July 1st Conversation and Dinner with Cultural Researchers in Silver City

Silver City residents are invited to a potluck dinner with the current guests at the Resident Artist Program in Silver City on Saturday, July 1.

An introduction to cultural researchers Sue Mark and Bruce Douglas of Marksearch, and their son Roli, begins at 5pm at the Silver City School House with a slide show and brief videos about some of their recent work in Japan and Portugal as well as in Alabama and California.

After the slide show, they’ll describe ideas they have for projects in partnership with Silver City residents, and welcome input. Their talk will be followed by a community potluck and a chance to chat with them further.

Potluck Dishes: A main dish of spaghetti will be provided. Attendees are encouraged to bring side dishes such as green salads and breads.

Stories About Stories: Sue Mark and Bruce Douglas explain that, “honoring the spirit of Silver City’s monthly soup potlucks, we would love to share stories with you about our creative practice over a communal meal.

For many years, even before there was the art-world term ‘social practice’, our projects have relied on conversations with people in parks, at farmers markets, in libraries, at bus stops and on the street. Our creative practice exists under the umbrella of interdisciplinary visual arts, but the manifestations of our practice rarely look like anything you would typically find in a museum or gallery.

While we are interested in history and architecture, our work is not scientific or academic. People’s stories fascinate us.

Please join us as we recollect some of our experiences collaboratively generating work and research in nearby and far-away places including our home in Oakland, rural Alabama, Portugal, and Japan. Through images and videos, we’ll give you insight into our process.

We’re looking forward to learning from you and are excited to talk about some of our initial ideas for a Silver City storytelling platform.”

About Sue and Bruce: The Marksearch team (Sue Mark + Bruce Douglas) focuses on place-based cultural preservation and social memory. Their performance-based projects explore intersections of lost history and cultural complexities. As conversation artists, they engage people in collaborative expressions of local stories to expose and deepen multifaceted bonds between people and their environment. Their participant-driven projects craft a much-needed conversational commons.

Their methodology synthesizes their academic backgrounds. Bruce Douglas is a fabricator and professional mechanical engineer who has meshed his values of building community and using recycled materials to build things such as functional, quirky human-powered vehicles. Sue Mark, with a BA in philosophy and linguistics and an MFA from the California College of the Arts, creates national and international projects about local history, culture and community challenges.

Since 2000, Marksearch has collaborated with non-profits, community groups, students, historians, urban planners, and municipalities worldwide, designing interactive projects for empowerment and preservation.

For instance, a 2016 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) fellowship helped them to research cultural preservation strategies in Japan. Their 6 month residency in Kanazawa, Japan included studying the traditional architecture in Kanazawa such as the Machiya, townhouses from the Edo period (1603-1867). In a completely different sort of project, in 2013 Marksearch researched the disappearance of handicraft and agricultural practices in a region of Portugal comprising 26 villages.

They created portraits of traditional makers of baskets, shoes, olive oil, bread, wine, tools, and more. These portraits, permanently installed in each of the region's 26 villages, now form a new regional cultural landmark. Other Marksearch explorations have been presented in the US and Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Germany, Norway, and Spain with support from California Humanities, Fulbright Commission, The National Trust for Historic Preservation, San Francisco Art Commission, and others. For more about their work, see marksearch.org.