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Paper short abstract:

East End Jam is a social practice artwork celebrating the unexpected fruitfulness of the urban environment. In this paper we argue that the project's outputs can be read as multi-sensory maps created through collaborative processes of participatory cartography.

Paper long abstract:

The jam made as part of East End Jam is an edible map of a London neighbourhood. The map is created in a collaborative process by the participants who walk, forage, pick, prepare and preserve the fruit. In this paper we will invite delegates to eat this map*, created in and of streets surrounding the Wilton Estate in London Fields, E8.

East End Jam engages groups of participants with the unusual activity of urban foraging. As an artwork it operates using real world activities to generate interactions between people and places. Foraging, picking and cooking engage multiple senses; we look up high for fruit in trees; we feel the scratch of a bramble as we lean into the bushes; we taste as we gather - sharp shock of the mahonia berry; we smell the apples before we see them - fallen in a carpet across the path.

Foraging changes the way an individual interacts with their environment. It functions in space/time generating new key features in a mind map of the local environment from which to navigate, describe and make sense of a place. Exploring the city through this lens of wild food, fruit, and edible plants is political and activist. It disrupts the binary thinking that cities are opposite to nature and generates new ways of visiting, being in, and living in a place.

As the conference will now be online we can post delegates preserves to taste during the talk (at cost). Please contact c.qualmann@uel.ac.uk to arrange.