Hello everyone and welcome my name is Cynthia Smith and to give you a brief visual description of myself. I'm a white woman with curly silver hair. I wear round eyeglasses and I'm sitting in my office in the museum in front of a shelf that are filled with design books. I'm the curator of socially responsible design at Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York. I organized our current exhibition, Designing Peace, which is on view until August 6 2023. It is my pleasure to welcome you to today's program Designing Place, Considering Power, which is held in conjunction with the exhibition. Please visit if you haven't already. We'd like to thank our supporters who made this program possible, including the Ford Foundation. Lisa Roberts and David Seltzer, the Lily Ockincloss Foundation, Helen and Edward Hintz and the Barbara and Morton Mendel Design Gallery Endowment Fund. Before we jump in I want to share some logistical details and accessibility information for our program. We have live captions available for today's event. You can access though all of those by clicking the closed caption button. I think it says CC on your zoom menu and clicking show subtitle. My Cooper Hewitt colleague Alexa Cummins will be your point of contact for accessibility today. She'll say hello in the chat now. If you have any accessibility issues, you can send her a private message in the chat and she'll be able to help you out. For today's program we encourage you to use the chat box to engage with your fellow attendees. Throughout the program feel free to add questions for our speakers via the Q&A icon. Today's program will run for 90 minutes. It's being recorded and will be posted on the Cooper Hewitt YouTube channel next week. In today's talk, our speakers will explore the importance of place and power when designing for public dialogues and spaces and how these sites of engagement might initiate peace, justice, equity, and at times creative confrontation. First we'll have a series of short presentations and then we'll have some time for a moderated discussion along with Q&A from the audience. John Rubin and Don Walensky will share about their Pittsburgh-based complex kitchen. Jonas Stahl will present on New World Summit Rojava located in northern Syria. Brian C. Lee Jr. will discuss his paper Monuments Engagement in New Orleans. You can read their impressive biographies for each of these speakers in the chat. I do hope you'll come visit to see each of their important creative collaborations which are on display in the Designing Peace exhibition. It's here at the museum. Now also we have a digital version online. You can also read more about this work in related publication, designing, peace, building a better future now. It's a pleasure now to introduce you to our moderator, Jamie Bennett. Jamie works at the intersection of nonprofits, philanthropy, and the public sector, engaging the arts, culture, and community development. Our executive director of Art Place America, a 10-year initiative that invested $150 million in some 250 projects across rural, suburban, tribal, and urban communities throughout the U.S. Projects that enlisted artists as allies in cultivating equitable, healthy, and sustainable communities makes him uniquely suited for today's conversation. Over to you, Jamie. Thanks so much, Cynthia. I really appreciate it. Hey, everyone. Jamie Bennett, he, him pronouns.  I'm calling in from Toronto, Canada, whose true name is Takaranto, where the trees stand in the water. These are lands that are stewarded through the dish with one spoon wampum and are subject to Treaty 13. This is the past, present, and future lands of the Mississauga of the Credit, the Mississauga of the New Credit, the Anishinaabek, the Chippewa, the Hutner, Shoney, and the Wendat peoples. And as Cynthia said, we're about to have three amazing presentations of projects, following which we'll have a brief conversation among the panelists, and then hopefully engage all of the voices. And just looking at some of the attendees who are here, I see some brilliant friends and minds, you know, Jessica, Priya, Susan, Sakshi, Patty, so please feel free to engage in the chat, add your voices, ask questions, we'll keep an eye on that. So with that, I think I get to invite John and Dawn, the two creators of Conflict Kitchen, to come join me on camera and share a little bit about your work. So, Dawn and John, feel free to introduce yourselves, however you'd like to enter this chat, and then take us on a little bit of a tour of Conflict Kitchen, if you would. Sure, I'll start off. So, I'm John, a white male. I've got mostly gray hair. I'm in my office, and behind me is an artwork that has the words Marigold, Mel Kilimanjaro, and Moonlight. And Dawn, maybe you can introduce yourself and then we'll get into the presentation. Good day, everyone. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening, wherever you're calling in from.  And the kitchen one of my favorite places to be. And John and I are going to share with you today, our project Conflict Kitchen which took place in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania from 2010 to 2017 and john will start us off so I'm just going to share my screen and share some slides. Okay. So, we'll give a kind of brief overview of the project and kind of maybe dive in on a couple of moments with in the life of the work and then, you know, we're very open to having dialogue and answering any questions after the presentation. So, as Don said the project occurred in Pittsburgh in the neighborhood called East Liberty which is a long term black working class neighborhood in city of Pittsburgh and project was located in a storefront and in that neighborhood. I think maybe go to the next slide. And in sort of like it's maybe simplest form Conflict Kitchen was a restaurant that operated from 2010 2017 every single day that sold food from countries the United States was in conflict with on a rotating basis so in our initial location in East Liberty, we had a kind of facade or I guess permanent facade placed on the side of the building that shifted its identity in relationship to the cuisine and country we're focusing on. We're looking at here. Cuba, Iran, Afghanistan, and Venezuela. One of the goals of this project was to bring to the street conversation that many Americans, many Pittsburghers might be uncomfortable having about countries that they might be entirely unfamiliar with and cuisines that they might never have eaten before. So, the exchange at the window of the storefront and of itself was a kind of performative space but also a place for the distribution not only a food but the food was wrapped with rappers that contained interviews with people from each country that we were working with. And it's important to note that this is sort of a series of publications that we would distribute over the years, books, interviews, speeches written by some of the people living in the countries that were focused. So the project is very much just a collaborative platform. It was developed here's a sort of the beginning of our Venezuelan version where members of the local Venezuelan community are there for a taste testing. It's important to note that the project worked with people in the countries that we were focusing on but also in the sort of larger diaspora and in our city specifically. So this is our Venezuelan version and our Afghan version this is a new venue that we moved into after I think two and a half years. And we went from being in a smaller neighborhood that had fewer folks coming maybe 20 or 30 people a day to on a sunny day like it is today in Pittsburgh about 300 to 400 people and kind of shifted the model of engagement that we were able to have. The recipes this is we're cooking in a woman's collective in Palestine I'll set a novelist learning how to make my tool. And so recipes again came from travels but also came from local communities that we were working with, and specifically in this iteration our Palestinian community here in Pittsburgh. And this is before the Palestinian version. Again, another taste testing, my friend Ahmed brought his mom from Gaza who had you know sort of modifications to the recipes which was a kind of perpetual process of recipes being kind of shifted through the perspective of every everyone who you know kind of cook the recipe. We also hosted a whole series of events and programs and educational platforms. This is a meeting with the local Sudanese community outside a kind of lunch gathering that we would have on a daily or weekly basis rather lots of virtual sort of engagements. And right now with zoom it's, I, you know, really don't feel like doing anything virtually but in the pre zoom days that we did an Iranian virtual cooking lesson we also did a North Korean version of this people joined from all over the world. There were a lot of people waiting in line, often, and there was a kind of captive audience so we initiated a lunch rush trivia show in which people started to engage in questions and that with the culture and cuisine of the countries we were focusing on. And just slowly over the years what started as a very small project with just a few employees grew to an initiative that had probably over 20 people working for an education and outreach component that reached into all the, or not all but was available for public and private schools in our region. Again, working with people from our community. Often times as john mentioned we had this sort of captive audience waiting for their take out food right we're utilizing within the stream of everyday life, this typical typified American capitalist concept of the take out restaurant so it's something that you would, you know, presumably understand the protocol of you go up and you order but then we would usurp that order and that protocol and say, with your Iranian food perhaps you would like to have that with sort of cash on E. But you're going to be doing that through the body of Elise Walton one of our conflict kitchen staff members so the foreigner, which is a tongue in cheek way of saying who do we call the other or the foreigner and what is foreign to us. What is a place or or person or senses of identity and what is authentic and what is genuine. We sort of use the foreigner as a way to have that discussion. So you could eat your food with Elise and speak to sort of through us microphone so as the staff member was had a set of headphones on and could hear sort of live in Tehran. So if you remember who was eating their food was mic'd up and could ask sort of any question they would like. So I could hear the question and Elise using a technique in linguistics and in translation called shadowing would repeat exactly what sort of was saying as he was saying it. You would hear the answer through the body of Elise, and we continue to have a conversation, albeit one person removed. So there became a layering of sexuality of gender of political affiliation religious affiliation, and of space and time of course, which for a lot of Pittsburghers it gave them an opportunity to perhaps have a conversation that they might not typically be encouraged or feel as comfortable to have. So we were oftentimes playing with that notion of bringing a perhaps what is an uncomfortable conversation for some to a more curious place so that instead of inheriting our own opinions from family members and friends and the news and media. Perhaps we need to challenge where there's misconceptions that are sometimes come from, and that included working with several other iterations, including a Juneteenth iteration where we were approached by black and African American chefs and home cooks within Pittsburgh to offer their cuisine. So for several Junes, we did offer Juneteenth cuisine where we pointed not only to the food that we were making in the kitchen, but to the many black and African American owned businesses throughout the Pittsburgh region where you could get your greens, you could get brisket and things like Trinidadian doubles which most folks weren't necessarily associating with Juneteenth cuisine. So this conflict kitchen went through many different iterations North Korean Palestine, Afghanistan, we also needed to look at how our foreign policy was created as a nation state, and that of course is due to the genocide. It was the genocide of many indigenous people stolen land, and the land that that we were on in Pittsburgh, which was not flooded due to the preservation, or the creation of a dam, which flooded then Seneca nation land. We also presented a Haudenosaunee iteration. This is current Haudenosaunee reservations throughout the five and six indigenous Haudenosaunee nations and then here is just a space since we're talking about place and power, a location on the border between New York and Pennsylvania which shows the Allegheny reservoir and river, and the Kinsuwa Dam which was built in the lower left hand corner. So that Pittsburgh was able to after a flood in 1936 retain some level of security from that flooding due to the building of the Kinsuwa Dam, which misplaced or displaced 600 Seneca families, took away a third of their land, much of which was their fertile land. And so our Haudenosaunee presentation was called Joheko, which in Seneca language means corn beans and squash the three sisters, which we presented at Conflict Kitchen, which a lot of our customers who are used to what is a typified sandwich in Pittsburgh, the Permani sandwich with your meat, your potatoes, and your vegetable all on one sandwich, often found the Haudenosaunee cuisine, which is the most local and the most indigenous. Here we're serving venison, deer meat, potatoes, time, berries, as to them the most foreign so again constantly playing with what is what is the other what is foreign to one in their daily life, when in fact, folks are our neighbors and we're on perhaps stolen land. And so we oftentimes we're looking at the food as not only medicine as a technology but as a way to refer to the sovereignty of the people and of the land that we were on, and would offer products including the Iroquois white born corn, roasted white corn flour, where we're really looking at the food as a technology with which to maintain that sovereignty and would oftentimes also use the food as a methodology for highlighting workshops and the technology of how the food maintains again the people and sustains the people. And I'll just leave you with a with a quote from some of the olive oil bottles that we purchased in bulk and then repackaged from a farm in the West Bank. From the farmer I am challenging the occupation by living only off the fruits of my land. And in this way the land itself is empowering me to resist. And so that's what we have for you today. And I'd love to pass it on over to Jonas. Thank you so much. Hi, everyone. My self identification my introduction. I use he him pronouns but I definitely prefer comrades, which is not so much of a pronoun but a gender neutral designation of a desire to stand on the same side of a collective struggle. I'm white man. I'm 40 years old I wear big glasses I have brown green eyes. I wear braces, and I am currently speaking to you from Athens in Greece. I will introduce a project called the new world summits for that. I'm going to share my screen. This is an artistic and political organization that I founded in 2012. And the aim of this artistic and political organization is to create parliaments for stateless and blacklisted political organizations. So here you see the design of such a parliament with flags that belong to organizations that are placed on so called designated lists of terrorist organizations. This was the very first new world summit parliament and created in Berlin in Germany in 2012. Here you see that the flags are organized by color creating an arena in which we invited representatives of these organizations to to come and speak. Now being placed on a terrorist blacklist means that once bank accounts are frozen. Once ports are revoked a travel ban is imposed. Essentially you are declared stateless. And this is a very cynical fact because many organizations on so called terrorist blacklists are already stateless organizations so here we have the gathering of representatives from the right, the Basque independence movement, the Kurdish women's movements, the Filipino underground movements, the representatives of the Keltamasek, better known as the Tuareg that fights for independent state in the northern part of Mali to Sahel and the Sahara Sahel region. So, many of these groups are already stateless organizations struggle for their right to self determination so to place them on a blacklist means that they are essentially double negated you are at the stateless are declared stateless. What for us was very important and when I say us I speak of the team of architects designers people from the field of progressive diplomacy and law with who I create these temporary parliamentary structures here an impression from the new world summit in Brussels in 2012 for us what was critical was to develop this project in a period in which the war on terror and the dominant narratives of the war on terror were haunting our politics and then I speak specifically of the so called us versus them narrative we want to ask who exactly is this then what constitutes them the so called terrorists the reason why my country included the Netherlands had joined the coalition of the willing for the illegal invasions of Afghanistan Iraq later of Libya with terrible long term decades long consequences as a result and millions of people, largely civilians who were murdered. So who exactly is this them and is it possible that what supposedly constitutes us, the states, the nation states that that act, claim to speak and act in our name that the real problem is not what is considered terrorism in terms of relatively small scale, organized militants resistance. But that the real structural problem is state terrorism and the war on terror itself is a form of structural states terrorism here's some impressions of the new world summit parliament that we created in Utrecht in the Netherlands in 2016. So could we create spaces these parliaments, where we could recompose what exactly constitutes us and what constitutes them maybe it's the states that that that lead this imperialist war that should be considered them. And maybe we citizens who have rejected the war from the very ongoing war on terror from the very beginning maybe we have more in common with the groups that that are prosecuted and that are often through paralegal means in the war on terror maybe we have more in common maybe we constitute more of an us of a collective. Then this, then the war on terror narrative presupposes. So the space in a way this creation of these parliaments in different shapes circle of all here there's more kind of track triangular semi semi broken open space that builds on morphological genealogies like the one we know from the House of Commons in the UK. These spaces are essentially trying to partake in that recomposition of the us versus them narrative to take down deconstruct dominant propaganda narrative and try to create a new one. And as such, I have come to believe that that spaces are very much participants, of course, at the place where you gather its history partakes in many ways. There's always already presences in an assembly very much before we gather to assemble and that's important to acknowledge. Then the space that we construct the spatial conditions of assemblies, and this also is also part is also partakes to this construction of the possibility of a new collective here in the case, the New World Embassy of Rojava. A series part of a series of temporary embassies that we create for stateless and blacklisted organizations to develop a form of non state or stateless diplomacy this was built in the municipal House of Oslo. So, the morphology of the space circle triangle oval. The division also of light in a space, who is who is through light enabled to speak who is not the difference of the use of chairs which tends to hide to individualize people to declare them individuals sovereign islands versus. And the use of the bench which is predominant in our construction, the bench has a long history in utopian architecture a bench is full with one person on it, but also with 20 persons on it, the bench is a space of continuous democratic negotiation a place where we can make space for others. We tend to think in extreme details of how space partakes and enables assembly. Now a very close collaboration of the New World Summit has been the autonomous government of Rojava. This is the Rojava means West in Kurdish refers to the western part of Kurdistan northern part of Syria, Kurdish people known as the largest nation without the state. And in Rojava the past years since 2012 actually since the founding of the New World Summit there has been a revolution to establish a new autonomous territory. And under a model that the Kurdish revolutionary movement describes as a form of stateless democracy, a way of practicing democracy without the construct of the state based on local communal self governance, gender equality and communal forms of ecology. And the Kurdish revolutionary movement representatives of Rojava they participated in the New World Summit from the very beginning here you see, I mean I also the co-chair of the Council of Foreign Affairs of Rojava, a close contact and partner who invited us our team to come to Rojava and to develop together with her a new parliament that would celebrate this model of stateless democracy that the Kurdish revolutionary movement for decades had struggled for and was able to realize an extremely complex conditions under the threat of the Turkish regime on one hand on the Islamic state on the other. So we attempted as a collaboration between the autonomous Rojava self governments and our team we try to think how does this new model of status democracy how does it translate and morphologically. And here you see some of the designs that we developed together with Amina also here you see the beginning of the building of the parliament and that establishes its very specific relationship to Kurdish territory to Kurdish soil from there. And Aguara arises a circular space of gathering that emphasizes that in the Rojava model of stateless democracy it is collective self representation that is central for Amina it was very important that the parliament would be a public space that it would not be the would not be separated from the public space but co constitutes the public domain and that the space between the person temporarily chosen to represent the community and the presence of the community itself would be as small as possible. This is what this is why we use this term of collective self representation that there's an intimacy in the building and performatively and politically of this of the practice of stateless democracy. Here you see the images of the parliament that was opened in 2018 continues to be in use, although currently it's under renovation, and there is a parallel Rojavan parliament that is currently operating in in the Netherlands where other coalitions between Kurdish movements and Zapatistas as well as activist movements like Extinction Rebellion is being established and as such this is an attempt to partake through artistic morphological competence the thinking of the forms through which we assemble and through which we try to organize ourselves in a in a very direct, you could say political intimacy with a revolutionary movements that brings me exactly to 10 minutes. This was the time that was given to me as the limitation for introduction and I look forward to discuss all of you and our fellow panelists, my fellow panelists, and it is now my pleasure to introduce to you, Brian C. Lee, Jr. Thanks Jonas and as Brian is just coming on camera and sharing his slides. I'll just share that Brian woke up this morning largely without a voice. And so he's going to join us as much as he can today without pushing himself so Brian share whatever you would like to share and we look forward to seeing the images and being with you a little bit. Okay. Thanks for bearing with me here.  I'll keep it quick. I'm going to do a little bit about a project called paper monuments. And this is a project that was founded in the aftermath of this nation's kind of pursuit to remove racist monuments from the landscape of our bill environment. In 2015, we started series of organizations that really sought to do that. Some were direct activist organizations. Some were artists organizations. I'm going to talk to you about the kind of arts and public space organization that came out of that, or at least project that came out of that call paper monuments. Some people ask why is it called paper monuments, mostly because we didn't have any money and paper would be an easy way to reach as many people as possible but also to not solidify a new idea in the face of something that had already been 150 years in the making in our given cities. Robert E. Lee sat for 150 years in the center of New Orleans as one of the tallest monuments in the city, and Robert E. Lee had never been there. So how do we create an opportunity for many people to have a series of imaginary opportunities and put those proposals back into the world and accumulate those and represent them back into the public. So a little bit of context. That time was very contentious in New Orleans. We had a lot of the racist that you saw in Virginia and across the country would travel from state to state, but they really started here in 2015 16. And we're pretty violent. They didn't murder anybody while they were in this particular city, but they did carry guns around at every event. And they were very kind of public about that threat. So that was one of the things that we were dealing with as organizations as well how both to challenge a larger system and to deal with the kind of acute malice that was proposed or threatened in that particular moment in time. So paper monuments became a project that was about imagining what new monuments might look like to the city. And not being told what stories were under wraps or been buried over time. And how do we lift those stories, the stories of teachers and of coaches and family members, the ones that are often negated in our larger context of history. So I'll talk to you a little bit about how we set up the system. We worked to use and utilize all of our kind of public transit systems posted up at bus stops train stops and posted a lot of posters which I'll talk a little bit more about later. We use our libraries consistently all across the city. We use our public institutions cultural institutions across the city. We talk to our schools and universities across the city mass. And we activated public spaces in mass. So, all of these dots that you see our interventions either static interventions artwork or public interventions of activities prevents that we created. So, doing so, we created a process in which we gathered posters and proposals for people over 1500 proposals over that time. And we collected those stories and made them into these kind of beautiful posters, put them back out into the public so it wasn't a dialogue or conversation between us as designers, and the public, it was a conversation amongst a public itself. Those conversations gave people other opportunities to have input and started to aggregate that narrative. So whether it was about culture or families, the legacies of women in the city. We wanted to make sure that it was visible and visible all the time. One of the ways in which we did that was to activate as many authors and storytellers as possible, as well as as many artists contemporary artists who would translate and take those stories and make them relatable to a contemporary environment, both in 2D and in 3D will start with the poster designs. We started with posters because there were so many stories that were coming in that it meant that we needed to find a consistent but beautiful way to tell all of those stories. So we had over 75 different stories told 75 different art pieces made to reflect these different events, collectives of people places and movements that happened across the city. One of the things that we were adamant about is not elevating or buying into the lionization of singular individuals and making sure that we acknowledge the collective act of city making a place making is one that is indeed collective, not singular, and it's alright so we tried our best to kind of expand that. I'll tell a quick story, one of these, maybe two of these. The desires to end off on the left hand side here is September 15 1970, the Black Panthers had nearly 200 police officers and four tanks come to attempt to eliminate their headquarters kind of cultural center. In doing so, they shot, they shot up this house with elders and with with young people existing within that space. Luckily, no one was harmed. The community came together rally put arms together and wrapped the building and push back the officers push back the kind of impeding force. There were no guns on the Black Panther side, it was mostly an assault on that community.  We started to post it in public. We, there was a, sorry, a civil worker downtown who saw this poster, he was a street cleaner. And every lunch break for three months, once he saw this, he said I was there at this event, and he would stand outside and tell anybody who got off the bus, what happened that day. So again, these became these kind of monuments to these stories that that were significant to the shaping of warlands. Dorothy May Taylor, I helped to desegregate Mardi Gras in the mid 90s. The Claybourne kind of innovation district Claybourne Highway cut through the oldest African American neighborhood in New Orleans, and the oldest African American neighborhood in the country at the time. And, ultimately, is a flexion of a black neighborhood that was divided as a byproduct of this kind of systemic violence, and has struggled for 60 years to find its footing. And here's just some of the kind of global or public posters that we pasted these are public events that we did with people. Maybe 30 or 40 people would come out we paste across the city, or we would make these smaller kind of civic posters that we would hang up in the given locations in which these events happened. And one of the things that we wanted to do with the this part of the project was to allow for the weather for time for people to occupy these narratives. And so as you see on the sassy servants. Sometimes there are things that off you skate our our narrative and our stories and our histories. And that is a byproduct of way that we live with this built environment. It also means that we can find ways to unpack and tell these stories in multiple different arenas. So the last two parts of this process were a way to take those visuals that people gave us in proposal form and create these kind of contemporary collages. And in which we start to future set. What would it be like if these proposals were made real. What would it look like if New Orleans a city on water was depicted in a real fashion. What would it look like if a gramophone that was constantly playing histories and narratives of New Orleans replaced Robert E. Lee, the kind of Confederate leader at least circle. What would it look like if we honored enslaved people's origin point and what they they were as humans before being saved. What would it look like if we really use all of the kind of cultural notions of our city and brought them to bear from the kind of education spaces across the city to second lining with the one down here on the left hand side that you see says We then started to explore how we expand that. How do we get larger. We started to ask in multiple artists to kind of support this effort, and we started to make these kind of paper based, but larger three dimensional monuments, basically. So you see another one to the raid and the desire like panther raid. You see these little portraits here in the top right by the bayou in New Orleans, that we're talking about stories of people who were either existed in this space for time and or passed away. And on the bottom left saw a monument of a series of these little books that told stories of people from two sides of a city and allowed us to kind of understand these many monuments, these many narratives as the, the effective type of monument we want to see moving forward. When the last one you see on the bottom right is a story of the kind of cultural community of Algiers point in New Orleans across the in the West Bank. Well, well, lastly on this part, I will talk about this beautiful piece on the right hand side by Lydia Stein on post Katrina sunflower seeds was strewn across the city. And so they grew out of free they grew out of the refrigerators that were on the side of the road. They grew on top of buildings.  And so this piece was a reflection of the resilience of the people in New Orleans post Katrina. And then we started to move into kind of physical space monumentality. This is one piece on the right hand side is a lenticular that worked in combination with the African American Museum to bring attention both to their relaunch as an institution, but also to talk about the leaving of the Jermay at large both the highway, the African American Museum and Congo square which is adjacent. And so the next phase of that project in which we are contemporary or we are currently in is called the story of project. So the way that this works is that we went from posters to markers to monuments. So what we're building is pavilion so these public civic museums, the Jermay is a public cultural displacement pavilion and talks about the displacement of culture in neighborhoods and starts to reroute some of those articulated cultures within that space. This is called the deep rack house. This is about neighborhood displacement. So what happened to the stories and the narratives people. This is in combination with the African American Museum in New Orleans. And this is called story of Delta. It is a reflection of ecological displacement and indigenous communities. So this piece will reflect on those narratives and stories with Lafitte Greenway, Nord and New Orleans redevelopment authority or sorry, recreation department and the Lafitte Greenway. I think I've run out of voice. So thank you for giving me a little bit of time and energy and try again in a minute. Brian, thank you for that get a tear whatever you need and dawn and dawn and Jonas. I invite you to come back on the camera. For everyone who's been watching and listening and paying attention feel free to jump into the chat would love to have your thoughts your questions your observation. And I think maybe the place I'd love to begin with you all is it's always interesting to me when a sort of curator comes in and bring sort of her frames do a set of projects and sort of sees what they have in common. And in some ways place is kind of an obvious one all of you are doing projects that are about people in place. And I've sort of found place to be a particularly squirrely topic I don't sort of quite know how to define it I don't know how to think about it. And dawn and john, you know, in our prep call, when I sort of said conflict kitchen, you know why did you set it in Pittsburgh, you both sort of said well because that's where we were. But I wonder, as you think about that project. How important was it how much was it taking place in Pittsburgh, a factor that shaped it how much was it different when it was in East Liberty, before it moved to another neighborhood. Just talk a little bit about sort of how, however you're thinking about the places where conflict kitchen has been how that informed and shaped the project. Go ahead, Don, do you want to start. Sure. Well, I'm, I'm born and raised in a rural area just outside of Pittsburgh, and most of my adult life was spent in in the city of Pittsburgh, and so it was for me the project very much a part of coming to understand the levels of ignorance about place that I had in a place that even though my family had been there for four and five generations. And we're very much a part of the blue collar communities within the city and and surrounding areas. I didn't know much of the history, or I had a version of the history that was just plain and correct. So conflict kitchen was an opportunity for, I think John and I in a lot of ways to do a lot of learning through what through conversation and you using food as a catalyst for that conversation, which oftentimes again those uncomfortable conversations or the discomfort moving to curiosity was something that we very much were doing and working towards. So, Pittsburgh was important because it was. I had to work through a lot of my own misconceptions of my neighbors and place and sense of land and and yeah, I, John, for you. Yeah, I mean I think that covers a lot of it but there's there's also something about making a work in the city in which you live every day I mean the restaurant was always just a couple of miles from where we lived. And the restaurant is like a living breathing daily entity that is. I think the beauty of it is it's a kind of mechanism for a call and response with the public which seems to be something that each of these projects and very informed engages right is sort of a kind of porousness sort of provocation or sort of putting into the public sphere and then a response and then and then you know conversation back. And so, you know when we started, I think our first focus was on Iran. People started coming up to the restaurant telling us what we needed to focus on next once they figured out what the premise was. There was almost like an organic quality that happens by just being there on a daily basis. Coming up with programs and ideas and platforms that hadn't existed in our city, we can only know by being in that city. You know, of course you're always like a call away when the friar breaks but you know, additionally, you're there when like a difficult conversation arises and you need to find a way to create a public forum to address it and how the project can and cannot be that way. So I think that was really important you know I've done work and I think we all have in in cities outside of our own, but there's a kind of organic gathering of momentum and and relationships that happen in a city you live in. Thank you for that and Jonas I particularly loved your sort of discussion of the sort of seat as an island the bench as sort of the thing that connects us. And in many ways that's sort of how I approach cities because you know I used to live in New York City, but really I used to live in downtown Brooklyn, really I used to live in downtown Brooklyn, which are related but but not synonymous, but the frame I'd love to invite you to jump in with Jonas is, you know, this is an exhibition called designing peace, and you are working with a set of folks and a set of peoples and a set of nations, where peace is not the sort of first frame that necessarily many folks would sort of put on that. How do you think about the sort of new world summits as adding peace to the world is not adding you know, is that a frame that you would have chosen for yourself as as you're thinking about this project. No, but what I really liked about, I mean what I really like about Cynthia's framework first of all it's that it's like it's a framework of a big mind, because to start talking about designing peace it's kind of it immediately. It's really a provocative form because it asks the question is peace something that can be produced and under what and under what conditions and what is the role that artistic or design practices like what is the role that cultural work plays in prefiguring the imagination of which I think at the at the part of the moment of time in which we are the radicality of pieces evidence it's the necessity and urgency to speak and and think of militants form of peace is the necessity of that this is very apparent. Then there's also the question of the, how we, how we create the visual and formal and spatial conditions and how these can, and how these contribute or can these contribute to the possibility of peace. And here I'm always a little bit conflicted because of course. I mean, when I was traveling in Syria, I saw the roundabouts, which had been transformed depending on where which, which territory were in the territory still in the control of Assad, it's father Assad, and and the current and the current leader of the regime in areas that had recently been liberated from ISIS the same roundabouts the same structure the colors had been changed into black and white and the tiles and cages had been placed to exhibit prisoners that would later be executed in the Kurdish territories those same circular roundabouts were colors that were painted repainted in the colors of a red yellow and green which are the center cops color central to the to the movement with depictions of martyrs that had sacrificed in the struggle against ISIS. And each of these roundabouts really represents something fundamentally different. And, and its infrastructure plays a different role in telling the story of that difference, but it was still that roundabouts. So, just because you make benches circular, or you divide light equally doesn't mean that the people who are gathering an egalitarian space doesn't not necessarily make egalitarian people. It isn't necessary part of it at the same time. So it contributes to, but it is not a guarantee towards peace and I think that that just says something about the modest role that we as artists and cultural workers play in the fact that we cannot and should think that by and of ourselves we design peace we partake in broader movements broader popular movements broader political organizations. And in that we play our relative importance but very relative part in the bigger whole. Thank you so much for that Jonas and that notion of sort of prefiguring peace or sort of dreaming the piece we haven't yet experienced Brian I often think the sort of twin of that kind of thing is excavating the past that's been papered over that's been intentionally raised that's been sort of pulled out. And I'll sort of, I'll offer you the sort of third P that Cynthia offered us which is power. And, you know, monuments are very specific form of power in America paper is an interesting thing to sort of fight. And I think we're going to start with that just talk a little bit about sort of where does power lead you to to want to talk about in the work that you're doing. Yeah. Yeah. You know, we often talk about power as a reflection of both the land mass that we are living on or with. The policies and procedures that are applied to that land, right. And so, you know, when one gets the opportunity to occupy space and monuments do just that they occupy these like moments and they leave residual traces and the powerful thing about monuments is that they are simply logos right they don't necessarily tell you the story of a particular individual or event, what they are as a symbol affirmative symbol of power. And so when someone, and this is the thing that we had to deal with at least circle. People didn't necessarily agree with the Confederacy or didn't necessarily agree with Robert E. Lee, who owned 190 enslaved people, but they stood out there for 40 years. And it was during Mardi Gras, and this space this thing became a part of their identity, even if the meaning of this space didn't attach to their identity, right. And so they find themselves kind of trying to support or justify power. And how like simple it is to get people to kind of justify the violence of power, just so that they can feel comfortable just so that they can kind of stay within that that framework. And so I think it has a, you know, for us, paper was a couple things it meant that we could love the zone, to some extent, right, we could tell so many stories that this one story could get. And then we could weaken its power of it. And then the other part of it was that we could get more people to engage, if not in their own stories in the kind of multiplicity of stories of the people that they might relate more to, right. And so in doing so getting them to honor and understand their own power relative to that situation, because it wasn't up to us to change the, the outputs of a 150 years of the city like we our job was to see whether or not the city itself the people of the city wanted a different format. And so that was the, that was the tool by which we did that. And we always go to like the Malcolm X quote that says, we know all revolutions are based in blood and land. It is the land list versus the landlord. And that like quote about how we think about land, and how we think about the land list is extremely important because it talks about places this it talks about who owns place who can drive place, and the kind of nomadicism of people who don't get to own place who don't get to control place, the easiness of which those people can be moved us, we can be moved from place to place. So I think there's that. And then the last thing I'll know is part polygon Alan, as a quote this is the culture is the root of all oppression, right, the loss of cultural memory sorry is of all oppression. And part of our kind of theory was that of the loss of all cultural memory is the root of all oppression, then the kind of persistent and willful pursuit of memory making and memory keeping is the is a formula for how we defeat that oppression how we dismantle oppressive systems right the kind of constancy in which we keep those narratives and those stories in public, make it real. Anyway, thank you for that Brian and I sort of I love the form follows fiction tagline on some of your slides and sort of, you know combating fiction with truth. The questions are starting to come in the Q&A I'm going to get to them in just the second start leaving them in. But all three of these projects push against power in some pretty important ways, and all of them have been met with controversy right they have not been universally and has sort of greeted them with unicorns and rainbows. Let me just go in the same order, but, you know, feel free to jump in. Don and john, was there particularly difficult moment that stands out during the course of conflict kitchen was, was there a moment of real sort of controversy, or danger or whatever that means or sort of, was there a moment of conflict that you think is especially notable to thinking about that. Yes, but we also are clear to not have that define the sort of mission or identity of the project. So the voices of, you know, in our case, you know, sort of a group or. Anyway, maybe I'll talk about the situation that happened and we can kind of contextualize it in a larger way. We focused on Palestine, and I think like any artist or intellectual or individual who's in the United States or in other countries as well but specifically in the United States of you. If you focus on a Palestinian center narrative with Palestinian voices, you're going to come up against a very large and organized effort to silence those. You know, you know, during our Palestinian iteration, which was no different, you know, in its focus than say our North Korean or Iranian wanted, you know, presented the thoughts and views and opinions of people living in Palestine and Palestinians living in Pittsburgh. You know, we started to basically be attacked in the media which is sort of standard thing it got kind of picked up in in the right wing media. In terms of a kind of specious set of relations between a grant funder of ours the Heinz endowment so Heinz ketchup is produced in Pittsburgh and one of our funders. But the second trace of Heinz was married to the Secretary of State at the time John Kerry. And so there was a lot of sort of like using our tiny little restaurant in Pittsburgh to basically throw carries efforts in the Middle East which are basically not reflective of ours or Palestinians, but to throw them, you know, into disarray and specifically, Breitbart and Fox News running articles, you know that Secretary of State funds radical is anti Israeli anti US eatery. You know, I had people behind the scenes trying to get me fired from my job at my university. One of the things to note is that the project operated through a research center at my university so that the employees of the restaurant are employees of the university and have benefits university could provide but you know that protection, you know, once you come against, you know, certain narrative forces is quite thin. We received death threats had to close the restaurant. It was a very destabilizing and environment for our employees. And I think, you know, again, this was a moment in time, you know, we're it's a seven year project. We continued the Palestinian version.  Right. You don't need to hear the Israeli side of a Palestinian viewpoint on government policy. We're probably over inundated with that net narrative. For you. Yeah. Yeah, thanks Jamie. I, I think, in addition to the conflict with our Palestinian iteration, the, the project ended for a number of reasons but at one point our staff unionized and so therefore the university because the staff for university employees was taking on yet another union. And we had contract negotiations for almost a year and then about a year after that the we had to end the project in terms of our relationship with the university. So I would say that after seven years, we became an institution nestled within another institution that because of the, because of the lack of flexibility due to the growth of the project and it further embedding itself into capitalism actually became the demise of the project and a lot of a lot of different ways. So when Jonah speaks about, you know, political intimacy and when, when Brian speaks to storytelling and collectivizing that storytelling, you know, there were, there were points when we probably should have shifted the direction of the project, or perhaps the direction of the project. And so that led to a lot of interpersonal conflicts conflicts within the project conflicts between individuals and institutions affiliated with the project. And it's, it was a deep learning experience for me personally and as an artist. And it's, it's one I continue to learn from and grow from very much. And Don, just before I go over to Jonas, as someone was wondering, does conflict kitchen live on other than it's documentation will it happen again is, you know, what what are your thoughts about sort of the future of conflict kitchen. There are no plans to, to reiterate it in any, in any way and in fact there have been many versions or iterations that folks around the world have have taken up on their own. There's a version in Poland, there's a version and their different iterations have popped up previously or continue. And it's, that's great. The idea is that the, you know, in terms of this notion of ownership, or concept. Or the notion of food as an as a tool for sovereignty and storytelling. And that's certainly not something that that we're the only folks that that have done or can do. And we encourage others to, to continue on with that, with that legacy. Jonas, your project, the New World Summit deal with many of the same peoples and countries that were also represented in sort of conflict kitchen, and you were sort of engaging them as a group and in a global context. Talk about some of the controversies you've experienced what are some of the political ramifications just help us sort of widen that aperture if you would. I mean, yes, I think they say that the territories of conflict kitchen and New World Summit partially overlap of course they're fundamentally difference because state people struggling for their own independent state or right to their territories. Have a different geography that is currently not the most in the, in the, in the world map. I mean, it's, it's, I, I'm very happy to be part of this to be in this panel because I think there's a lot of questions related to organizing. And the vulnerability of organizing that that are very specific to them very particular kind of artistic and cultural cultural practices so I recognize a lot from the controversies that john and don were just narrating. I mean, what are the conflict conflict the controversies that we're facing the controversies that are the result of the widest possible paralegal nets that the US and its allies including the Netherlands have cast in order to create a perpetual war that wants to build to create a utopian piece of a terrorist free world but is actually itself a machine that continues to produce more terror this must be this is the ultimate paradox of the war on terror that it creates exactly the terror that was almost unimaginable before it started. Like, if the Islamic State would have been depicted depicted in the film pre September 11, it would have been banned immediately as the most kind of racist idiotic like Orientalism on crack type of representation of a supposed terrorist organization. But the, the, the, this is kind of dark imaginary of the war on terror produces exactly this kind of agents that even go beyond is what it fought terrorism is or could be. This wide net that the war on terror has paralegal net that it costs we we have been confronted with it as well me and several of our fellow members have our we have travel bands in post. I've not been allowed to travel to the US since since 2015. Of course, this is all very relative to many of the limitation structural limitations and violence and systemic violence is that the organizations we work with are facing. Because we still have functioning passports for most of the world and that's, that's, that's already a lot but of course, the strategy of the war on terror what was, what was launched maybe even more specifically with when the white papers were passed passed under the Obama administration is the broadest possible association with so called terrorist organizations, blacklist organizations is already a reason for, for being banned from appearing in, in the, in the public realm and appearing means that access to political institutions, access to to banking systems access to, to structures of mobility. And I think this is where, maybe, as Don was, was pointing out where I do indeed see a connection that I guess our, our counter organizing work is to try to build histories and alliances. I think in the case of conflict, kitchen account of non aligned alliances even for more than alliance differently aligned alliances to build our own infrastructures and histories and narratives with which we can systemically counter these, these forms of system systemic violence. And that's maybe provides a relative form of safety and solidarity and, and comradeship in order not to be dissuaded from the very beginning to even enter to engage these questions in the first place. And as, as John was pointing out in relationship to, to supporting the Palestinian rights to self determination which should, which basically equals equals boycotting your yourself your future career, your access to funds and you name it and, and this is very recognizable but the more of us refuse to partake to the narrative, the stronger that the stronger that we are, the more chance that we can create a relative peace within our community. That's great. Thank you, Brian. There's actually a much better question laid out in the Q&A than I was going to ask you so I'm going to, I'm going to pick that up. And someone sort of began sketching out a little bit of a sort of theory of change which is you sort of start with a blank piece of paper.  And maybe if that is overwhelming enough there's a political change. And you sort of think about sort of the journey from the piece of blank piece of paper to the permanent change that you want to see in New Orleans. Just talk a little bit about sort of how that works or what that brings up for you. Yeah, I'll try. And if at any point you want to call a time out feel free to call time out. Appreciate it. Okay, two, two continuums I often work with are one is the continuum of memory, which essentially states that our memory can impact both the pedagogical political or procedural systems that we're engaged with through an activation of memory itself through momentum, small little tokens. Then through the media, the media as in the paper that we created markers monuments, but these are all steps in creating interventions or activations and each successive one, both builds power within the collective community and directs. It starts to direct that power with a nuance. I'm sorry direct the kind of people power with a nuance to where those systems are that are controlling right. And so, you know, as as I showed you, you know, we started with the paper, but I showed you those pavilions that we're working on presently those pavilions. So it's an opportunity both to hire community members to be a part of processes around displacement and housing in the germane. Right. They give us an opportunity to talk about ecological displacement across the city of New Orleans subsidence. And it rallies people it's a it's a rallying point. So we tend to think that creating spaces. And well, some people tend to think that creating spaces are neutral conditions and whatever happens in the space is what happens in the space but we kind of believe that these activations and these pursuits around creating space moving from the small intimate space of creating someone a paper and that space being wrapped around them to a much larger space like a pavilion or a museum are our political acts that give people the space and time and opportunity to both understand and acknowledge the systems around them unpack the systems around them, but also give them a chance to organize to challenge that power. Right. So, yeah, so I think I think those that that is our kind of theory of change relative to that. And I think it's really interesting to be a part of a community that has been historically disinherited or disenfranchised from public spaces from owning houses from all of these kind of built environment conditions, and recognizing that if we wanted to see a change, it's not going to happen by way of just dropping a new community center or dropping new housing into a community. It's going to happen by building the trust that leads you to that and building trust means that you have to be in conversation in conversation means that you have to start small and non transactional. Transaction can lead to then more trusted larger transactional engagements down the line. But if you don't go that trust and none of it happens and so we thought paper transactional we give people a gift, basically, and we build relationships, and then it gets to where it gets. Don, you did a little bit of this in the in the q&a but I want to invite this into the spoken space as well. All of your projects take place in public space. And we know Brian exactly as you sketched out that no public space is neutral is universally accessible. So, as you think both about sort of physical accessibility, as you think about welcoming belonging safety. Don, what does the sort of designer self in you. How do you begin thinking about making spaces that sort of achieve that continuum of access welcoming belonging. Stewarding or, or how do you would sketch it out just anything you want to share here, in addition to follow up with Kelly and writing. Yeah, I think you know when Brian mentioned, moving away from the transactional or being able to build up to a place where then the transactional is a collectivize protocol. Right where there are expectations and there is some level of trust which of course is always ebbing and flowing. It's trying to create. Inter interlope into spaces that are possibly overly transactionalized and are working with modes of production instead of reproduction. So if we can, as Jonas was pointing to move in solidarity towards more reproductive methodologies, which sometimes means stopping and pausing and backing off and also allowing for a lot of grace and also allowing and building in time for breakdown rate and antagonism and allowing the agonism to move to antagonism which I think a lot of our work is about continuing to poke and prod at some of these things so that so that so that the violence is at the surface, but also maintaining time for there to be rest you know in the seasonalities of organizing as as many folks talk about it. So I think it's best to occur within a reproductive practice as a designer or an artist or an architect. And I found that to be quite tough personally and and certainly working with others on projects in this way. So I don't necessarily have any answers but as as john also talks about that there is this ecology of participation. In doing so in that way when we think about that ecology. And when we think about power, my question is who is being centered in that power right, who is deeming themselves to be the host of something to be the arbiter of invitation. And that that I think gets really tricky. A friend ran agarwal who is an architect and socially engaged artist often speaks about reproductive spaces also building an exits. Or, and I think that's that's a good one as well. So those are just some some provocations for discussion but don't really have any answers just more questions always. Yes, I'd love to come to you. I was fascinated by your talking about the different shapes you use and sort of the triangle the parallel benches the circle. When you sort of think about that, you know, when you think about literally who gets centered is there a center. Just how, how do you think about those shapes how does that just talk a little bit more about that bit of it because I found that fascinating. Yeah, I mean, it's also, it's a set of questions that I've that for me have been central also to my work in social movement organizing. And that is how what what kind of morphology morphology is what visual forms that we associate with particular political concepts and can help to enable them. The circle which is a shape that we very often fall down fall back to is of course is probably one of the most tricky tricky ones because it's the shape that creates the quickest sense of collectivity but also has the quickest hierarchy of of privilege, in terms of who was in the circle first before someone else and that's when you're in a circle it's it's a highly egalitarian and inclusive space but when you are arriving at the circle and you weren't part of it from the it's a wall doesn't have. So like they were often morphologies that we assumed have this democratic appeal or potential democratic working is it that partake to the building of radical democracy. But then sometimes spaces like the one that I showed in the New World Summit in Utrecht, which was much more fragmented seemingly oppositional with these kind of strange diagonals breaking through allowing for much more and entry and access points. Actually works better than what as an image works, what works as an image of democracy, the circle always works as an image of democracy doesn't mean that it necessarily works, how we want democracy to work and sometimes there there are also strategic considerations because organizations that that that I work with and in some cases I'm also active member or part of. And there's of course also the image the image we want to propagate the claim to an alternative power that we want to propagate through the building of these parliaments and embassies and these alternative infrastructures and the point where how they work visually as an image in the world runs counter to what we want to happen inside of them so that there's also a continuous tension between the the reality of presence, the use of the space at the moment that we gather in the parliaments and the question of representation we want that image to operate on a whole other set of levels and we wanted to propagate our own alternative counter power to an existing existing political systems are there yeah all these all these considerations cross each other all the time and probably also speak to this fragment notion of of presence that we're never present present only in a singular way we are present, always in a variety of senses, it makes me think of your earlier question on place. And I was thinking yes indeed there's, there's a place and my place in the Netherlands, where I'm part of different political parties and social movements and and do my work there but I also, I'm also, I also have a place in ideas and in ideological narratives and that makes me really makes my loyalties across many other geographies and suddenly have less to do with with the place where you were born and maybe touches closer on a notion of expanded commercial that builds around the ideals and the imaginaries that you're trying to realize into the into the world so just as place has this multiplicity of manifestations I think with presence and representation through the spaces we created this that's in really the case. Thank you I'm really, I had never thought about sort of triangles and diagonals and I've got to design an event a couple weeks and I anyway, I didn't thank you for that. So we are dangerously close to ending this event on time so I want to see if I can mess that up with just a sort of quick exit question for you. And let me just go Brian john Jonas dawn.  Yeah, we are. We're working project. Yeah.  I'll come back to you, john what's got what's got you occupied these days. Several things. I'm currently creating a kind of fictional National Museum that can be cited in every state in the United States that allows the public to conceptualize what we should be commemorating what we should be imagining into our futures. So it's a kind of large scale project, but that will happen at a serious local spaces. Jonas, how about you what's what's on your to do with as many things but what I'm very closely to close closely working on now is a collaboration with lawyer rather the Suzanne alternative tribunal that we've created called the court for intergenerational climate crimes to prosecute climate crimes perpetuated by states and corporations and we're organizing preparing a series of public hearings now in Guangzhou in Korea let's start next week that specifically focus on the intersection of war crimes and climate crimes. And the case that we're trying to make together with various piece activists and climate movements across across Korea is that it's not just, it's not just waging war, it's the very existence of the military industrial complex that is a climate crime. And I think that that that that's also touches or this attempted analysis this attempt to prosecute an infrastructure that even if it doesn't wage war it's very existence and it's fossil reliance is a is a forms a kind of perpetual form of well extinction war, you could say, against against the living human and non human alike. I think this touches maybe on this on the question that we're dressing here the question of peace and the radicality of peace and the fact that that you know when you were asking in the beginning also about peace. I was thinking, where is their peace, because countries that we turn as being at peace tends to heavily rely on wedging war elsewhere. So their war is our piece, or their their their subjugation to to systemic extraction is what is what what what what what facilitates this this supposed peace that we're living. So peace must must mean the dismantling of these of these very infrastructures of the war machine of the criminal fossil fossil machine. And our understanding of peace has to has must relate I think to these infrastructural questions and that's, that's why I'm so obsessive. Both in the work with the New World Summit in the work with Radha on this climate tribunals on, on also making infrastructural proposition prosecuting these the infrastructures that maintain a world at war, where war is transformative, and to propagate infrastructures that at least, at least could maintain the imaginary of the possibility of peace as the minimum as good this way. Thank you for that. Don, where's your momentum taking you these days. What's next. Since 2018 in my current locale. We've been organizing and I co steward an organization called emergency and why or para organization that's a regional mutual aid network that services people with goods and services during times of ever present crisis however individuals here to find crisis. And we're looking to finally after we just received a little bit of funding to shift one of our working groups into activation it's called specter theater and it's a community theater company, where the ghosts of the of that have created situations of violence on this landed on this earth, come back to life and our grocery shopping next to you at the price chopper sitting next to you and the hourglass bar. And they're, you know, just back to check on how things have been going so how did that policy work out what were the consequences of my actions and speak to people improvised in everyday life to just help them to again admit perhaps, and reformulate different versions of our histories, and that will all be. I walk along as a scribe during this time and all of that goes into a script that will be played as a Allah Orson Welles is war of the world radio theater in our mutual aid ambulance. And that will be broadcast through our pirate radio our ham radio, and through publications and other devices so stay tuned for that. Radio Orson Welles I love it. Alright Brian last word. What's what's what's taking you to Cambridge or what. Alright, so I get to teach a class in Cambridge right now that is a class of lack of construction and the Harvard legacy of slavery report. It's our ability to kind of challenge the 70 people that were challenged the Harvard institution as they enslave 70 people from their origin. So that class has been amazing. And the second thing I'm doing is we are designing the Claymore and innovation district in New Orleans which is a 19 block cultural marketplace in the germane. This is a project that is the culmination of 60 years of activism that challenge the highway that cut through the center of this neighborhood this historically black neighborhood, eliminating jobs, education, you know health outcomes educational outcomes wealth outcomes all of that. And we're building and organizing a kind of storytelling campaign around that history, colorizing old photos from the neighborhood, and then building all of that into place over the next two years. So that is the, the most pressing project and the most fun. So if you come to New Orleans, come see me. When you come to New Orleans. Absolutely. Yeah, so I think the only thing left to do is dawn Jonas john Brian. Thank you so much for sharing so wonderfully over these past 90 minutes. Cynthia and your colleagues at the Cooper Hewitt thank you so much for giving us this space. Anyone who is going to be in New York City before August 6 can go see the exhibition in person at the Cooper Hewitt. Anyone who's not going to be there there really is a wonderfully done sort of digital experience of the exhibition online if you go to the Cooper Hewitt website. So with that, thank you all so much. Enjoy the rest of your days wherever you are. And we'll see you soon and hopefully over delicious piece of food. Great. Thanks so much.


I think we probably did it totally the opposite of the way that you would think a restaurant would come to fruition. You would think that there's a chef who's been spending 20 years honing their talent, they partner with somebody who has a business background, the menu they've been working on for 20 years in their head, and then the next day a restaurant spits out. We were printing out crazy old Campari posters researching Italian futurism because the way that our brains work, we're brand centric, that's the kind of pivotal piece here, and we spent maybe like 9 or 10 of the 12 months working on the logo and the brand and the way that it would look and feel, and then we realized that we got to open this thing in a month and we're like, fuck, we don't have a menu. And so then we were like, oh, we've got to figure that out.


Hello, I am Dr. Satish Kumar Kashyap, Professor in Civil Engineering from Balchan Institute of Technology, Soolapur. In this video, I am going to discuss Reservoir Planning, Area Capacity Curves of a Dam Reservoir. Learning Outcomes At the end of this session, the students will be able to explain important reservoir levels and different zones of reservoir storage. The students will be able to describe the Area Capacity Curves of a Storage Reservoir. The students will be able to estimate storage capacity and subversion area of a dam at any particular level using Area Capacity Curves. Coverage. Just we will have a brief discussion about Reservoir and their purposes. Then we will discuss about important reservoir levels, then Reservoirs to range zones, then we will glance through capacity surveys of reservoirs, then we will discuss Area Capacity Curves of a Reservoir, and then we will see how one can use Area Capacity Curves for fixing important levels of a reservoir. You know that reservoirs are used for human consumption and industrial use. Also for irrigation, also for hydropower, also for hydropower plants. We also construct dams as flood control dams and we also construct dams and form reservoirs for the immunity use. This may include for boating, water sports, fishing, sightseeing and so on. Now this is a typical river valley development. This is a Damo river valley. So you will find these reservoirs which are constructed by using dams here. So the reservoirs are well spread over the catchment area so that every dam will have its own catchment and will receive sufficient water to satisfy the demands. Now this is a reservoir which is formed by construction of a Tehridam. Tehridam happens to be one of the highest earth dams constructed in India and not only in India but the world having height over 250 meters. And see the water level it is very low at this particular moment. In one more picture I will show you the water level has come quite up and now water has reached up to spillway and excess water is diverted downstream through this particular spillway. So here you can imagine that the water contained in dam will be different at different levels. So let us understand important reservoir levels. First important level is maximum water level. So it is the water level ever likely to be attained during the passage of design flood. It means it is not expected that water level will rise above this. Of course it depends upon the specified initial reservoir level and the spillway get operation rules. Then second important level is full reservoir level. It is the level corresponding to that which can be maintained without spillway discharge or without passing water downstream through fluids. It means it is the level up to which we store the water normally. Whenever there are no floods there is minimum drawdown level. It is the level below which the reservoir will not be drawn down so as to maintain minimum head required for power projects. It means this MDDEL is important especially for the power projects. Whereas there is one more level dead storage level below this level there are no outlets to drain the water in the reservoir by gravity. That means whenever we have canal outlets so it is the spill level of the canal outlet below that water cannot be drawn into the canal that is the dead storage level. So this figure will give you the idea about the levels. So this is the maximum water level which is attained at the time of floods design floods water is not expected to go above this. This level is of course top of dam. This is FRL that is full reservoir level which we maintain whenever there are no floods. So these levels are again against the gates against the gate. This is the spillway crest level. So whenever there are no gates provided you will find the spillway crest level itself is a full reservoir level. But when your gated spillways are there we define these levels. Now if you are using this reservoir for hydropower generation so this is the minimum drawdown level so that minimum head is always there above the turbines. It is uneconomical to generate electricity when water level goes below this minimum drawdown level. Whereas this is a dead storage level which matches with the spill level of the outlet of a canal also. You can also have outlets below this level but they will open in the river. Now important storage is in a reservoir. One is a live storage. So this is the short storage available for intended purpose of a reservoir between full supply level and the invert level of a lowest discharge outlet. So this is the most useful water for satisfying the demands. The dead storage it is the storage below the invert level of lowered discharge outlet from the reservoir. It may be available to contain sedimentation provided the sediment does not adversely affect the lowest discharge. Floor storage it is the storage between full reservoir level and maximum water level to contain the peaks of floods that might occur. So here this will give. So as we discussed this is full reservoir level. This is the storage which is used at the time of flood control level and this is the searcher storage it is matches with the highest flood level. This is the conservation storage which is used for satisfying the demands let it be for irrigation let it be for hydropower and so. And below this dead storage level whatever the storage is there that is called as a dead storage. So in this way the storage zones are important for us dead storage this is a live storage this is the flood control storage and the searcher storage. Now let us go for two small questions. The searcher storage in a dam reservoir is the volume of water stored between minimum and maximum reservoir levels minimum and normal reservoir levels normal and maximum reservoir levels none of above. One more question the useful storage in a dam reservoir is the volume of water stored between minimum and maximum reservoir levels minimum and normal reservoir levels normal and maximum reservoir levels none of above. Just see the searcher storage is the storage between normal that is full reservoir level and maximum that is highest spread level whereas the useful storage is between minimum that is dead storage level and normal reservoir level which is also called as a full reservoir level. Now we estimate the reservoir capacity by using the control maps at a dam site. So by using prismodal formula or by using say trapezoidal formula we can estimate the volume of water which is stored. So here you can find the contour one which matches with the highest level, this contour matches with this level, this contour matches with this level, so submerged areas at each and every level is calculated thereafter by using the formula one can estimate volume of water stored at each and every level. So one can find out these, now for calculating capacity of reservoir one can have control map then submerged areas calculated by means by measuring area of contour as each level, storage capacity of reservoir is estimated by using trapezoidal or prismodal formula and then one can draw the area capacity curves. So you can draw a curve elevation versus storage value in this way and here also this is elevation versus this is area submerged. So this gives elevation versus area submerged and this gives elevation versus volume stored. So one typical curve we have these curves are useful to estimate submerged area at different elevations and to estimate storage capacity of reservoir at different elevations and to fix up important reservoir levels accordingly once you have decided what should be dead storage, what should be live storage, what should be searcher storage. So here you will find a typical curve after surveys. So at 290 meter RL this is a curve so you have to come down and then you will find the storage capacity is say 1.7 kilometer cube. At 290 this area of submerged may be say here 100 square kilometers. But these curves go on changing due to sedimentation how it changes. So a typical change curves over a period of 1986 to 2011 are shown here. So summary we discuss important reservoir levels and different zones of reservoir and we also discussed by using area capacity curves how one can find storages and submergence areas and hence how one can fix up the reservoir levels. These are references thank you.


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Welcome to The Journey. Today we're going to talk about how to prepare your business for uncertain times. What the world being is not the only thing currently at risk. I mean, for instance, many businesses in the food, retail, and grocery industries have drastically needed to change their business models so their businesses can survive during these times of uncertainty. And you may not be able to see to the future, but it doesn't mean you can't prepare for it. Ensure your business can withstand any further hardships by embracing the uncertainty rather than ignoring it. Now this can reveal real opportunities for your business to grow. And look, nobody knows when the new normal will transition to something more stable. So why not take this disruption in society as an opportunity, an opportunity to transform it into something you can utilize in your business for growth. In this video, we'll create your strategic roadmaps as you plan for your business's future. Let's start off with step number one, and that's to plan for uncertainty factors. Factors that can cause uncertainty and really include those economic conditions, fiscal illness, and shifts in consumer behavior to name a few. All right, Emma, can you tell us a couple of simple steps to strategize for each of these? Yeah, totally. Let's talk about economic conditions. So economic conditions, you need to create a plan to help you predict when the industry will be at its lowest or highest.  Then in turn, that can help you to implement new strategies so you bounce back from the current situation. And then there's physical illness. You'll need to consider how physical illness may affect your business. You need everyone feeling comfortable and safe. So let your clients and staff know about your disinfecting instructions, social distancing rules, hand washing guidelines, and other sanitation and hygiene protocols. And third point, shifts in consumer behavior. In addition, shifts in consumer demand can certainly influence both how your business operates and, of course, its long-term success. And I encourage you to ask yourself, you know, are you catering to new clients and not just your regulars? Is client safety taken into consideration? Also, do you have the right marketing strategies in place, like email marketing and social media campaigns, in order to grow and engage with your community? All right, step number two, tune into how you feel and stay present. As the decision maker, you may be feeling burnt out, stressed, and extremely overwhelmed by the lockdown and everything that's going on in the world. It can all be a bit much, but just remember that it's okay. And feeling this way is kind of normal. Be aware of how you feel right now. And as a business owner, it's especially hard during these times to run a successful business since many gyms and other different areas have forced to close or pivoted to an online business model. Many unanswered questions may add to your stress and anxiety, such as like, how do I pay the bills? Will my business be able to continue? And can I still generate revenue? And something that I often say to those around me and my nearest and dearest, stay present or in the now, be mindful as you prepare for multiple outcomes, review the current state of your business on a regular basis, regular basis and continue to build relationships with clients and staff, partners, and more to create a long-term community. And remember, staying in the now allows you to become more familiar with what's happening with the state of the economy at this very moment. So as you tune into current events, you can make informed decisions about your business. And economic forecasts can shed light on your industry. So then good news, you can plan accordingly. And this allows you to plan for multiple outcomes rather than just one.  Exactly. And then step number three, keep the lines of communication open. It's super important to be transparent and keep the lines of communication with your staff members and your clients. You'll also need to constantly review and evaluate how you communicate with your community. So communicate any updates to your community about the status of your business, your health and safety protocols, or just new promotions or virtual classes at your business. And now the good thing is digital strategies and automation can allow you to take your communication to another level, which is awesome. So you can create custom templates and automatically send email, text, messages, and even push notifications to keep base with staff members. And this is going to allow you to engage with your clients as well and grow your business, of course. Yeah. And you can announce a class and target past customers who have previously purchased some type of service from you just to increase those class attendance. But you can also reengage whenever a client hasn't visited your business in a while and just notify them when their membership is about to expire to really boost your retention numbers. All in all, communication is key to building a lasting relationship with staff members and your clients. Number four, focus on a marketing plan. Can't stress that enough. And you need to implement the basics of an effective fitness business marketing plan. Before you can decide or truly invest though, the building blocks of business marketing plan can serve as a roadmap. So I like to call it that you need for an effective strategy to get more clients. So what should your strategy include? Let's break it down. I'll take this one, Emma. So I think your strategy has to start with research and development just to help you better understand your target audience, especially at this stage. So this marketing stage is all about research. You find out everything about your audience, literally everything, including their age, where they live, the problems they want to overcome, the goals they want to achieve and more. Then you jump into competitive analysis so you gain a clear perspective on your competitors. And after doing the research and development stage, you need to know what you are offering and ask yourself, why would consumers come to your business over others? And this is where you start to distinguish yourself and make your business unique to stand out from the crowd. Also, let's talk about clear goal setting, clear goal setting. So your marketing has the right vision and it has the right direction. You'll also need to set aside funds for your marketing budget. And don't forget to ask yourself how you will reach your target audience. Nealey and I talk about this all the time. So for instance, is your audience on social media like Facebook or Instagram? Which one of those? Or did they prefer reading your blog or your emails? Next, consider how your online presence factors into your overall marketing strategy. So you're going to want to attract new clients with an effective landing page with a clear call to action and form of FAQs and lead capture widget for more conversions. And then engage with clients on the most popular social media channels. This can be Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, whatever you want to do there, wherever your audience spends most of their day. And then share client success stories, blogs and expert tips, important updates on your business and really anything that fits into what's going on with your business. Also referral programs are great. Running referral programs encourages local customers to go out there, tell others about you, your business. And when current clients refer new clients, a referral program lets them earn rewards. I love this personally. Such as discounted memberships, free gym classes, you name it. But don't forget to continue to make adjustments and evaluate your marketing throughout the pandemic. And this one's probably one of my favorites, but step number five, remember your self-care plan matters too. A topic that is being openly discussed more and more is self-care and it's important for your overall journey. As a business owner, you often think about others and how you can cater to your clients, your staff members first. But remember that taking care of yourself is vital for running a successful business. And although this may seem uncertain and out of whack right now, you should definitely schedule some of me time to reflect, refresh and rejuvenate. Develop a routine both in and out of the business and is essential because then you can create good habits. Now, some people may think that taking a vacation is the only way to clear your head. You guys, that's totally not true. It's just simply not true. Taking some time for yourself or talking to someone, even that can give me a little clarity in the head for the day. Like a business coach, an advisor, a good friend who can help you navigate the uncertainty and answer your questions can be extremely refreshing and good to help clear the thoughts and let those new ideas flow in. Nobody and no business is perfect. It's imperative to realize that there are endless possibilities to improve from where you are right now. It's one of my favorite parts of being a business coach and consultant. I get to provide more than just hope and mindset shifts, but real life results through proven best practices and execution with tools that boost the key performance indicators of your business. Nothing is better. All right, that's a wrap. You just learned how to prepare your business for uncertain times. Be sure to like this video and comment below. While you're there, make sure you subscribe to our channel and ring that bell to get these episodes first. This is The Journey. We'll see you in the next video.