Vaissnavi Shukl
I don’t think I mentioned it the last time, but this is actually the grand finale of Season One of Architecture Off-Centre. I wanted to thank everyone for listening and bearing with me while I got a hang of podcasting. Season two is already in the pipeline, and I can’t wait to put it out in the world. Oh, and another big update, I mentioned the Architecture Off-Centre website in the trailer episode, but it took me 10 episodes to actually put it together. So have a look at archoffcentre.com that is ‘archoffcentre.com’, and let me know what you think about it. And if you have any ideas for upcoming episodes, or just want to say ‘hi’, I would love to hear from you.

Now onto today’s episode. Have you ever seen a storefront opening up as a theatre or a dilapidated house becoming a community event space, or ever dined on an unfolding table that sells food from plants on the verge of extinction? What about a lamppost that is lit by converting dog poop into electricity. Well, if you know any of these projects, you’re probably familiar with Matthew Mazzotta work. Today’s episode is a special one, because it is with my boss, my friend and my collaborator, Matthew Masada. Matthew is an internationally renowned artist who works at the intersection of public activism and urbanism, particularly focusing on creating spectacular public spaces with communities, while highlighting the social, economic and environmental issues. Matthew is a graduate of MIT, and is a Guggenheim Fellow, a Loeb Fellow at Harvard, and also a TED fellow. His work has received several accolades, including the Dezeen’s Architecture project of the year award. And most recently, his TED Talk, went live. So let’s get started.

My name is Vaissnavi Shukl and this is Architecture Off- Centre, a podcast where we highlight unconventional design practices and research projects that reflect the emerging discourses within the design discipline and beyond. Architecture of Center features conversations with exceptionally creative individuals who have extrapolated the traditional fields of Art, Architecture, Planning, landscape, and urban design.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Okay. So I think our conversation today might seem a little too familiar, or a little too casual to people listening. And that’s okay for me, because we’ve worked together for almost two years now. And I kind of feel guilty knowing way too much about you and the practice than any interviewer should. So I thought, why not just ask you about stuff that I’ve always been curious about, and really don’t know about your work or your previous project? The stuff that’s not out there in the public domain? Does that sound okay?

Matthew Mazzotta
Yep, beautiful. That’s actually, I was wondering how we’re going to do this, since you know, all the tricks and all the thoughts. If we can go someplace else, it’d be interesting.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Yeah, usually, I’d like send a few just topics or questions. And, you know, because nobody till now is as experienced as you were, I thought with you, which is kind of, I mean, I have the questions, but I didn’t want to send them to you. So I’m cheating a little bit. But nevertheless, I thought we could begin with maybe your very first public art project. What was that? Like? was it was it bicycle? Was it peer shear? Or should we feel it way back to your time at MIT?

Matthew Mazzotta
My first public artwork might have been, what like, like, probably many people in a small town, a can of spray paint. So like, in this little town I grew up in, you know, there’s not a lot, there’s like, five or 6000 people, we had our little shopping centres or whatever, I will go behind them and there’ll be walls. And this is like, free graffiti hidden, you know, the world. It was in our little town was hard to, you know, you might see it in a movie or whatever. But then I was like, Okay, I’m doing anyways. And so there was no scene here anything, and I’ve just kind of, you know, do my own thing. And at the time, they were like, little missions, because it is, it’s kind of like, I don’t know how people think about an act of vandalism. I’m sure someone’s not going to like it. But I did it in areas where, you know, only I would see or, you know, very few people might go behind, you know, behind a building and through the woods kind of thing. And yeah, I just got obsessed with it. I started like doing these pieces, sketching them out, and then you know, putting them together. And yeah, very few people saw them. But uh, that was my first act. I remember thinking getting very excited that like those lived in the world, and this chance encounter that someone might come across them or whatever. So yeah, I think the very simplest public art for me was probably yes, the spray paint can and a wall.

Vaissnavi Shukl
When you say it was at a place where nobody else could see you, or you know, they would be kind of hidden. Can you give us some examples? Like, where would it be for example?

Matthew Mazzotta
Yeah. I mean, I haven’t spoken about this before, or to anybody for a long time. But yeah, it was just like, behind like a, like a big box store. If you can imagine something made out of cinder blocks, you would go behind it and might be a part of a loading dock where a truck might come in and unload the goods so that they could sell it up front. And I’m just realising now that when I did those, you know, graffiti pieces,then I got interested in the beatniks and I started, I actually just started getting obsessed with all the different writers. And so and I liked the fact that they were kind of a group of They were kind of formalised as a group, historically, they all hung out, I would cut out pieces of their poems I’d like and Xerox them, copy them. And then I would go around when I went to Chicago, that’s where I went to art school, I would actually, again, find these alleyways and I would, you know, we paste them to the walls that wasn’t very public, but it was just this chance encounter that someone that wasn’t me, or in my network would see this. And then I actually went all over Chicago, and I was like hopping fences and putting them in weird spots, just so that like, you know, it really was, “How the hell did I get here?” for someone that might see it. And then I actually made these little I was into making zines, like little magazines, you know, with personal thoughts, whatever. But I made one all about this, uh, this network that I had made of where they were in Chicago, and I had little descriptions, so you could find them all. And then I would leave this little pamphlet on the subway. So I mean, it was definitely like not reaching a large audience. But just this idea that someone might happen upon this, and then be able to go down that rabbit hole that I was going through, which was trying to match a poem with a certain location, like of an alley, or a viewpoint or whatever, just trying to complement each other. But yeah, not a large audience at all. But that was my first endeavour, out into the public.

Vaissnavi Shukl
I had absolutely no idea. This is so cool. So I don’t know if like this podcast that ever, at any point makes it big. And there’s somebody from Christie’s or Sotheby’s and they go to Canton, New York, to the loading docks of the big box store, they can probably, you know, take take it off the wall and maybe auction it as the very first original Matthew Mazzotta or something that were completely against us, you know, having that kind of work that can ever be possessed by someone this is I had absolutely no idea. This is so cool.

Matthew Mazzotta
Yeah, I think all that stuff came out of I was attracted to skateboarding. And skateboarding was always in the public space. So your take the skateboard, and you start rolling around this little town and you start to reinterpret the architecture. This is a bench, but we can kneel, grinder, slide it, or jump over whatever we may do. Or, yeah, a loading dock was obviously great. It’s concrete and it’s got the you know, the difference of height or whatever. But just being outside, I remember that was, I looked at back at that of my life. When I was in high school, you know, you get done with school, and then you’re immediately outside until whenever late at night. And then when the summer hit, I mean, we just lived outside, just every single second was outside. And so you’re always exploring new spaces, to have a session with your friends, skateboarding. And then once the skateboard mags magazines came, you know, you’d see graffiti in those, you’d see a bunch of stuff that was cultural from the city. And I just remember trying to, like, take my hand to it, and still being in this small little town with the resources that had just to flex it and see what we could do here. And yeah, I think that’s how it all started, knowing that there were ways to express yourself. I don’t know if it was really appreciated in the small town, especially in the form I was giving it at the moment. But I’m just trying it, you know, just dipping the toe in the water of like, what is this all about?

Vaissnavi Shukl
Your method and your mode of expression has changed and evolved over the years but now hearing where it all began from, I think the one thread that still continues is, this is the common thread of having chance encounters, right? I mean, even when you look at open houses or when you’re, you know, looking at the storefront theatre or even home to table, well, you’re trying to create these situations where people can have these these chance encounters that they probably otherwise wouldn’t have like these very intentional chance encounters. But when I was when I was looking through your initial projects, you know, whether it’s wandering home or do not disturb which is a group of placemats aimed at provoking conversations about heterogeneity or looking for landscapes and steeped in exploration which encourages community to forage ingredients for tree and bruise it through a methane digester. These initial projects while in the public domain focused more on, quite literally like the phenomenon and gathering, right? They’re kind of fun and cheerful and chirpy, very celebratory in not that the other projects are not, but the latter projects, including the storefront, theatre, open house, home to table and even neighbours that we’re all working on right now, are very rooted in their intention and cause. This is where I see you not just as an artist, but also an activist, whether it is highlighting the phenomenon of abandoned main streets in rural America, or talking about climate change, you know, very broadly, do you know, yourself? Or do you know, that moment when this shift happened for you? Was it like a conscious choice? Or was it just the kind of opportunities that were coming along your way that needed you to shift into a different pair of shoes? Or I wouldn’t say different pair of shoes, but kind of take on another role in addition to being an artist?

Matthew Mazzotta
Yeah, let’s see if we can answer this. Because I have a couple thoughts about it. You know, you always self analyse, but, growing up in a small town, yeah, there’s, you know, I didn’t excel it much. And it almost seemed like a finite world. This is what this little town has, and this is your opportunities. But as soon as I saw this little crack in the wall, I think an art professor showed, you know, Andy Warhol warehouse, and I saw, you know, the Velvet Underground, playing music in a tin foil room where they’re videotaping each other, you know, while they’re sleeping. And I was actually like, “Wow, this is really wild, like, all these adults are just using all this equipment in this really unique way”. And I remember going, Okay, so there’s other ways to do things. And I was immediately attracted to that, then the whole idea of skateboarding came, and it was right in the early 90s, I guess. And that’s where, if you followed skateboarding at all, now, it’s a huge industry, but at that time, it was just passing over from one generation of skateboards to another. And that particular one, it had the small wheels, and people used to wear baggy pants and the skateboard shape it turned into they call it a popsicle shaped with just the nose and the tail kind of became kind of equal in terms of its length. Anyways, it was a big buzz, and it was a huge cultural moment for skateboarding. And I was just at that exact moment. So like, I was dyed in the world of skateboarding every single day, you know, it’s just, that’s what we were doing. And that was a great sense of community and also being outside. And then the third element. So we got the art, we got the skateboarding, about reinterpreting architecture, the third was, um, music and I was always deep into music that was always a huge love and still is today. I got into at one point into like underground music and punk and hardcore and metal and all this stuff. And we used to go to shows and their house shows in the whole network was kind of beautiful in the way it was. The one may call it hardcore music, but at the time, what it was was just underground music, you know, extreme music, whatever you want to call it. But it had this kind of intentionality as you were speaking about activism. And so it was like, women’s rights, birth rights, you know, finding out who was the zepa testers and, you know, School of the Americas, it was just like passing around all this information, basically saying, the reality that, you know, is constructed, and maybe it’s not constructed that great. And as kids, we were like, wow, okay, we’re on a mission here. And so the bands would write about it. And then people would make fanzines about it. Either personal, one’s about their own life, or about the larger issues of society. And so I got into protesting pretty hard. And we would do that just basically, in our social group that we go to all these music shows, we go skateboarding, and then we’d be out in the street, protesting whatever it may be. But, yeah, I kind of hit a glass ceiling, because I was like, so into it. I was like, this is we got to do all this stuff. People need us, we have the ability to do it. Let’s try our best. And then, yeah, that whole standing on the side of the road was streets, you know, signs and people honking or yelling, and then people yelling back, I remember going this is just not totally. And so I kind of moved to Chicago for art school after and I didn’t want to tell anybody about that past I had. I wanted to try new things completely. And, but that activism thread was always grinding through my mind, even though I didn’t have people to speak about it with. I was just kind of like, this is what it’s all about. And I remember being at art school. And one of my professors says, “Why does your art have to be about something?” I said, “But it’s not what are supposed to be to change the world.” And he goes, “No, sometimes it’s just about stripes next to each other on a painting”, and I remember thinking this guy doesn’t know anything like, what, no, this is not about art as far are literally to liberate us to give us a new perspective. And so I always just had art like that, like, in my mind, I always, like when I grind through every single thought I’m like, how do you make the biggest difference? Yeah, for me, it came down to art. That’s what touched me, even the small little town. I remember, like, you know, there’s not a lot of culture here. But it was MTV would have a music video. And I remember the scene, a little bit of whatever it may be at the time Nirvana, or, you know, some, some cool video and I’m being like, wow, you can do more than what people are doing in this town, none of the people in this town would do that. But I know you can do it now. And also, the whole thing we live next to the railroad tracks a few houses down. And so that was the other form of art that came into my life was that all the kids spray painting and cities on the railroad track cars, they would come through. And I always think about that as like my art show like this would come through. And I’ve just look at all the different graffiti that was coming to my town. So those are the two main threads of like, contemporary are getting into the bloodstream here. Anyways, long story short, I just tried to combine all that stuff. And then I was angry as a kid and more aligned myself with the punk and all that stuff. But then there was a point where I started realising strategies of how to deliver information. And I remember thinking like, you know, you have punk rock, which is against the system, at least this is a generalised, you know, whatever, you know, Molotov cocktail spray paint, like, hate the man, whatever. And remember, okay, that’s one way to go. And then I saw this whole hippie thing, you know, these communes being built, and people, you know, tearing apart cars and making houses and geodesic domes. And I thought, okay, that’s also interesting, because not only are you saying, you know, fuck the man with by getting out of the system, but you’re also creating something new. So it’s not just against something, and I started getting kind of like thinking this is not good. Just always be against the man like, the man does. One thing is man in quotes, of course, you know, society or corporations or whatever, they do some now there’s a reaction against that. I’m like, you’re kind of in this dance. How do we switch over and just make something so cool, and so new, that everybody has to look at that. And so that’s where I kind of got into the whole strategy of like, let’s not be so easily read with the anger. Let’s take it to this next level. Let’s make it so intriguing. So curious that people have to come into these ideas on their own volition. So it wasn’t like you do this. I’m against you. It’s more like, here’s this and we speak about this, you know, question of DNI, the third space. Yeah, this other place where it’s kind of like snaps that polarity apart. And we all don’t know how to deal with this. But that’s interesting. I got to go over there, we see. And I think that’s basically if I boiled it all down. Yeah, that’s what it came to is just that I had easily acknowledged early on, that we are much more than our roles that we play every day in our lives, you know, there’s so much dimensionality and every human. But then, how do you get that out, because we’re all in these reverse roles. And then I thought this, this idea of the spectacle or being able to pull people into the curiosity into a new dialogue, so important idea, but then be able to deliver in a way that isn’t just smack smack, like, against something, but actually this third space, and we can go there, and we can visit it. And there’s no real problem here. Because it’s not against me. It’s just curious.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Matthew, something you said, struck a chord with me, just so deep cause you said, you’re trying to find different mediums of different ways of delivering information. And up until you said that, when you typically think of art, you think of it as a visual medium that may or may not have an immediate meaning, in addition to what it visually represents, but I never thought about it as a vehicle to deliver information. And now when you said that, like when you articulate it, I look back at all the projects we’ve done, and it is about delivering a certain kind of information, you know, whether that is the state of affairs in a small rural town, you know, reflecting everything that has happened as a result of different economic and political changes, or whether it’s creating this unfolding table where you serve food that is kind of bringing to light the information about what is dying in the immediate neighbourhood. So in that sense, I think it’s a very profound statement that you chose this as a way to, to deliver information. But then I’m curious to know how you shifted mediums, because you started out with the, with the spray can. And everything we’re doing right now is not, not something we do with a spray can, in fact, a lot of the stipulations we have for the public artworks discourage people to use spray cans on, you know, the kind of stuff we build. And when you talk about the third space, we’re literally talking about a space that we can engage with in a more tangible way. Like it’s not a digital space. It’s not a virtual space. It’s not a space that you experienced through AR and VR, you know, it exists. In reality, like it’s built, it’s brick and mortar. I’m curious to know where that shift happened, because the way I think we identify ourselves is, you know, we, we are a public art practice, and we build public art projects, but we are not that far away from architecture. So we are also kind of, we’re architects, but we are artists, and just looking at the nexus of, you know, sending kind of this information and the medium. What do you think?

Matthew Mazzotta
There’s a train going by in the background? Is that okay, or should we wait for a moment? This is the train actually, that carries the graffiti. That’s how close it is, I don’t know if you could hear that. Okay, I think it’s gone. Oh, yeah, that’s that… that was one of the… that was my curated shows, come through. Oh, let me just think. So yeah, when I was, okay, art, as a kid, interesting. Wow, you can think and, you know, artists confusing, what’s good art, what’s not. And you know, I’m, I’m in a small town, there’s a university here. And at one point, I would just go over to the library and get a whole bunch of art books. And I’m not a night owl at all. But at that point in my life, I actually was, I would just get the books and put them down on this desk. And I would plough through them. And I’ll go until like two or three in the morning, and be drawing, and collaging. And just trying to like, you know, have this dialogue between what I could consume in these books and then producing things. And that’s basically what I use to get me into art school. It’s just that portfolio. I didn’t know it at the time, I was kind of more, you know, interested in living in a van and skateboarding and being out in the world. It was really kind of a lot of my family and girlfriend at the time, pulling me back and saying, “Hey, where does this all end up?” And they thought, okay, you know, maybe art school, and I just come off some big trips. And I was like, yeah, maybe I’ll try that. But when I got to art school, so I’m all loaded now with all these, you know, punk rock shows and skateboarding and hanging out with homeless people and living in a van. So I was kind of like, you know, I was so supercharged to go to art school. So I get there. And people start talking about art for the first time. And there was a moment where I did think I was levitating. I thought my feet were not touching the ground. Because I was so happy. I was like, I can’t believe people are interested in talking about this stuff. It was that like a really profound moment for me. I was like, wow. And I learned about critique. I’m like, you could critique anything? And like, how do we see these things, and I started to hone. So when he was one, I took every class, I took bookbinding, I took performance, I took video, I took, you know, course up drawing, I took an installation. I just took as much as I could. But I got attracted to the installation. I was like, okay, so you can make things in real life. At the same time, I was taking painting. And I remember this, just to speak about this transition, I was making paintings and the painting started to gain more and more found materials, I would be always outside grabbing stuff and putting in. But at one point, I started breaking the composition, where it’s not just about one painting, but two paintings next to each other that had a relationship. And then that started getting bigger and bigger, where there was multiple paintings that had relationships, like one composition with multiple surfaces. And then I just was like, okay, I think that the frame is constricting me. And then yeah, insulation came in. But I remember being in that painting class and thinking, I said, what’s the best artwork you can make for painting, like if you’re in a gallery, and then my idea was like, just cut holes in the gallery, so people can leave and go out into the world. Like, so then I was like, I’m not interested in this gallery. I cannot be in here. I just can’t like where the people are, where the issues are, where it all happens outside. And so I knew at that point, I want to make work for everyday people, I don’t know how we’re going to define that. But I’ve actually kind of, you might have seen my little Venn diagram I kind of made work that’s in public has to address these three for me, which is, one is a mass media. This is like people that view the world through like magazines, and dentist’s office, you know, they put them through, you know, whatever TV show is hot, or wherever the government is, or where we are with climate change, or what war we’re in, like this, people know that and, like, on Jeopardy, or whatever, you know, kind of current events that people know, then there’s experiential, and these are people that are aren’t interested in that, but they’re just like walking around the world, they’re like, making the, you know, the water come down their driveway, they’re putting a rock here, it pushes it over here, or they’re trying to balance a stick on their hand, or they’ve built something or, you know, they’ve explored the world for themselves, one to one in a physical way. And then the other type of knowledge was academic, people that studied movements, or, you know, genres of art, or, or any type of discipline. Those are three ways of perceiving the world. Yeah. And I thought, how do you make a work that can touch all those, or be interesting to all those different ways that those three ways of looking? So that was always a criteria? I had? Is this impressive for someone who studies whatever, yeah, to a larger, you know, scope of architecture or art? Can they see this as someone’s pushing the envelope? Can we push over into the mass media? Can someone who just cares about, you know, the world around them through this mediated experience of, of Corporation, you know, corporate media, and whatever? Can they read this, and then someone who just sees the world just walks around? Are they impressed enough to go, “Damn, I want to look at that more.” So those that was my criteria of making things.

Vaissnavi Shukl
And when we, when we look at your work, right now, again, I’m still drawn to when you’re talking about, you know, representing information, a lot of it, whether it’s talking about, you know, these three points and finding something at the intersection of all those three, or your larger intention to, you know, create a work that is also symbolic of what you think it stands for. But this very inherently reflects in your method, or your process of doing something. And when I know firsthand that you actually do collect a lot of information, research is a huge part of the studio, I mean, not just like historical archival research, but research also that you do on the ground with the communities that you are designing for. And so I’m hinting towards the outdoor living room, something that has become this iconic charade almost that you that you do in the middle of a town square, you know, where you just put sofas out, you know, warm cookie, you smell coffee, and just invite the community to be a part of this conversation, almost the way I think about it is, in a lot of ways, just when you’re talking about the gallery and cutting holes so that people could go out in the real world. You think of art and high art is something that is just so exclusive, you need to have a certain whatever trained eye to appreciate a Rothko, for example. If it were just hanging on a billboard, you’d probably not even see it. But just because in a gallery, and it’s framed in a certain way it has a certain value. But the way your process thinks about art very broadly is it tries to almost democratise the final installation of the final products almost like making art more accessible, making design more accessible. And so I wanted you to talk a little bit about the outdoor living room. But I also really wanted to know how you started it because I know there’s a method to the madness. It’s not just like putting in so fast and you know, come chat about your town, but how did you come up with it? How did you devise it?

Matthew Mazzotta
Yes, yes. Well, I’ll tell you both, let’s make sure we don’t lose them because I got two different threads. One is kind of about sensitivity. And the other one is how it all started and actually started in Chicago, but I’ll start with the sensitivity part. So, you know, as a person in the world, as we all are, we are living, we’re having our experiences, some are good, some are pleasant, some are not. Sometimes we try things they work out. Sometimes we have desires unmet, you know, just as a just person in the world. One of the things I can noticing was how sensitive someone was. And you know, some people are very, very sensitive, and like, brash and hard context would be too much, and they might retreat back. And then someone that might be so rough and tumble, they can’t deal with something so sensitive, it drives them mad or whatever. And so I always just thought about, like, you know, if you took a hammer to tune a piano, you probably damaged the piano. And then if you took an instrument that might tune a piano, and you try to put in a nail, you might damage the instrument. And so one of the things for me is, like, it’s always a wish I’ve had is like, you know, to figure out your own sensitivity, where are you on the scale, and they complement your surroundings. Or have your, your surroundings complemented and, you know, by your own will, if you can, and so the way I just described it is like, on a construction site, it might be great that people are covered, you know, in during putting things together, this camaraderie, and it’s all of this nice nature, and there’s whatever it may be this real fun, energy, but then like you think about and you can’t be rough enough, he’s like, “Oh, this guy’s so great, he does this, or this woman, you know, she can eat nails”, you know. But then there’s another one where, you know, people take their shower, they have their meal, they get all dressed up, and they go to a concert hall, and then that concert hall might be the pianist. And at that point, you know, they introduce who’s coming out to play, and everybody, there’s a hush over the room, and then all sudden, the player comes in, and this becomes very quiet, they open the, you know, the lid, and they start to stroke the keys. And at that moment, I mean, everybody is just waiting to hear how this is done, how sensitive they are. And at that moment, that piano player can’t be sensitive enough, you know, it’s almost like we’ve, we want them to be the ultimate sensitive. And so what I’ve looked at in the world is like, figure out where you are on the scale, and try to find somewhere that, uh, that you can fit in. So you’re not going up against the wrong kind of energy, you know, and, and making your world harder than it is. So I’m always hoping that people can find that. Anyways, that story all goes into the fact that I have just so many times I’ve been in situations where I’m like, the format of this is not good, like, either as the work culture or whatever. But one of the things I didn’t like was these City Hall meetings, like, I always felt they were kind of, you know, maybe the louder people in the room, or the people that felt like their ideas were more in line with the agenda, or even how the agenda was set. I’m like, this is not working for everyone, I can clearly see there’s a lot of voices that are not speaking out. Because you’d have conversations with people, you go into City Hall meetings, and they would stick to a certain agenda, like, Okay, this is not about information gathering. This is about, you know, solidifying certain themes. And so I wanted to step out of that, I knew that each community has way more knowledge to it. And a lot of the products are about this creating a framework. So this kind of knowledge come out. But in particular, talking about this outdoor living room. That’s what it was all about, like, how do you take the meeting? How do you extract, you know, information from a community, but don’t go through these normal channels of City Hall Meeting to be here by eight, here’s the agenda, we’re going to get through these anybody has questions. What I did was, we put living room furniture, in a public space, um, could be streaking in front of a grocery store, whatever it may be. And it’s for people passing by the goal. What the hell is that? And then I said, “Oh, come on over. And we’re just talking about the town here, have a coffee”. They’re like, well, I don’t know much about town. I said, No, no problem here. Everybody. These are really easy questions we’re just talking about and people would sit down, go, Okay, this is interesting. What’s this? You know, and I would ask questions, and I call them all softball questions, like, you know, what is, uh, what’s the history or the unknown history of this town? What is something that is not known for me just visiting, but something that you guys have, and someone will be like, well, that building there used to be a Creamery. I said, What was that all about? And they said, Well, we used to have, you know, an ice cream store here. And, you know, it’s connected to a farm out of town, but then it went under. And they turned to a radio station. I said, so it became a radio station. Yeah. But before that, we used to have chickens inside of, or whatever it may be, you know, and you’re like, Okay, that’s interesting. I said, Yeah, that was next to the tobacco shop that my grandfather had, and actually in the back of that, and you start to hear all these stories, and there’s a number of questions like 10 questions we asked, but you really extract a different type of knowledge out of this situation. And you we get into contentious like what is working really well in this town? Where do we see people coming together in great ways beyond the Fourth of July? parades are beyond the typical holidays. And then we go into the negative. Where does this town fail? What are issues that just have not been addressed? And so we kind of cruise through all these things. And I even get to a point where I’m like, what’s a secret that only you know about this town, like, maybe you feel there’s a magic parking spots. So every time you pull in, to where you want to go, there’s always a certain parking spot waiting for you, or you like the way a shadow falls on a building when you eat your lunch, or whatever it may be. Or, you know, there’s hawks in your chimney, just something that only you know. And so I take all that information. Of course, I meet with the mayor and the organisers and community as well, one on ones together all, but that outdoor living room is where you get a lot of this really authentic sentiment and what we’re searching for, with all the works, how do you get to something that this community or the local government has not addressed yet, and this is, I found it to be the most potent way to get those answers. There’s no agenda, it’s open form. I’m a person that doesn’t know anything, I have an open notebook. And so I just take it all in and start to like, triangulate, I’m like, wow, a number of people have said this. And then I’ll bring it to Yeah, the city government, “Are you guys addressing this?”, or a community leader group. And we’ll try to figure out and once we find something that no one is really addressing, we take that as the focus of the work. Anyways, long story short, and then the way it all started with the outdoor living room was that when I was in Chicago, I had a van, this was the van I spoke about living in. In art school, I had a nice group of friends, you know, all these wild characters, we’re all meeting we’re making music together, speaking philosophy and theory, and whatever we could just about life, we’re all meeting a bunch of like, whatever, you know, misfits, but then we’re all at this art school. So it’s like, Damn, this is really cool. They want this from us, and we’re going for, so we would drive around the van, around different neighbourhoods in Chicago, and everybody’s throwing out, whatever, you know. So we’d go to a wealthy neighbourhood, and there’d be thrown out like a fake plant, or a pretty awesome lamp, or whatever, we go to another neighbourhood, and there’ll be, you know, whatever vacuum thrown out to collect it all. And then we would just bring it to a park and we’d set it up as a outdoor living room, but we just did it just because it’s like something to do, as we’re having all these ramblings because I had a, there was two captain chairs in the van, and the whole rest is taken out because I had a bed back there. So just all these people in there, we were listening to music and just chatting. Yeah, it was very nice, um, but ended up with these outdoor living rooms. And so long story short, I had that in my past as something that was cool. We actually slept in the buildings that night. And in the morning, we saw all these tourists looking at it like this. So I knew it had some value. I got invited to do a project in New York, Alabama. And they asked me, they said, Would you come down and speak with the community? I said, Yeah. Do you want me to give a talk? And they said, No, we want you to hang out with them. And, you know, on a different plane, I was like, okay, that’s cool. I said, What about, like, we all get together and go for a bike ride? And they said, Well, in this community, no one really rides bikes. I said, Okay, what can we do? And so that’s when I started thinking, you know what, let’s do an outdoor living room and just have a chat. We just took one of the main streets, we put on this outdoor living room, we actually asked people at that point to bring furniture. And so everybody brought a little bit. And then we just sat down and had a chat. And that was, that was kind of the that was the initial one. And I’ve refined it from there. I saw the magic that I actually could ask questions that were outside, you know, the lines of any city meeting and get really answered, I was like, Okay, this is actually really good to do because maybe these are not the same characters that show up at the City Hall. And we’re not talking about anything that’s on those agendas. Yet, we are still a community speaking about our community. So that’s where I started realising Okay, this is powerful. And yeah, just refined it. And now it’s one of the dominant ways we get information from a community of coming in as an outsider, to get people to actually speak about it in real terms, what the issues are.

Vaissnavi Shukl
I had no idea. That’s how it began. But I’m so glad I did. And so for everybody who’s listening, if you want to learn more about Matthew’s, Outdoor Living Rooms, and want to see some really cool images of them, head over and see Matthew’s TED talk that went live last week. And it’s been an absolute honour to have worked with you on that. But with all the current projects in the pipeline, where do you see yourself in the next five or 10 years? What’s next for you?

Matthew Mazzotta
Yes, good question. Oh, Vaissnavi, thank you so much for working on that TED talk with me. That was a… Yeah, it’s hard to be that self reflective. When they say “Hey, you know, let’s put together a talk about your practice”, it’s because you’re so deep in. So that was a pleasure working with you on that one. All this lovely five to 10 years that’s a… Yeah, that’s the kind of question they ask you, people ask you all the time. No, no right. It makes you think a lot. You know, one of the things that I was interested in that kind of goes back to the beginning, is like, once I found out that there is money much more to every person, than it seems, you know, this was like an early thought, I’m like, “Huh, you know, people might be acting a certain way”, or presenting themselves. Almost as locked into a certain ego or, or posturing wherever, but I remember like seeing like let’s let’s take it easy example, like say we’re all walking down the street, we all know, we don’t talk to our neighbours, you can give a little high or whatever but you know there’s not a lot of conversation but like, let’s say, a paint truck comes around the corner carrying all this paint in it and it ends up having an accident and paint goes all over the street and starts to go down the street, you’ll actually have people for a moment go, “Oh my God look at that.” Or like they’ll stop, and there’ll be part of a situation. And I remember going home, the social fabric was just ripped open, people are willing to talk to each other at this one moment. This small accident because it maybe had some, something interesting with the pink colours or however it was working allowed people to speak and maybe even speak about things that they would not have thought that they had inside of themselves like wow you know I, that’s almost like a rainbow, do you know about whatever and it’s like so two people are talking about a unique new way. And so I just kind of focused on that. I’m like, well, how do we get how do we cultivate that moment more and more. And so, I guess there’s like a deep, I don’t know, desire for me to see that more and more for people to make conditions that we can become, you know, I don’t know bigger I don’t know what the word is but to go deeper inside of ourselves or to have more of ourselves express to each other to show more of our humanity than you know the day to day status quo lives, allow us to have. And so that’s, that’s just always been the magic of it all. I, as you spoke about art and architecture for me, architecture, even though I’m not an architect. I’ve always, the power of the built environment is so strong for me. Like how a building looks. You know how it, how it feels open, who is it for all these things can shape, you know, “Do I feel welcome to go inside? Do I not feel safe?Hey, this park feels safe. This street feels not safe. Hey, what are these people doing, wow this is a really neat environment,” whatever. I just started noticing how much the built environment can play in shaping our relationships, how we feel about ourselves conversations. And so that’s where I tapped into it so so much stuff is on this architectural scale or using architectural methods or thoughts. So, if we talk about five to 10 years like the thing that I’ve always wanted and always liked is almost on the scale of planning, like, how do you how do you make pieces that allow us to be, to show more of ourselves not to be more isolated or more rehearsed, you know, but can actually provoke us to show more of ourselves to each other in this hopes that, you know, there’s much salvation in that connection between us all. It might seem hippie or whatever but I think for me that’s might be the hope of it all is that, you know, we are together. We do all love each other. The fact that we coexist. I know some people might have different viewpoints on that, but the amount of cooperation that humans have is quite you know, if you actually look at it like even the fact that you’re in Ahmedabad right now and I’m in Canada and we’re doing this whole thing, I mean, it’s, it’s all set up, you know, it’s way beyond us what’s, what’s going on from the technology to the theories and, you know, experience, it’s just, it’s radical if you ever sat down and thought about it, but yeah that’s what I always think about is how do we twist all this stuff up to can maximise these experiences so that we really get to see the best of each other.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Well that’s a very good note to end this on but if I were to say is this like one thing. I think we should have these conversations more often, like less so pensive and I’m thinking about where I lie on the spectrum and where do I fit in, am I the male or the piano.

Matthew Mazzotta
That’s awesome.

Vaissnavi Shukl
But, hey Matthew thank you so much, so much for doing this I mean this is literally like, I wouldn’t even say cherry on top of the cake. This is like an entire cake on top of a cake. Thank you so much.

Matthew Mazzotta
Yes, of course. Thank you for inviting me.

Vaissnavi Shukl
Special thanks to Ayushi Thakur for the research and design support, and Kahaan Shah for the background score. For guests and topic suggestions, you can get in touch with us through instagram or our website through our website archoffcentre.com, both of which are ‘archoffcentre’. And thank you for listening.