 The Conflict Kitchen developed with Dawn Waleski, who's my partner in the project. She now lives in California, but she was working with me and we have our, the side of our Waffle Shop has its own little storefront, and that's where our kitchen is. And literally we were challenged by the hip hop restaurant, he had a hot dog guy selling food outside and he said, and I was like, you know, that's preventing people from coming in our Waffle Shop. You do the booze, we do the food, he's like, come on man, you're a fake business, why don't you compete? So I was like, that's it, you laid it down, we're going to compete. And we decided we'll open a restaurant, but obviously we're not going to sell waffles because that's the thing that brings people in for the show. What would we do if we could create a takeout restaurant in Pittsburgh? And we started off with what was missing from Pittsburgh and all the things I described originally. And so how can we be all of those things at once? How can we, every restaurant that's never existed, how can we be a center for political discussion? How can we create presence for cultures and ethnic groups that no one's paying attention to or that have small populations within our city? And how can we do it in a way that's really truly engaging? So we created the Conflict Kitchen. Essentially what you're looking at is a facade that's just stuck onto the building. We got around any permitting because it sits off the ground a little bit. So if you wear on the ground, you've got to get a permit. If you go out into the public right away a certain amount of space, you've got to get a permit. Everything unfolds or folds out and then folds down. And basically we're running two restaurants out of one kitchen. So we're competing with ourselves, which again is like an irrational business strategy. The other strategy, I mean a lot of people, it's funny because we were talking now that it's kind of moved through the internet. There's like a Russian social entrepreneurship group that has approached us several times about like, can you present to our social entrepreneur group in Russian? I'm like, we stumbled upon the whole strategy. When we presented this to people, no one liked the idea. No one wanted to give us any money because you're going to sell food that has no market in Pittsburgh. It's not a pizza joint. It's not, you know, whatever. You're going to ask people to talk about politics with strangers in the public space. Americans hate that. And as soon as someone gets used to it, you're going to go out of business and change to another restaurant that does the same thing. So there are like three bad business model ideas which have all turned out to be good business model ideas. And maybe if we weren't artists, if we were entrepreneurs, we would never have gotten to this point. So the very first version was an Iranian one. Obviously the visuals are really quite important, right? It has to be striking. It has to get people. We want it to be anomalous to the landscape, to the visual landscape of the city. We also want to privilege the Farsi over the English. We were the only Persian restaurant the city has had. We worked with local Iranians, as well as folks in Iran. I have many friends I've developed over the years in other projects who were living in Iran. You know, the impetus at the time, which was almost four years ago, was looking at the rhetoric within media that was very similar to the buildup to the Iraq war, right? Being made. And a very simplified discourse was being put out. And I have friends there where the discourse is complicated. I mean, if we all talked about even Obama at this moment, none of us would agree exactly, right? It's not about simplification. We were thinking, can we create a place that actually complicates people's perspective? And can we sell really, really good food as the seduction towards that? It's just, can we bypass ideology with just hunger? And can we engage people on a daily basis, and, you know, can we not just be a fly-by-night pop-up? We're not a pop-up. We're a restaurant that's been in the city for three years. We were a pop-up the first week, and the first month we became less of a pop-up. This pop-up kind of thing to me sometimes is kind of irritating, because it implies a lack of real depth and commitment. And it implies also that we know what we're doing, and we're going to pop-up and tell it to you. What we're doing is we're creating a space for coeducation, co-learning between ourselves and everyone else who comes to us in the city. And to do that, you've got to be around. You have to have a call-and-response system, not just an iterative system. So the idea was, let's use the food. This has the food also be a mechanism for carrying information, right? So obviously food is an incredible storytelling device in and of itself. The food comes wrapped in interviews that we did with Iranians, again, on a variety of cultural and political topics, often contradicting each other, as we are like to do. Folks who've never had Persian food, you know, might just think, oh, this is kind of like a weird cuisine, and that could be a great way to start. But then they might think, oh, what does this relate to the culture and cuisines of either my community or my city? This space, the space that opens up when you're waiting, when you're ordering, right? This is kind of the same performative space as the talk show in some capacity, a little bit more open-ended, but also more focused in terms of the nature of the conversation. Our idea was to be disruptive, to not, to have people come with a question, like how do you get people to come with a question, to create a space of curiosity that they're initially like, what is this place? It looks weird to me. And then fill that space. That's a really fertile environment, right? That curiosity, and too much curiosity, total befuddlement, you don't get anything. And if it's too normal, you have no one caring. That space doesn't get opened up. So when that space gets opened up, it gets filled by our staff who are really just expert conversationalists. They're not experts on any one of the given topics. They're cultural junkies. They're political junkies. They're following the information. But they're just trying to catalyze that moment between them and the customer. And to me, the worst thing is you can just sort of spout your own ideologies and shut down a conversation. So this is our Afghan version of the project. After about five or six months, we switch. This is the Venezuelan version. This is a recent trip to Cuba, where now we have a full-time chef who's amazing, cooking in homes, cooking in local restaurants, interviewing folks. I won't go into great depth. This is the North Korean embassy. So we knew we wanted to do a North Korean version. This was the closest we could get. We rang the doorbell, literally. And Atache came out, talked to us for 45 minutes. I'll go over that a little bit later. So we open the Cuban version of the project. So the food is one level. There's also projects and events that we do. So we take a table like this. We take a much larger projection screen. On the screen is a space in Tehran. So it's a Pittsburgh Tehran dinner party in which, on their side, they're eating. They've pushed their table up against the space. And essentially, we're sharing this another version of the meal. This is in Pittsburgh. This is in Tehran. We're all cooking the same Persian recipes. Ironically, we made our small from scratch. And my friends are bought it all at the store. A lot of canned stuff, which was part of the conversation. At that time, the second time we did it, the sanctions, the second level of serious sanctions were in place to cook from scratch was actually more expensive than to buy from the store. Similar events we've done with Afghan filmmakers. We do cultural festivals. School groups are coming in. We've used the billboard as a way of catalyzing the conversation. The line was for us. That was our event. Yeah, so we had a paladar. So while we were down for a little bit looking for a new location, we basically just functioned out of someone's home. And then we've recently, a year ago, moved to probably the most central spot in the city, which is the Chenli Plaza. It's right between the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon, across from the Carnegie Main Library. And we've gone from having 30 to 50 people at the old location a day to having, during a summertime, we'd have 200 to 300 people. Changes the nature of what we do. And it's had to make us be more nimble about how we can actually engage with folks. What it's accelerated is our capacity. Number one, it's a full kitchen. We make a lot more food. We have this built-in audience of folks who are just hanging out during lunch every day. And we're open from 11 to 6. So that audience kind of changes. As a publishing venue, it's probably been the most remarkable thing. We've accidentally discovered that we're a great publishing venue. People really read the wrappers. They read, there's a North Korean cookbook. There's other materials that we hand out in that space you have during lunchtime to kind of put aside. Maybe you'll be on your phone, but you might read something. Actually works for us. So that's kind of one of the ways in which we storytell. And I know there's a Center for Rethinking Documentary here. And all of my work is fundamentally nonfiction. But it's very early on recognized how nonfiction is a completely constructed and playful genre. So in that realm, this is a project that we do called The Foreigner. So you come to eat. And we say, how would you like to have your Persian meal with Sourab? He's living in Iran right now. And you can have lunch with him around the corner through a human avatar, who is our employee, Elise. So Elise just sits around the corner. And in her headphones, she has Sourab live. Simple, right? Sourab is live. Anything Sourab says, she just automatically repeats. And the customer has a little microphone. So Sourab hears directly what the customer says. So Elise is basically this empty vessel. But she's also a hyper-local human body. She's someone you recognize. She's someone who looks familiar. She's someone you've seen in the window if you've come to the restaurant before. And this, to me, is the metaphor for the project in general. Number one, trying to create a simultaneity of place, of being here and there, of being us and them. And also, these stories that Sourab is telling, you can do it on Skype and talk to him directly. But how do you make people pay attention again? What actually makes things uncanny in life? So that, to me, the fundamental artistic impulse is to make what's familiar or unfamiliar so that we're in the present moment again. This, in some capacity, both takes you out of the present because you don't know where you're located, but also brings you into the present. And it complicates identity, which, you know, he's a man, she's a woman. Sometimes we have older people doing it, younger people. So these are just some customers. A lot of times I'll pilot and try these projects out in other cities. So I tried this out in Cleveland, in the public library and in the shopping mall. These are the human avatars for these Iranians throughout public space. So these happen in different ways where folks would just approach you and say, hey, you know, what's life like here right now? A totally confused person, you know, a fish out of water, that then slowly realize that they're not here, even though they seem to be here. We did a similar thing at the San Diego Museum in the Persian gallery where you meet, you're told to find this woman, who's a local, and she is an avatar for our friend Sourab who runs an art space in Tehran. So you're in a gallery filled with ancient Persian works and he's in a gallery of contemporary art. So you have the juxtaposition of the space, of the work and of the individual kind of happening. Another project that got piloted outside of the restaurant and brought back was Don and I were invited to be part of a biennial in Puerto Allegro, Brazil. So I'll walk you through the project. It happens in this main city square park, rather, and there's a lake. And so when you walk up to the lake, there's these signs that tell you that you can take free rides with Barack Obama or Hugo Chavez. And then there's a series of speeches that will happen over the next five weeks. As people line up to sign up to take these rides, which are swan boats, already pre-existing, we made our own version of the sign where you could take a free ride with Chavez or Obama. And then we hired... And then we hired actors... We hired actors who played Chavez or Obama. And very quickly, because this is a very huge project, Brazil you can see in terms of Venezuelan socialist policies have been very influential throughout Latin America, let alone Brazil. But the IMF is perhaps the most embedded partner Brazil has. So United States and Venezuela present very interesting polls, but also Chavez and Obama are these very romantic figures that people project their irrational hatred and love on, very polarizing. And so we thought, well, these will be great devices to elicit stories from the Brazilian public. So what happens is you're invited to take a ride and during the ride Obama, like a lover, would say, what do you think of me? After a little while, you know? And the public would say everything they really thought of him. And maybe they break up at the end or they fall in love, I don't know. And the same with Chavez. So he would come up, and the way they would work is they'd come up to you on the dock, like, would you like to take a ride? And this issue of seduction is something Catherine and I have talked about. How do you seduce people into something that's maybe didactic in some capacity or political or ideological or problematic? So you take the ride and he records what you're saying. So then those recordings are taken verbatim scripted. And the scripts become the speeches that the politicians give every afternoon. So here you can see on these floating platforms, there's Obama and there's Chavez. Throughout the park, there's speakers. So during the two to three hours that they're giving the speech, you'll come up to the park and you'll hear Chavez giving us, they're in Portuguese. Or you hear Obama in Portuguese giving a speech. Sometimes they overlap the speeches. And the speeches are filled with first person opinion. But the president embodies them. He presents them as if they're his viewpoints. And what you get is a politician who says what you want him to say, who's really self-critical or self-aggrandizing or actually factually incorrect about himself. Or actually a lot of things talk about Brazil. And via Obama, who's a very powerful individual. So the romance is then turned into politics, is turned into documentary, is turned into storytelling. So, both of these guys were in a play about Michael Jackson at the time. So okay, so we've done versions of this at Conflict Kitchen. We've done, and I've got stuff that can hand out, we published something called the Iranian speech. And the Iranian speech is a speech that's crowdsourced from Iranians. We asked Iranians, what would you like to hear Barack Obama say? Give us part of a speech, right? Part of a speech. Then we compile that speech and hire a local Barack Obama imitator to give the speech to the public that's just gathering outside of Conflict Kitchen. We've subsequently also done a Cuban speech, which I think we have some versions of here. So we've published the speech and then another version, in this time, we decided we could get a much larger audience through our social media, which has become pretty large at this point. So we hired the number one Barack Obama imitator in the world. Lives in LA. His name's Ron. He has this studio next, his kitchen is right behind the flag. And we gave him the speech and then we disseminated it through public media. I'll play a little bit. Nope, can we turn that up? Yeah, absolutely. That's okay. They're future generations. Will be rebuilt by its citizens? A country respected by the international community? Or will it be known as a country destroyed at the whim of the elite and powerful? We cannot remain silent for fear that we might be afraid of international men. The thoughts of actual Cubans. Across Cuba, a slogan is heard. Cuba will change if we want it to. We must support the people's will to change their country. I actually forget the last time I had anything to say about Cuba. We like to talk a lot about defending human rights. But then we have trade and have close ties to China and Vietnam and Russia. We have Cuba 90 miles from us and yet we have forgotten all about it. Americans, we care more about things that happen far away than close to our shore. I'll just jump around a little bit. Today, the United States reaches out a hand to your citizens, but they don't even see him. I really think they want to be capitalists at heart. There is a Cuban woman I know in Miami that never worked a day in her life and she gets Social Security. And that with Vietnam. And Vietnam is a communist country. We have even established negotiations with North Korea and now with Syria. And those are countries that have openly opposed and sometimes fought against the United States with public's lack of information with the aim of connecting citizens all over the world. The Cuban government has persecuted civil society. So you can see it's a schizophrenic speech. It's filled with pro and anti-Castro people for different types of policy. And there's a simple construct that we're using so that the voices don't become simplified. We want to get a debate out there. We want to, you know, it's sort of, people talk about metrics a lot. We're not really into metrics. We're into encouraging curiosity. Now, what we could say, how do we measure whether curiosity is being encouraged? As artists, I feel like I've got a good sense of we're engaging curiosity or not. And we're always trying to experiment. Like, is this interesting enough? Am I going to want to engage with it? So other byproducts of the, this is an individual project. I did the city of Columbus next to their state house. It's a live time and temperature from Tehran is played in Columbus. Again, this idea of simultaneity of space. We do something called the lunch hour. This is a local Syrian doctor who's been giving support to rebels in Syria. A way to, so now we have folks who come to us every day like, hey, you're going to do a Syrian version. Are you going to do an Egyptian version, a Czech version? And our chance to kind of move a little quicker is to have these weekly lunches. Our current version is focused around North Korea. Obviously this is the hardest one to research. I was in Shanghai, the closest I could get to North Korean is a state-run restaurant by the North Korean government. They actually have it in several countries, which is really like a Chuck E. Cheese meets Shangri-La version of North Korea. Incredibly bizarre and you can't really record anything. There's a stage show and the William Tell overture happens in the middle of it. It's really disturbing and disconcerting. But what we did was we actually, we are now working on a project with North Korean defectors in Anyang, which is a city south of Seoul. And our research was to go there initially to interview folks, to cook, to hang out with the defector community. To go into North Korea you can go, but it's a very controlled experience. So the recipes all come out of those direct experiences and they're brought back to our venues. Sometimes we've done an event, there's an event for 250 people where if you sit on the right side of the table, you're getting a South Korean dish. And if you sit on the left side, you're getting a North Korean dish. So there's the arbitrary differentiation and separation that's given. But you know, one of the things that you learn is that, you know, this is a, you know, Korea has been one Korea for thousands of years. The politics of 60 years doesn't really create a culinary separation. Although the politics of food in Korea is based on what is accessible. You know, so North Koreans are only eating meat, you know, two or three times a year. So we're by default a vegetarian restaurant at this time. One of the other events I was telling Griff about that we were doing, now that we're having this sort of international following is a cooking lesson. This is using kind of like Google Hangout. This is just Skype, like a premier account where you can get 10 videos up. And we have the North Korean chef that we've been working with is giving a lesson in Seoul to nine other people who are in different cities. And the way we do it is everyone, first you sign up for it, right? And if you're in Buenos Aires, we give you the recipe, the ingredients to shop for it. And that's one of the interesting challenge, right? It's to, you gotta get your local version of what you could find in North Korea. Even in Seoul, they have to get the local version of what they could find in North. And then we all cook together. And the greatest part was when we're all like grating potatoes, it's like an orchestra. So I'll show you, I think I have a little clip. So my name's John Rubin, and I'm the co-director. So everyone had to do something. And I want it to be never, a couple of times. So after introduction, we go into cooking. You put in the radishes in the stock and let it stay there for a month, while the water is quite boiling, so you might want to keep your fire up, okay? And then you want to mix them together. Okay, yours look great too. Thank you. So this is how our pancakes look like. So that is what, how are these things, and then they are where people can start cooking. And then we just sit down and eat, have a conversation together. One of the nice things about this, as you guys sit here involved in technology, I'm sure you've done a lot of Skype. You know, Skype is tough when you have a group, there's one person at a time. This, because everyone is doing an action, you know, and you're not just sort of like all paying attention, you can, the conversation was much more organic and casual. So someone's like, soy sauce, do you, you know, is there a specific way in which you use soy sauce or do you not use soy sauce? Is it fish sauce and soy sauce? And you're kind of just asking a functional question within your recipe that then oftentimes organically flows into perhaps even a political question. So I'm gonna end with, I added these. So just to talk about this bizarre way in which the project has hit a kind of cultural zeitgeist and the portals in which people enter or become aware of it. The biggest one is through the food, is through the kind of foodie movement that's going on. And I can't say I'm barely a foodie. Griff's a foodie. We hire people who are really amazing foodies. But the second one would be actually through tourism. Forgot to mention that. So we've become a tourist destination. Visit Pittsburgh, which is our main tourist bureau. Mostly because we got attention beforehand, now has us on the tour of alternative spaces in Pittsburgh. So people are always coming by from other countries. Then there's the news outlets that are interested in it. And then the international attention, which is frankly way more than the national. People who are asking us to do franchises on a weekly basis, majority of them are in like South Africa, in New Zealand, in Warsaw. So the perception folks have of us from the outside is often that we're way better than we are in the inside. I always feel like we're never fully actualized. I mean, we could be a much better project. And we could be more engaging. We can figure out more creative solutions to how our city, our first constituent, our customers, can become more curious and informed citizens. And I hope that we're starting to create a civic impact. And the thing about Pittsburgh is it's so small. Everyone in the city knows about us. If I say Conflict Kitchen, people know about it. And we have, I feel like in that way we've been able to shift the identity of the city itself. And it's also, people love the story. This bizarre thing in Pittsburgh, that to them is a narrative. And I totally embrace that cognitive dissonance that people seem to have about Pittsburgh having this really incredible culture project. The other important thing is that we're open seven days a week. We're like the hardware store. We're like the grocery. We're like any other business. We've got a revenue. We've got bills to pay. And we think about economics as much as anyone else. And it's not for free. It's not just a fancy art project. We're business. We're struggling and trying to survive along with all the other businesses. And I think that gives us a type of credibility to our customers who are also interested in our kind of non-business ideas. So I'm gonna end with maybe one of the most bizarre media. Yeah, if we can pull up the sound. I was in Italy recently and I was giving a presentation and my friend called me up after the presentation and he said, did you know that you're on Italy's national game show? And I said, no, I did not know that. And then we found it online. There's no stadium in the city of New Zealand. But in Pittsburgh, I've opened a kitchen, a restaurant where couples can litigate their arms. That's what I'm talking about. That's what I'm talking about. And this is a conflict kitchen. But who is it, Laura? There is a conflict kitchen in Pittsburgh. It's a restaurant that prepares customers from all over the country with which the United States are in conflict. The idea of attracting customers with good food and then involving them in events or debates will stimulate the knowledge of culture, of politics of some states, such as Iran, Iraq, Cuba, Venezuela, and North Korea. Well, thank you. You can't hire Valente to be your spokesmodel.