About
The Conch Girl Project
The Conch Girl Project is a photo-based, socially engaged project that utilizes cooking to co-nurture the mutual care for strangers started by Sidian Liu in New York City in 2022. In a time of globalization, migration, and crisis, this project seeks to create experiential chances for healing kinship and emotional solidarity within a densely populated metropolis.
Sidian migrated to New York City in 2021 from the opposite side of the globe. Dealing with her sense of displacement, she has been asking strangers to let her use their kitchen in solitude. In return, she cooks them a meal. She asks for the least amount of face-to-face contact: she would arrive, cook, take photos, clean up, and leave. After the visit, the resulting photos are sent to the kitchen owners, who are invited to make responses. These correspondences, along with the photos, will later be printed large and wheat-pasted on the green construction boards on the New York City streets, a public-facing, liminal space. The street publication is both a presentation and an open call that invites future collaboration.
The least-amount-of-in-person-contact rule orchestrated in the project resonates with the various barriers that a newcomer faces when they migrate, and provides a spatial distance that enables emotional solidarity between strangers. A respectful boundary is consequently formed, brewing a sense of intimacy similar to Bauman’s love for neighbors: loving oneself in others and respecting each others’ uniqueness.
Through wheat-pasting the kitchen photos on the New York City’s construction board, The Conch Girl Project also connects with the practice of Public Art. In sharing the private domestic space in the public, and presenting the correspondence between the kitchen owner and the kitchen borrower, the street publications function as activism posters that ask people to stop, take a look, and rethink the relationships between fellow strangers, neighbors, and one another whom we rely on. Beginning with the desire to quench the thirst of an individual’s survival and desire for familial care, The Conch Girl Project developed into a humble gesture of “care-ful society,” a feminist notion inspired by non-patriarchal social structures and often cited in iLiana Fokianaki’s writings.
©2025 Sidian Liu