To Sanjit Sethi

Sanjit Sethi
Santa Fe, USA

San Francisco, USA
11 October 2014

Hi Sanjit

Obama made me miss my flight. SFO was closed to allow Airforce One to land. I’ll have to find another opportunity to visit you and Cristin and the kids in Santa Fe.

And I want to know about the scene there — especially from your point of view, as someone with a background in Community Arts. Never having been to Santa Fe, I can only imagine it as Aspen-in-the-desert. I met Irene Hofmann in Liverpool last week. She was invited there for the discussions taking place this week about — among other things — the relationship between biennials and their locations. When I heard that SITElines was adopting a geographic region, ‘the Americas’, as a defining scope of inquiry, I wondered about the viability of that, partly, I guess, due to having worked on the Mercosul Biennial last year, which seems to be moving away from the regionalism, ‘South America’, that had defined it.

In our wider discussions last week about what the Liverpool Biennial could be and do, the example of 100 Families Oakland came up — that must seem a long time ago now. There’s a lot of focus here on the conditions of residential life, and the relation of the Biennial to that. Someone wondered whether artists could be hosted by Liverpool families — applying the funds for artists’ accommodation to support the residential communities, and facilitating that experience where, though cohabitation, one adapts to others’ ways of living.

Love to the family

D