The Conch Girl Project In Fort Collins

Sidian Liu moved to New York City in 2021 from China. Dealing with her sense of displacement, she started The Conch Girl Project in 2022: she asks strangers to let her use their kitchens in solitude. In return, she cooks them a meal. She asks for the least amount of face-to-face contact during the kitchen visit. After the visit, the resulting photos and the kitchen owners’ responses, will later be printed large and wheat-pasted on the green construction boards on the New York City streets. The street publication is both a presentation and an open call that invites future collaboration.

The least-amount-of-in-person-contact rule orchestrated in the project resonates with the various barriers that a newcomer faces when they migrate, and provides a spatial distance that enables emotional solidarity between strangers. In Strangers to Ourselves, Julia Kristeva argues that we must recognize the foreigner within ourselves, while stating that a foreigner is an uncanny strangeness we see in ourselves and thus in others as well. Following Kristeva’s notion, The Conch Girl Project enacts this separation with each situation (visit), simulating the social hardship from settling-and-adapting and the uncanny strangeness of the kitchen owner and myself. A respectful boundary is consequently formed, brewing a sense of intimacy similar to Bauman’s love for neighbors: loving oneself in others and respecting each others’ uniqueness.

Through wheat-pasting the kitchen photos on the New York City’s construction board, The Conch Girl Project also connects with the practice of Public Art. The street publications present  images of kitchen interiors, a young woman’s self-portraits, a slogan-like sentence “May I use your kitchen?” and a QR code, resembling advertisements ubiquitous on New York City streets. However, this publication, which serves as both an open call and presentation of the project, does not sell anything. In sharing the private domestic space in the public, and presenting the correspondence between the kitchen owner and the kitchen borrower, the street publications function as activism posters that ask people to stop, take a look, and rethink the relationships between fellow strangers, neighbors, and one another whom we rely on. Beginning with the desire to quench the thirst of an individual’s survival and desire for familial care, The Conch Girl Project developed into a humble gesture of “care-ful society,” a feminist notion inspired by non-patriarchal social structures and often cited in iLiana Fokianaki’s writings.

With the support of the 2024 Denis Roussel Fellowship, organized by the Center for Fine Art Photography, Sidian Liu traveled to Fort Collins for a week in September 2024. The resulting photos and recipes culminate into this exhibition.