Helping their human garden grow
Unusual effort tries to show hidden ties
Warning: By reading this article, you may be participating in a social experiment.
So goes the general sensibility of the yearlong project, ''Sifting the Inner Belt," which is examining life in the South End, with the help of gardeners, a nail salon, restaurants -- and maybe even you, the passerby.
Playing the parts of historians, sociologists, and community organizers, with a sprinkling of kindly neighbors thrown in, a group of seven artists and community activists is trying to spur conversation among area residents who seldom interact.
An exhibit on display in the Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts through this month provides an overview of the project.
Begun as a way of exploring the relationship between the Berkeley Street community gardens and the Boston Center for the Arts in the South End, the project's roots go back about four years.
Performance artist Hiroko Kikuchi, 32, a native of Tokyo, and her husband, Jeremy Liu, who works in Chinatown on housing and other community development issues, had just met when they began chatting about how they could blend their respective fields.
Borrowing from Kikuchi's views of art as a process, the two set out to do social research, unencumbered by traditional notions of how things should be done. The idea is ''to explore how what goes on in the South End is interdependent," said Liu, 33. ''We don't have findings, per se."
They and their colleagues came up with five mini-projects, including putting a nail salon in the gallery two evenings a week; making photo nametags to help gardeners become better acquainted; creating a ''pointing pictionary" in English, Spanish, and Chinese, a prototype of which is on display in the gallery and will be published in a booklet later; and enlisting South End restaurants to make dishes for ''Bitter Melon Week" July 22 to 30.
The group also has held monthly ''bridging performances" since December (July 1 was the last) centered around a single word, often gardening-related, like ''fallow," ''sprout," or ''shade." For Kikuchi, gardening provided a rich set of metaphors to dig into -- planting seeds, nurturing, life and death, and even weeds.
''Weed is so much about the South End too. You can't pinpoint what weeds are. It could be anything," Kikuchi said.
Other word displays relate to the project's title, the idea of sifting through layers of information to understand a neighborhood where housing was torn down to make way for an ''inner belt" highway, in the name of ''urban renewal."
Explaining the project to Asian gardeners or to business owners wasn't easy, due to language and cultural barriers, said artist Jeremy Chu, a Singapore native and South End resident.
Chu said he found himself pulled into the micro-dramas of the neighborhood, as he tried to meet and understand gardeners -- and sometimes mediate among them.
''How do you settle different ideas of what a garden should be for people of different backgrounds, different histories, who for different reasons moved to [the] South End, and for different economic reasons have a garden? How do we respect, value, and treasure those ideas of what a garden should be? How do we come to a common place?" he asked.
In another project last September, the group set up a tasting booth and camera, recruiting bystanders to participate in exploring ''the idea [that] people are more similar than different," Liu said. Some were given a bit of bitter melon; others honeydew.
''There's my sister," exclaimed Patricia Yurkins, 38, of Cambridge, as she studied two video monitors one Friday evening at the back of the gallery, trying unsuccessfully to spot footage of herself.
A few minutes later, she stood next to the display where gallery visitors are asked to write instructions in felt pen on a plywood board on how to perform the word ''turn." ''I'm not sure I really understand the project," Yurkins said.
Somerville resident Cindy Person, 47, said the displays reminded her of bus rides she took as a teenager from Plymouth to Boston, riding through the South End and seeing Asian gardeners. ''The thought of seeing gardening in the city was very strange to me," she said.
Attending the exhibit's opening reception in June, Person had just missed getting a manicure. Yet, she said she was excited to have met the Vietnamese nail salon owner. ''I got to telling her that my brother, who's Caucasian, sings Vietnamese songs."
Recasting established behaviors and linking unlikely people was indeed a goal, the artists said.
Armed with microphone and laptop, in the somewhat intimate setting of a manicure, an artist interviews the manicur-ee on her [or his] stories.
''Three people who might not have met each other, ever, are coming together in a somewhat strange situation," said Catherine D'Ignazio, a new media artist.
''It's somewhat intimate. You have someone nurturing you. . . . There's often a class difference or a language difference."
The overview exhibit is on display in the Mills Gallery at the Boston Center for the Arts, 539 Tremont St. through July 31. For more information, see www.siftingtheinnerbelt.com. 