Meet Me at the Dinner Table is one of five can’t-miss projects at this year’s Nocturne, a site-specific art festival that has things popping up all over Halifax from Oct. 13 to 15. Read more about the other Nocturne projects we’re most excited about here.
“Our main thing, our main agreement, is that we want desires to be at the forefront when we’re talking about these things,” begins Excel Garay, one of three artists behind the Nocturne project Meet Me at the Dinner Table. “I feel like, when we’re exploring diaspora communities, it’s very easy for our stories to be essentialist or to become tropes. I think desire is a really interesting way for folks to be able to relate to other people’s context. It’s a way for other people to connect and relate. And all of these things many communities face [are] very real. And talking about desires or how those desires exist or are not met because of certain obstacles? It’s a way for other people to relate and put themselves into their shoes.”
Garay—along with artists Stephanie Yee and Joni Cheung—isn’t just putting viewers into other’s shoes, though: They are also offering a seat at the hyperreal dining table of a group of unseen others—a work that brings famous installation artist Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party to mind. At Garay, Yee and Cheung’s invisible feast, though, a set table is the stage for a sound installation (located at The Khyber Centre for the Arts) made from interviews with family members. The effect? Each voice has an unobstructed chance to speak about, as their joint artists’ statement puts it, “the complicated detached memories of diasporic communities from their food systems due to effects of migration, ecological shifts in food production, or recipes lost in time.” (The installation is on view at The Khyber from noon to 7pm Oct. 13 and 14 and from 6pm-midnight Oct 15.)
“I think originally what we had in mind was to share all kinds of cuisines—and specific traditional cuisines to everybody,” Garay adds. “But we decided to talk about the lack, because that is something that we’re missing in our various contexts and frameworks… For example, in the Philippines, we have a lot of tropical ingredients and some of those ingredients are just not available for use in North America. So, we decided to focus on the lack instead… And that’s probably part of the reason why we quoted Ocean Vuong’s quote [in our artists’ statement]: Ocean Vuong said something along the lines [of] ‘Is that what art is? To be touched, thinking what we feel is our own, when it’s someone else in longing, who finds us?’
“So in a way, because many diasporic communities have a sense of longing, and there’s also that lack, we thought it was an entry point for people to relate to.”
This article appears in Oct 1 – Nov 6, 2022.