Tastes of Justice: the politics of food-art practices in Asia and Australia (2)
2 December 2022 at 4:30:00 am
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Session Convenors
Dr Marnie Badham, RMIT University
Professor Stephen Loo, UNSW
A/Prof Francis Maravillas, National Taipei University of Education
Session Speakers
Madaleine Trigg, Massey University
Alia Parker, UNSW
The diverse food-art practices in Asia, Australia, and New Zealand highlight critical issues relating to the ethics and politics of curating relational practices of commensality and hospitality (Badham & Maravillas, 2019). These performative, social, and material practices engender diverse forms of cultural expression and creatively mediate cultural relations by tapping into transnational and diasporic vectors of connection to an imagined ‘home’ (Ang et al., 2000). While artists engaging with foodways can draw our attention to pressing concerns of sovereignty, race, migration, gender, labour, and climate change - the curation and exhibition of these practices raise both practical and conceptual issues. Cooking and galleries rarely mix, foodstuffs are difficult to collect, and eating creates unpredictable experiences (Badham & Maravillas, 2022). Gallery exhibitions can remove these practices from their cultural and community contexts, uncritically staging demonstrations of food cultures as spectacle, flattening their sensory and social complexities (Badham & Maravillas, 2019), as well as overlooking non-normative affects and dissonant perceptions (Loo, 2022).
Hosted by artist-curator-researchers, Marnie Badham (RMIT University) Stephen Loo (UNSW) and Francis Maravillas (National Taipei University of Education) this double panel will explore ‘the tastes of justice’ including both performative lectures as ‘cooking demonstrations’ and critical examinations of ‘curation as demonstration’ to consider the affective, sensuous, and culturally and politically attuned potential of food-art practices. Your ‘dinner hosts’ will frame the sessions with appetisers and palate cleansers across our afternoon menu of diverse ‘tastes of justice’ served up by Bianca Winataputri, Rebecca Blake, Joella Kiu, Madaleine Trigg, and Alia Parker. Presenters and audiences online are encouraged to snack, sip and slurp their way through the afternoon of dialogue, discourse, performance and provocations together.
Kneading new relations with non-human beings
Madaleine Trigg, Massey University
This paper shares my current creative-practice led research within Australiasia, which focuses on the relationship between dough and (non)humans. Specifically, I have been moving, doing contact improvisations, in dough to practically explore new materialist and posthuman philosophies and re-configure interrelations between humans and non- humans. As a feminist performance artist re-working relations with dough, naturally issues of gender, labour and the politics of food have arisen, especially as these practices dwell on the hand-made and I grew my own wheatfield for this PhD project. Notions of home have also been expanded as these performance works illuminate that human bodies are not sovereign as our microbial ‘messmates’,1 yeasts, have evolved with, inhabit and colonise our body. Re-thinking relations between humans and non-humans through dough also helps to materialize a different ethical responsibility to others by focusing on ecologies rather than distinct individuals. These sensual, affective works hope to emphasise our interactions with others and extend notions of hospitality from human to non-human beings.
The paper will be performative as it will feature excerpts from these performance videos(contact improvisations with dough, Body-Made-Bread etc). I am also interested in a hybrid paper/performative kneading demonstration as a format to disseminate this practice/research.
Collective Digestion: how to share a multispecies meal
Alia Parker, UNSW
Eating is a collective and transformative activity. Anne Marie Mol argues that through eating we become enmeshed with our surroundings and with more-than-human others via digestive processes(2021: 36-37). Eating is not only relational, but also political. What or who we eat,and eat with, speaks to our ethical tendencies and how we care for ourselves and others through the affordance of nutrition and the preparation of ingredients. Taking the protein-rich chickpeas a starting point, this performance lecture explores the culinary possibilities chickpeas for mycelial and human palettes alike. How might a politics of multispecies digestion be reconceived when we break bread with those often overlooked as non-charismatic passive others, or simply, matter to be consumed? Experimenting with the emulsifying properties of aquafaba and the crumbly texture of whole roasted chickpeas,the audience is invited to ‘share’ a meal with fungi. Building upon Jane Bennett’s concept of ‘onto-sympathy’, that captures the possibilities of a partial material overlap through processes of digestion, and Lynn Margulis’ theory of endo-symbiosis, this demonstration explores the politics of metabolic affinities through gustatory preferences and holobiontic entanglements. By stimulating a more inclusive multispecies food-art practice,we can rethink the transformative relationships that arise through processes of collective digestion.
Biographies
Dr Marnie Badham, RMIT University
Marnie Badham With a 25-year history of art and justice practice in Canada and Australia, Marnie’s research sits at the intersection of socially engaged art, participatory methodologies, and the politics of cultural measurement. Through forms of encounter and exchange, Marnie’s research brings together disparate groups of people in dialogue to examine and affect local issues. Recent collaborations include public performance in the Dandenong Ranges; public art commissioning on Wurundjeri and Bunurong lands; curatorial projects on food-art-politics; and creative cartographies registering emotion in public space. Marnie is CI on Ambitious and Fair: towards a sustainable visual arts sector and is Senior Lecturer, School of Art, RMIT University.
Assistant Professor Francis Maravillas, National Taipei University of Education
Francis Maravillas is Assistant Professor in the Critical and Curatorial Studies of Contemporary Art (CCSCA) program at the National Taipei University of Education, Taiwan. His research focuses on contemporary art and curating in Asia, exhibition histories, socially engaged and performative practices in art. He is currently writing a book on the aesthetics and politics of food in contemporary Asian art. He is area editor (Asia-Pacific) of the Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas journal. He was previously a board member of the 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art, Sydney, Australia.
Professor Stephen Loo, UNSW
For more than thirty years, Stephen has researched, taught and practiced in the transdisciplinary nexus of architecture, design, philosophy, psychology, performance and science. He has published widely in architecture and design theory, biophilosophy, posthumanist ethics, ecological humanities and experimental digital thinking and practice. He is currently working on the relations between thinking, justice and the psychophysiology of eating. Stephen is Professor of Design at UNSW Sydney/Gadi and Visiting Professor at the Centre for Philosophical Technologies, Arizona State University.
Madaleine Trigg, Massey University
Madaleine is a performance artist and photographer. From 2012-2018, she was a part- time lecturer on the BA Performance Arts and MA Scenography courses, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama (London). She presented her practice-led research at Critical Costume (2013, 2015, 2018), TAPRA (2015), EUPOP (2015) FCVC (Fashion, Costume and Visual Cultures, 2018), End of Fashion (2016) and Performing Artefacts (2019). Previous publications include; (Ad)dressing the female body (Scene, 2014) and REF:CN1183315 (Performance Research, 2017) and the chapter, Kneading Bodies in Posthumanism in Practice (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2022). Currently Madaleine is in her final year of a creative-practice PhD at Massey University.
Alia Parker, UNSW
Alia Parker is an experimental textile and fashion designer and researcher investigating the nexus of biology and design to provoke more sustainable and ethical ways of engaging with materiality. Sheis a current PhD Scientia Scholar and sessional academic at the University of New South Wales, Art & Design. Her research interests include experimental and critical fashion and textile bio-design, posthuman and multispecies ethics and philosophies of care.Alia holds a Master of Philosophy (UNSW), Master of Fashion & Textiles (RMIT) and a Bachelor of Design (UNSW) and has worked in the fashion and textile industry internationally and exhibited her work nationally.