-006 Daniel Pravit Fethke
If there is one thing that you can change in a previous project of yours, what would it be?
One thing that I would change about a prior project is in relation to my MFA thesis project at Pratt - the "Pratt Public Sphere." The project involved a 20' geodesic dome that I - along with collaborators Mary Mattingly, Rafael de Balanzo Joué, and many others - transformed into a mixed-use classroom, public kitchen, and mutual aid hub for several months between October 2022-June 2023. The work was certainly ambitious, and we had a vision of a third space on Pratt's campus where students, faculty, and neighbors from the surrounding Brooklyn neighborhoods could gather, relax, and offer to teach classes in a radically new setting.
We had a lot of successes with the project, including a series of public programs relating to food, arts practice, and even harm reduction. We had a donation rack for thrifted clothes, running water and electricity, and a food pantry where students could give what they could/take what they needed. We even had the opportunity to host an artist talk with Jeffrey Gibson, who was looking for an alternative setting to offer MFA students a place for open dialogue that broke free of the stifling institutional frameworks within a school setting. Despite all of our incredible successes, I still left the project feeling that it was lacking in some fundamental way – that somehow all of our work to create a space that was joyful, restful, and open to the surrounding community had failed to really succeed.
It has been over two years since that project concluded in its original form, and in hindsight I have been able to process this disconnection and think through what I would change: the site.
When we first planned to install in the middle of Pratt's idyllic green, we had a vision of adding to the stagnant, modernist sculpture garden with an artwork that was truly active. What we came up against was a mountain of limitations, red-tape, and an institution that was unwilling to really work with us to help make the project a success. One of our main goals was to have the space take on a life of its own, a communal living room that was adopted by students and neighbors alike. This worked in some ways, yet mostly left me with a sense of unfulfillment.
As it turned out, it was a monumental task to try and get people to really own the space collectively. There were many reasons for this, including our own incredibly busy schedules as students as well as the struggle of promoting the Pratt Public Sphere outside of the campus gates. Nevertheless, I attribute a part of these shortcomings to the project's site in the middle of the Institute. Instead of being able to open up a radically autonomous zone for play and experimentation, we were met with the limitations of trying to create new public space in the middle of the fraught power dynamics of a private, gated academy. Pratt's relationship with the surrounding community is simply too closed off to really allow for open, spontaneous action on campus – and this ultimately ended up stifling the project.
In a world free of restrictions, I would change the site to be in the middle of a public square that would be more conducive to free and open dialogue about art, pedagogy, and what it means to support each other through mutual aid efforts. I imagine a space like Prospect Park or Union Square would come with its own drawbacks; however, I would like to envision a world where a group of artists collectively establish a new "Public Sphere" project (with or without a geodesic dome) that could better serve the surrounding community. As examples, I think of the "autonomous zones" that were established by Black Lives Matter activists during the summer of 2020, or even some of the recent collective possibilities opened up by the encampments established in solidarity with Palestine on university campuses.
I also want to acknowledge that wherever the site moves, there is always going to be the enormous task of funding, maintaining, staffing, and even promoting the creative work that we would be doing. This work was both incredibly rewarding and exhausting, and ended up overshadowing a lot of our original goals for the project. That being said, I think back to the Pratt Public Sphere and dream of an alternative site where folks can be open, curious, and forge a collectively creative environment that centers non-hierarchical structures of stewardship and belonging.
Images courtesy of the artist.
About Daniel Pravit Fethke
Daniel Pravit Fethke (b. 1993, New York, NY) is an interdisciplinary artist working in film, performance, social practice, and installation. Teaching is a central part of his practice, and he regularly facilitates workshops, cooking classes, and creative gatherings that center food and recipes as ways to explore identity, narrative, and culture. He co-founded the mutual aid food pop-up Angry Papaya, and has hosted workshops at Dia:Beacon, Socrates Sculpture Park, and the Performing Garage. Daniel has held several artist residencies, including at the Wassaic Project (2024), the Woodstock-Byrdcliffe Guild (2024), and as a Culinary Resident at the Ox-Bow School of Art (2024-25). He has exhibited work internationally in Bangkok, Berlin, Barcelona, and domestically at the Yale School of Art, Recess Art Space, and the Knockdown Center. He recently published an autobiographical Thai-American cookbook through Pratt Institute, where he also received his MFA in Fine Arts in 2023. He currently lives and works in Brooklyn.
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