((PKG)) INFLATABLE SHELTERS AND ENEMY FOOD ((Banner: A Creative, Helpful Life)) ((Executive Producer: Marsha James)) ((Camera: Kaveh Rezaei)) ((Editors: Kaveh Rezaei, Philip Alexiou)) ((Map: Chicago, Illinois)) ((Main characters: 1 male)) ((NATS/MUSIC)) ((Michael Rakowitz, Artist, Teacher, Chef)) I was always interested in whether art should do something, if it should do anything at all. And so, I went to art school to, more or less, assure myself and my parents that there would be a living, a kind of profession for me. And so, I did a residency in Jordan and I spent all my time studying the tents and the equipment of the Bedouin. ((Michael Rakowitz, Artist, Teacher, Chef)) The tents were set up differently every night in response to the way the wind patterns were moving through the desert. And when I got back to the United States that winter, back to Boston, I saw a homeless person sleeping underneath the vent of a building. And vent in French, you’d pronounce it ‘von’ and it means ‘wind’. I immediately saw myself harnessing the warm air that was leaving those buildings to create inflatable shelters for homeless people. And so, paraSITE is basically this project that’s gone on for 20 years now where I’ve been custom building those inflatable shelters for homeless people around the world. And it responds to not only the needs of each homeless person but the desires. ((NATS)) ((Michael Rakowitz, Artist, Teacher, Chef)) Each time I build the shelter, there’s a relationship that emerges between me and the different homeless people that I design for. But then it also becomes a real, sort of, record of how people end up on the streets and why they end up on the streets and now I tend to publish this step-by-step instructions on how to build a shelter. So, it puts the skill sets into the community that would use the shelter and also allows for the critical dialogue to not only happen in the art or the architectural world but to actually happen among the people that would actually be using it. ((NATS)) ((Michael Rakowitz, Artist, Teacher, Chef)) I grew up on Great Neck, Long Island in my grandparents’ house for the most part with my parents who were living there as well. And my grandparents were Jews who left Iraq in 1946 and came to the United States. And so, I grew up in a community that had a lot of, kind of, diverse representation of Jewish culture. So, there were a lot of Ashkenazi Jews of Eastern European descent. ((Michael Rakowitz, Artist, Teacher, Chef)) But I grew up in this house where all of the Jewish food was dishes like Aruk and Mhasha, dishes that came from Iraq but I associated them with a certain kind of Jewish upbringing that for me was what I would come to know as being very much a part of Arab culture and not something that was steeped in, what one would think, is New York Jewish traditions. ((NATS)) ((Michael Rakowitz, Artist, Teacher, Chef)) I was 16 years old when Iraq invaded Kuwait. It was on the evening of the first air strikes when my mother saw my brothers and I watching the green tinted CNN images. And she said, “You know, there is no Iraqi restaurants in New York.” What she was telling me was that there was no Iraqi culture beyond oil and war that was visible in the United States. I remember approaching my mother and saying that we should do something and that something was something as simple as teaching her Iraqi recipes as a form of resistance to this culture of war. It started out as workshops that we taught to different New York City public audiences. In Chicago, Enemy Kitchen has evolved to become a food truck. ((NATS)) ((Michael Rakowitz, Artist, Teacher, Chef)) This idea that we have, not weapons of mass destruction but weapons of mass deliciousness, traveling through the city in this truck, but then the staffing of the truck. There were Iraqi refugees who were the chief chefs and American combat veterans who had come back from the war that were the sous chefs and the servers. ((NATS/MUSIC)) ((Michael Rakowitz, Artist, Teacher, Chef)) So, these fists that were holding weapons on the other side of the world, are now here and they’re making kebab. And so, you’re taking in that kind of sculptural void as a sort of communion. ((NATS/MUSIC)) ((Michael Rakowitz, Artist, Teacher, Chef)) You know, I think every day the way that my work hasn’t necessarily been washed away by cynicism yet. I don’t want to leave that burden only to a younger generation. For as long as I’m here, I want to believe that there is something that can be done. ((MUSIC))