limited to urban agriculture alone. Walkers are often spatially agile, slipping from conversations about food production as introduced by the Edible Map, to shopping, to their itinerary for the day or reminiscences about the neighbourhood. In my view, walking flips the primacy of the map as a possible new ‘master plan’ to be understood or potentially constructed, to an enacted moment which is fluid, dynamic and nomadic. As a result, I often find it hard to disseminate maps not in connection with walks or exhibitions. It is as if I am giving out the cover of a book that will never be written. 

In June 2019, at the end of the Shieldfield walks and group show, SAW suggested that, given the interest generated by walkers around actual food growing, they would support implementing a food growing project in the neighbourhood. Wheat was suggested. By happenstance, it had grown in the various disused flower beds around the neighbourhood where a resident had been feeding birds with seed that contained wheat. The plots had been abandoned to nature by a local authority desperately making cutbacks. Simultaneously, a local bakery had opened up in the neighbourhood, who offered to mill and bake any wheat grown. Much of the enthusiasm for the project came from two words expressed by residents during walks: “curiosity” and “risk”. The map had created a sense of curiosity within some residents, who were now captivated by the idea that they could and should put the spade in the ground. They were curious to see what would happen, and while they knew it was a risk in terms of actually growing any food, it was worth it to countenance their sense of frustration regarding how the land was managed in the neighbourhood.  

As a result, “Shieldfield Wheatfield” was born in 2019, a funded project with the intention of growing enough spring wheat to bake 10 plus loaves, together with a harvest festival celebration for October 2020. Four public sites, as well as three private gardens, were chosen to plant spring wheat which grows from March to August. The planting event, held on March 14th, 2020, was well attended by residents and supporters, still ‘curious’ to see what might happen. However, the following day on March 15th, the gallery closed due to Covid-19 and ideas around ‘risk’ took on a whole new meaning. During the planting the wheat, conversations turned to discussing how before modern agriculture and its concomitant supply chain, older communal agricultural practices such as planting wheat might mean the difference between life and death for a village. This was heightened by the spectre of plague that hung over us in the form of coronavirus. I would argue that, despite the almost magical endless appearance of food on supermarket shelves, the trauma of plague and harvest still reside within us passed down through the generations. During lockdown, the neighbourhood went silent and nature, in the form of birds and animals, returned. The wheat was attacked in the absence of the resident’s everyday presence. Despite this, we harvested wheat in August and I would argue that our small harvest of 1.5 kg was a success, given the extreme circumstances (figure 6). 

The map and walk had taken us from imagining food growing in the neighbourhood to actually holding grain in our hands. The threshing, milling and baking happened under strict separation (and for me via zoom) as the pandemic still continued to constrain social interactions. Furthermore, the planned Harvest Festival event and the community meal in October 2020, at which the bread would be shared, was cancelled. It was replaced with an event where residents came into SAW at pre-set times to collect activity packs containing bread (figure 8) and other food items prepared for the harvest event, entering and leaving the building without congregating. 

My part in the proceedings was to perform on Zoom in a costume made of wheat, whose head was covered with a mask depicting a map of Shieldfield (figure 9). The mask told the story of the project, from planting to harvest, and also showed the locations of the wheat gardens. Using green screen technique, I projected the streets of Shieldfield behind me, giving the impression I was there … or was I? Had I always been there, or was I imagined, conjured up from the threat of a failed harvest and our modern coronavirus plague? Perhaps, I was an afterimage, burnt into the retina of those who have seen me once and now close their eyes to reimagine me. Perhaps, it is just an academic dressed up in a costume he glued together in his home studio, hoping it wouldn’t scare the children. Uncertainties aside, outside its ceremonial function within performance, the mask and costume act as an artefact and record of the event, which may inspire later generations, sometime in the far-off future, that this was what urban harvests were always like and how they were also always celebrated.

Figure 9: Shieldfield wheat costume and mask. 

Author 

Dr Mikey Tomkins works across academic research and art practices within the field of urban agriculture (UA) both as theory and practice.

References

[1] Mikey Tomkins. “The Edible Map Project Archives.” Dr. Mikey Tomkins. Accessed October 31, 2020. https://mikeytomkins.co.uk/category/edible-maps/.

[2] Calendar Customs. “Carshalton Straw Jack.” Accessed October 31, 2020. https://calendarcustoms.com/articles/carshalton-straw-jack/.

[3] Ryoko Sekiguchi, Toshiharu Ito, Akihiro Hatanaka, Charles Fréger, Yokainoshima Island of Monsters : Japanese Folk Rituals (London: Thames and Hudson, 2016).

[4] Newbridge Gallery, URBAN ORGANISMS May 16 - June 13, 2015

https://thenewbridgeproject.com/events/urban-organisms/, accessed October 2020

[5] Dwellbeing, https://www.saw-newcastle.org/dwellbeing/ accessed October 2020

[6] Shieldfield Art Works, https://www.saw-newcastle.org/ accessed October 2020

[7] Shieldfield Art Works, ‘Curated by the Holy Buscuit’. Accessed 31 October 2020. https://www.saw-newcastle.org/curated-by-the-holy-biscuit/shieldfield-art-works-exhibition/,