My Pizza, My Idea!

601Artspace, 88 Eldridge St.
Aug 17-20, 12-6pm

From August 17 – 20th, Donna Oblongata & Patrick Costello will bring their conceptual pizza business, My Pizza, My Idea! to 601Artspace. My Pizza, My Idea! gives participants the opportunity to make a pizza themselves, fire it in the artists’ hand-built mobile pizza kitchen, and silkscreen their own pizza box. However, you don’t get to eat the fruits of your labor; you have to give them away. Once you’ve made your pizza, you decide who you want to send it to, and a uniformed delivery person takes it to its final destination (anywhere in NYC except Staten Island.)

Using locally sourced ingredients, this project makes visible the ways that we nourish ourselves and each other. We make things by hand. We engage in tangible creation—dough, cheese, ink, cardboard. We imagine who could benefit from something we have to offer. We surprise and delight each other and feel how those fuzzy feelings created by generosity bounce right back to us.

My Pizza, My Idea! is a playful jab at the culture of convenience and on-demand-ness we’re living amongst. After all, what is less convenient than making a meal by hand and then not getting to eat it? For Oblongata and Costello, the project highlights questions around the availability of food and convenience at this moment in time, and the premium we’re willing to pay to have everything on demand—as well as what’s actually lost in a culture that gives primacy to that. Surprise and real-life interactions are important and precious, especially within an urban context. And that gets lost in a culture where surprise is sacrificed in the name of commerce.

Image: Patrick Costello and Ben Simon