ABOUT
Market Thoughts is a participatory online workshop with Anna Harsanyi and Sonia Louise Davis which explores relationships to hawker centres and practices of eating together. This workshop encourages participants to consider ways to navigate personal and collective storytelling in a site-specific context. Participants will respond to prompts for reflection and engage in discussions with each other around themes such as connections to place, personal and social rituals, and relationships to food. At the end of the workshop, the group will have composed a collective text which contemplates the lived experiences and personal dynamics of hawker centres.
REFLECTION
When I think about markets, I think about space – space to move around In, making space for others around me, the discursive space of talking with vendors. Within these spatial dynamics lie a network of interpersonal connections that bring us closer through rituals of eating, of providing and receiving care.
In Market Thoughts, artist Sonia Louise Davis and I organized an online activity that involved discussing themes of gathering and eating together, and the physical and social dynamics of space. We had previously worked together on a project in New York City’s Essex Street Market, called In, Of, and Crossing Essex. In this project, three artists engaged the historic city market space to think about themes of transition and memory in a site that was slated to be demolished and relocated. Sonia’s work Become Together Freedom School, an experimental platform to cultivate critical improvisation, included site-specific interrogations through abstract and ephemeral actions. Though we had not been to Lau Pa Sat, we carried our shared experiences interacting within Essex Market, and our own individual relationships to eating and communal gathering, to the conversation.
Our discussion unfolded through exchanges about how our rituals around eating and socializing have shifted since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, and how food has become a different kind of comfort. We relished small stories shared about participants’ close connections to certain hawker centres, to specific dishes, and specific vendors. The intimacy of space became apparent, opening up thoughts on how we connect to ourselves through the generosity of others.
We are grateful to everyone who joined the Market Thoughts workshop, and who shared their experiences and reflections as a way to honor the hawker centre and cherish it as a cultural site. Below is a collective notation of our discussions, created by participants over the course of the workshop.
