Engagement, Conversation, Conviviality and The Distance Between Us

Portable City is an an urban survival kit,  it is a set of articles or implements used for a specific purpose:the articles are stored and transported within a mobile and they are assembled and put together as a whole this kit represents a packaged set of related materials. The kit is a tool box for social interaction.

The Portable City is about creating a social space through which to engage people in conversation and exchange, using an arts based approach to building human connection while ending the silence that exists between us; it is a study on creating dialogue amongst those who experience urban alienation and isolation: The conversations held in real time platform the idea of connection and dialogue.
The materials used to create The Portable City signify pedestrian culture. I use patio tables, umbrellas, and portable seating, food, conversation and sometimes pie. My art actions are public invitations as well as innovative inventions in a dialogical practice. I make space with portable fold out objects because they are temporary installations meant to transported from place to place in both urban and rural environments.

The objects I use create a sense of place that offers comfort, familiarity and through hospitality encourages conversation. Sometimes I serve pie or make food to "help bring people to the table". Sometimes I offer exhausted transit users and pedestrians in "waiting" comfortable seating through providing fold-out mobile bench that will be delivered to crowded transit station/stop.

All of these activities are interventions in urban space, they are spaces that I create and the interactions that occur at them and around them are art. In our times we need to be innovative and if innovation is a social process that involves complex interactions then it is a good time to begin thinking about how to get those communities conversing at a table.