Nicolás Dumit Estévez / An Interview at MacDowell

Pleased to Meet You

Commonly ascribed reasons for personal relocations did not apply to my decision to leave my home in the South Bronx for a small town in New Hampshire. Invited by the MacDowell as part of its Centennial Celebration, I was to move to Peterborough in the fall of 2007. My intent was to meet every inhabitant in my new place of residence. This meant connecting with a population of over 6000 during a period of two months. 100 encounters per day would bring me to a number close enough to the total sum of people in this New England community. The plan was to invite the staff at MacDowell to help me forge the first contacts, and to ask those I then met to introduce me to others. These in return would continue to widen the scope of this social intervention by maintaining the ripple effect required for its sustenance. I envisioned opening up a space where interactions between the locals and the newcomer (me) would coexist, but made no predictions as to its day-to-day outcome. Pleased to Meet You was inserted into life itself. Anything was certainly possible. Encounters were to be documented through snapshots I took and by photographs contributed by those I met. At the end of the two months, these materials were going to be assembled into a collective photo album of Peterborough.

Nicolás Dumit Estévez, 2007

Can you talk a bit about the broad conceptual ideas you are trying to get at with this project in terms of cultural/community identity?

Nicolás Dumit Estévez: For close to a decade I have been invested in the presentation of performances and actions that involve audience participation, and for which collaboration is vital to the development of the work. Pleased to Meet You, is a public intervention that was born out of my strong commitment to art in everyday life; moreover, to my keen interest in bringing art out of the traditional gallery context. Pleased to Meet You is an experience that opens up a space for a series of exchanges between me and the town’s inhabitants. In addition, it deals with the accelerated process of social-cultural integration that I, as a newcomer, undergo in order to become a resident of the place to which I relocate, even if for a brief period of time. The core of the action rests on the premise that one way or another, all of us share some commonalities. But where can a Lebanese-Dominican – who became a Dominican York after emigrating to New York from the Dominican Republic almost twenty years ago, and who now considers himself a Bronxite – find a meeting point with a life-long resident of New England? In the weeks following my arrival, locals searched for a common denominator between themselves and the newcomer from a Spanish-speaking island. And so their Dominican friends and relatives emerged out of the Nordic Peterborough landscape. I, on my part, recall talking to a family native to the area about climbing Mount Monadnock over a dinner of mounds of rice and beans that they had prepared for me.

Can you talk about the different things you may have learned when you instituted this idea/project in Calaf, Spain, versus the different things you may have learned when you instituted it here in Peterborough?

NDE: In the spring of 2007, with the support of IDENSITAT I relocated from the South Bronx to Calaf, a town of 3,500 or so inhabitants, one hour from Barcelona, with the purpose of meeting everyone in the town. This gave me a good basis to then move to Peterborough in the fall of 2007 to undertake a similar project. In Calaf I learned the importance of reaching out to people through organizations, and became aware of the efficacy that these neutral spaces provided for the encounters that I was looking to forge. It became evident to me through trial and error that I needed to allow people enough time to absorb the intervention at a purely visual level. My presence in town indeed altered the rhythm of a place where most people have known each other for generations. I should also add that the perception that locals had of themselves was that of being “closed.” This is an adjective that I eventually replaced with “deliberate,” implying Calafins’ ability to put things in perspective before formulating a response.

Peterborough was in many aspects similar to Calaf, yet different enough to make me reconsider some of the experiences of my previous relocation. In New England I was at once closer and further away from home; whatever home meant. It was obvious to people that English was not my mother tongue, and therefore Pleased to Meet You had to deal with an additional layer: the insertion of the newcomer into a territory broader than the one he had initially envisioned: the USA. Searching for a perfect Christmas tree as part of a family’s annual ritual followed a breakfast of pancakes topped with yogurt. Neutral and private spaces opened up quickly. Residents tried with remarkable dedication to make me understand and be a participant in the daily aspects of life in “Our Town.”

How did you come up with the concept for this project, and what were you trying to accomplish/say/demonstrate with it?

NDE: Please to Meet You is part of the steady progression of relocating my artistic practice into a borderless territory, one in which art is not confined to the traditional white cube of the gallery but coexists with life. Prior to this intervention I had been engaged in similar experiences. For example, in 2004-05 I presented Help Offered, for which I provided my services free of charge to small-scale independent businesses in Queens, NY; and in Kitchener, Canada. I worked in close proximity with the owners and/or employees, performing a variety of tasks that met the needs of the establishments, bringing purely utilitarian actions to the realm of performance. “Why was I doing this?” was then and is now a prevalent question of those who come in contact with these experiences. Pleased to Meet You underscored the everyday with the simplicity of a reader, pencil in hand, highlighting the most compelling parts of the text.

Did you uncover anything surprising in your efforts to meet everyone in Peterborough?

NDE: In the weeks following my arrival, Peterborough and I became gradually familiar. The man who attended most political meetings, went to the various weekly religious services, and tried to make it to every public event held downtown was no longer news. Several weeks had passed since the Ledger Transcript had covered the story on its front pages. Peterborough, on the other hand, continued to reveal itself afresh with unfailing regularity. To my surprise, I couldn’t keep up with the town’s full agenda: firefighters’ open house, comedy night at the public library, the monthly havurah of a group of Jewish citizens to celebrate their faith, choir rehearsals at the Unitarian Church – all of these were only a few of the things going on. National political figures came in and out of town with the informality of a close relative. I heard Giuliani speak on gun ownership and support of the war. I missed John Edwards through my own error as to the time he was to speak.

I believe you ended up altering your original goal of meeting everyone in Peterborough to include meeting people from the surrounding communities as well, due the connectedness of the people in the region, correct? If so, can you talk about why this change came about and what it meant in terms of your project?

NDE: I often talk about life taking art on unexpected detours. Pleased to Meet You was no exception to this. I had in fact foreseen that the perimeters of the intervention had to be somewhat flexible, meaning that the experience was going to end up expanding into nearby towns. Peterborough, with its role as the cultural epicenter for the region, corroborated this statement. Limiting the scope of Pleased to Meet You to its immediate geographical area would, if anything, have rendered a cropped image instead of a faithful view of the town.

This interview was originally published in MacDowell’s newsletter in 2007