Documents from: Occupy Yr. Home

While we plan on hosting many meals over the course of OYH the conversations over meals and the ideas generated from them will be greatly enhanced if the table spreads and the guests at that table grow in number exponentially.

With that in mind we are very excited by the idea of others hosting their own meals and providing us with documentation of the going’s on, and most importantly the conversations and ideas generated during the night.

So, a few thoughts on how to proceed with your own OYH meal:

• Consider the description of what OYH is after in terms of the conversations to take place over meals at the table. In what ways might we consider our life at home as the most elemental and productive space to contemplate our political consciousness and the relationships that form out of that consciousness, from the table and out into the streets?

• Invite some friends and strangers over to eat. While big meals are great, they’re not always the most conducive means towards generating the productive and agile conversations. Invite people who you know are already considering these ideas, or people who you think might be interested in exploring them if they have not already begun to do so.

• Plan on how you’d like to document your meal. While having audio recorders, cameras, and the like around during a private gathering can be a little off putting to some it’s important to recognize that the table, in this circumstance, serves as the temporary creation of a public space for discourse. The idea is to make the dialogue at the table as visible as possible to further along the conversation and allow each conversation from each meal to accumulate and form new considerations between them. The accumulation of the ideas and questions generated from these meals will be served all the more by considering the table a public space and the conversation around the table public speech.

• Eat  and drink well! Enjoy yourself. While these are “serious” topics, it’s important to celebrate the moment as somewhat rare, a moment of repose to enjoy and consider the here, now, and soon-t0-be.

• Once the meal is finished collect the documentation you compiled and send it all to us. Provide us with whatever contextual commentary you’d like to add and we’ll post it right away to the OYH website. Having photos, audio, and a direct transcriptions of the conversations from the meal is great. If it is possible to transcribe the audio before you get it to us we would greatly appreciate it. We’re going to have a lot of conversations to work on and we can use all the help we can get.

• Lastly… if you’d like we have these great OYH broadsheets that help explain the project while also serving as placemats for the meals. The placemats contain a fair amount of space for dinner guests to jot down notes while talking, as well as mark off who they are, where the meal took place, and when. If you would like some of these just let us know and we’ll mail them to you. We’re very excited about seeing these placemats, the notes, and wine and food stains which they accumulate collected over time and mined for use.