Quite honesty prior to this past week, work on my project to secure a site to test my interventions in had been rather slow and demoralising for me. It had involved day after day of phone calls and emails trying all manner of ideas I had to try and contact venues in which I could possibly run an intervention, no matter how small it may be. However, all my ideas were coming up dry and after all there is only so much positivity and pushing through the pain you can give a matter before the wall of unread emails and negative replies start to make you question whether you are actually going to be able to succeed in this aspect of the venture. And as much as I don’t want to admit it, I was starting to fall into that downtrodden trap of losing faith in securing a public hospitality venue to test my interventions in.
So, I took a step back and tried to remind my self why I was wanting to do this project in the first place. I took a day to revisit the nature I so keenly want to bring into peoples lives. Consequently, I went to explore new natural spaces and parks through going for walks and taking in the atmosphere of being surrounded by nature. Sometimes a refresher in your goals and motivators with a little step back really is all you need to keep going.
And so the quest continued email after email call after call; even just popping my head into a restaurant or pubs whilst I was walking by asking if they would be interested. But, I was still consistently getting turned away.
However, a few days ago I really had a breakthrough moment. I got a positive reply. The head of catering at the Chelsea Collage of Arts responded to my email and was really interested in my work and wanted to meet with me to discuss the different forms my work could take in their spaces. And there it was I was off, I grabbed the meeting with both hands and prepared mock- ups of what interventions would look like in their main canteen space, I thought of other smaller interventions they may wish to implement, I poured everything into preparing. The meeting went very well and I ended up being able to secure the possibility for multiple interventions in their spaces; which was better than I could have hoped. Subsequently, this was a big breakthrough or me finally being able to get my foot through the door somewhere.
As they say no one will let you build a building until you have built one, so once you get that first opportunity, you can leverage it to gain many more. Therefore, this is exactly what I began to do and contacted a family friend who I knew had a contact with the head chef at the Marylebone Hotel. After talking with her about the up and coming event I was running at the Chelsea Collage of Arts, I was able to get her to pass on my details to the head chef who has consequently agreed to have a meeting with me about any possible ideas and interventions I may be able to host there which is extremely exciting.
So, not to get to ahead of myself, but after a bit of a shaky patch where there wasn’t much to show for the work I had been putting in, finally the results are starting to slowly slot into place. I am very excited to see where these next steps can take my project and push it past its current realms.