A 10 year lemonade stand

Hello Renee,

Thank you for your thoughts. To answer your questions:
The conceptual keywords behind the lemonade stand are long term commitment, platform to interact, building trust, exposure and space for opportunity. We consider the lot at meadow street as our temporary studio. The lemonade stand is our first mark on that green and otherwise empty space. And it will stay like this, until someone from Larimer comes by and changes this situation – makes an improvement, propose a different route, adds to the setup, etc. Then we have a start – a dialog that evolves out of self-motivation.
Our way of reaching out to other people is not going from door to door talking to people, making phone calls, attending meetings or writing emails. We are terrible at this. We reach out by exposing ourselves in a foreign context physically. We sit there and wait until someone sees an opportunity to do something with this situation, take advantage of it (in a hopefully positive way). We might be seen as intruders and occupiers staking out a new frontier, but we might also be seen as people who are stranded in a foreign situation who need help.
We proposed a 10 year run of the lemonade stand based on our experience from last year. Even though the stand proved to be successful as a point of interaction with people from the neighborhood, “business” was very slow. And we deeply respect that slowness, believe that the project depends on that slowness, if we want to allow anything to grow in between that huge gap that culturally separates us from the majority of the people who live in Larimer. To be a stranger is one thing, to be a member of a race the majority of the locals have a conflicted history with exposes barriers that need even more time to be dealt with.
You are right when you think of a nine-year lemonade stand as an ability to mark what changes in the community by contrasting it with a constant (the stand).  And yes, as we did in other projects we’ll document the process of this experiment. Last year it wasn’t the time yet to shoot any video or take a lot of pictures yet – since that is a very aggressive way to approach a location. We rather took a lot of notes. And, when we told a woman who teaches at the community center at the end of our lemonade stand week that we didn’t take any video and only a few pictures she replied: “Thank you for respecting us in that way.”
We have no idea, into what the lemonade stand will turn into over the years. We just know that it won’t be the same 10 years from now. May be it will look the same, but we might have a long line of people waiting because it’s so popular. There might be rows of benches and chairs for people who like to hang out. May be the mayor of Pittsburgh comes by every afternoon to get his lemonade there. He might land with a helicopter – why would we otherwise occupy such a huge space for such a small stand? It’s a heliport in the back for the celebrities that like our lemonade.
The goal of the lemonade stand is to become a place where there wasn’t one before. A place one goes to have a different experience. A place people from Larimer will be able to experience “the difference” in the same way as people from the rest of Pittsburgh.
In our notes from last summer we described how “different” it felt to be there – at that place, in that neighborhood in a green meadow sipping iced coffee.
And here we hope we can make the connections… and for example use you and the public art fund as a great resource for networking. How about you organize a tour for people interested in public art to come out to the lemonade stand? A bus with tourists will probably draw even more local attention than the police car that stopped last year. A newspaper report about the lemonade stand, or something on the radio could probably be helpful to get local people interested. And once they feel there is an interest from the outside, we are sure –  the people from Larimer will unpack – start mixing their idea of culture with ours in the most unique ways.
As for the Kingsley Center – that’s a hard question. We understand their involvement for funding purposes and we like the people who work there. We are happy with the relationships we have build there last year. But based on our experiences from last year we realized that the mode in which the Kingsley works is institutionalized, which is its nature by default, because it is an institution.
The 10 year process we anticipate with this project is very fragile and depends on a lot of intuition, inexplicable actions, and on a huge amount of flexibility. An institution can’t work like this, an artist can – and in order to produce a successful project we need that kind of artistic freedom. So if we there are other ways of funding, we would like to go this way.
This is not to say, that we don’t want to work together with the Kingsley Center, we just don’t want to depend on them – on their approval or permission to do things. We experienced the Kingsley Center as a great resource for practical support and as such they are invaluable – for the community in Larimer (as they were for us as well). But making an art project is not a practical endeavor – it’s highly impractical – and it has to be carried out as such to be able to transcend beyond being some ice cubes and organic lemonade in a plastic cup for $1.

A 10 year commitment is a huge step for us in our artistic practice. We never proposed something like that and it’s somewhat scary, therefore we need a proper start to do it in a professional way.
Since this is not something we set out to do ourselves, and the proposal is shaped by the institutions and people who invited us, we think funding must be a given.
The Larimer project is not a hobby we have been pursuing on the side and we don’t want it to turn into one, because we don’t know where else to spend our summer vacationsJ. And we are not in a rush. We can start “counting” next August and do a 10 year run from then on.
Last year we did not have a concrete proposal. Things were still very vague. Now we have something we can put into writing – backed up by a test run we did last year. The foundation might be a good source, from what you describe and we would be very much interested in a meeting. We can also brainstorm about other grants and possibilities, invest into that side of the process from our side as well.
How does that all sound to you?

We hope all is good with you.
It has been a real pleasure to work with you on this and we hope, we can continue, even though the road is long and windy .

Hajoe and Franzy
eteam