Gargi Bhattacharya (UK)

Gargi Bhattacharyya is Professor of Sociology at University of East London and the co-author of the forthcoming Empire’s Endgame: Racism and the British State (Pluto, 2021). The author of Rethinking Racial Capitalism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), Dangerous Brown Men (Zed, 2008) and Traffick (Pluto, 2005). Gargi’s writing and scholarly activity has focused on changing cultures of racism and the manner in which discourses of sexuality are deployed as techniques of power. They have recently been researching the histories of racial capitalism and the relationship to food. They have undertaken funded research examining: vulnerable workers and the hospitality industry; remittance circuits; political disengagement in Birmingham; changing understandings of poverty; trade unions and the integration of migrants in Europe. Gargi is a member of the Centre for Migration, Refugees and Belonging.

Ira Barker (Australia)

Ira Barker is a Gunditjmara and Barkindji artist who was born and still lives on Dja Dja Wurrung Country to this day.
Ira works as a cook at Castlemaine Indigenous catering company Murnong Mamas and manages a small bush-tucker plot at Gung Ho Growers at the Harcourt Organic Farming Co-op in Harcourt, Victoria. Ira facilitates educational workshops around the Mount Alexander and Central Goldfields Shires centred around growing, cooking and connecting with Indigenous Australian food. Ira is also a filmmaker, released their first work at the Central Victorian Indigenous Documentary Film festival in July 2021.

colectivo amasijo is a group of women from different parts of Mexico (Veracruz, Oaxaca, State of Mexico and Mexico City) united in their desire to actively reflect on the origin and diversity of our food. The collective was born in 2016 and ever since has been providing a platform for non-dominant voices: the narratives of women close to the land, stories that tell us the real cost of climate change and show us the way towards the regeneration of the land. As an open collective they cook collectively as a way to share, learn, care, conserve, relate and celebrate the (bio)diversity of food. Their projects are aimed at making visible the interdependence between language, culture and territory. Through these projects,- that can take the form of gatherings, dinners, research, actions, ceremonies, exhibitions, markets, seminars, film, talks or other – the collective builds the needed structures to form a community in which taking care of ourselves and taking care of the territory we inhabit is priority and we understand food as a network of relationships.

Leone Contini (Florence)

Leone Contini (b. 1976) studied Philosophy and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Siena.  His research unrolls at the intersection of anthropology, aesthetics and politics and his mediums include lecture-performances, collective interventions in public spaces, textual and visual narratives, drawings. He has held exhibitions and displayed works at: Madre, Naples; Pearl Art Museum, Shanghai; SAVVY, Berlin; HKW, Berlin; IAC, Lyon; Manifesta 12, Palermo; Fondazione Sandretto, Turin; Pistioletto Foundation, Biella; Delfina Foundation, London; Kunstraum, Munich; Khoj, New Delhi; Kunstverein Amsterdam; Villa Romana, Florence.  In 2018-2019 he was a fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart. In 2017 he won the second edition of the Italian Council award. In 2017 he collaborated with “TRACES – Transmitting Contentiou

Grace Gloria Denis’ work converges agricultural research with interactive installation, incorporating edible material, sound, and image to propose a convivial and comestible approach to critical inquiry. Implementing the meal as both a medium and a pedagogical tool, her work refers to participatory action research models, engaging in collaborations with actors in local food systems. Her work considers the meal, or quotidien interaction with edible matter, as a poetic tool of transmission, inviting a reimagination of sensorial relationships to consumption practices. She received her BFA from Cal Arts and her MFA from TRANS at Haute école d’art et de design de Genève (HEAD), with a focus on critical pedagogy and socially engaged practice. Her work has been exhibited in Mexico, the United States, France, Switzerland, Spain, Germany, Greece, and Morocco. Grace has taught and developed non-profit arts education programs for various institutions and recently published the book In, From, and With: Exploring Collaborative Survival. The book presents a collectively constructed lexicon by a constellation of contributors, proposing an array of embodied pedagogies, from walking to fermenting, including edible and non-edible recipes and a foreword by Anna Tsing.

Marta Fernández Calvo (Madrid)
In her work Marta speculates on the re-wording of built environments through a variety of collaborative methods specific to each situation, including those outside of architectural and artistic traditions. This engagement and the processes that stem from it translate into ephemeral interventions in galleries, public and domestic contexts. These interventions are at once socially engaged and participatory. Living in Italy and Ireland for eleven years and she has developed her practice at an international level working also in South Africa, Senegal, Morocco, Ireland, Italy and Spain amongst other countries.

Alana Hunt (Miriwoong Country)
Alana is an artist and writer who lives on Miriwoong country in the north-west of Australia. This and her long-standing relationship with South Asia—and with Kashmir in particular—shapes her engagement with the violence that results from the fragility of nations and the aspirations and failures of colonial dreams.
Alana studied in Sydney, Halifax and New Delhi, and since 2009 she has led several award-winning art and publishing projects. These have circulated in the Hansard Report of the Australian Parliament, as a reading in the history department of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, as a newspaper serial in Srinagar, Kashmir, and as an unofficial street sign at the base of Australia’s most under-utilised dam wall.  She has been working on evolving iterations of Cups of nun chai since 2010, most recently published by Yaarbal Books, and will present new work in The National 2021: New Australian Art at Carriageworks in 2021.

Stephen Loo (Australia)

For more than 25 years, Professor Stephen Loo has researched, taught and practiced in the transdisciplinary nexus of design, philosophy, art, performance and science. He has published widely in architecture and design theory, biophilosophy, posthumanist ethics, ecological humanities and experimental computational and digital thinking. He holds a PhD in architecture and philosophy from the University of Sydney. Recent books include Deleuze and Architecture (ed. with Helene Frichot 2012) and Poetic Biopolitics (ed. with Peg Rawes and Tim Mathhews 2016) and is currently working on Speculative Ethologies (with Undine Sellbach) on the relationship between entomology, psychoanalysis and ethics.

Stephen is a founding partner of award-winning design, architecture, interpretation and exhibition practice Mulloway Studio, whose projects have featured in the Venice Biennale in 2008 and 2014. He has a performance-philosophy based art practice and has shown internationally in Paris, Berlin, London, Phoenix, Prague, Sydney and Adelaide, and is part of an international collective, The Food Project.

Francis Maravillas (Taipei / Taiwan)

is Assistant Professor in the Critical and Curatorial Studies of Contemporary Art (CCSCA) program at the National Taipei University of Education. His research interests focus on contemporary art and visual culture in Asia and Australia, curatorial and 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 particularly interested in the various uses of food in performance and socially engaged practices in Asia, and the sensuous, affective and relational connections they engender in the context of the gallery/museum and public space. He has published journal articles, book chapters and exhibition catalogue essays on the Asia-Pacific Triennial exhibition series, Asian artists in the diaspora in Australia, and food and hospitality in contemporary Asian art. He co-curated the exhibition Bruised Food: A Living Laboratory at RMIT University Gallery in 2019. 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.

Elia Nurvista (Yogyakarta, Indonesia)
Elia Nurvista is an interdisciplinary artist who is interested in exploring various art media with an interdisciplinary approach and focus on food discourse. Apart from the food medium itself, Elia is also active in working with installations, videos, performances, and other performative forms. In 2015 she initiated Bakudapan, a food study group with colleagues from different disciplines. Bakudapan runs with the principle of complementarity and camaraderie between the members. With Bakudapan she has conducted research on food within the socio-political and cultural context. She is the co-curator of the Jogja Bienale 2021. She collaborates on the multi year research project Struggles for Sovereignty. She has curated ADAM LAB at TPAC (Taipei Performing Arts Center) with Transient Collective (2020), Struggle for Sovereignty platform (2020/2021) and participated several exhibition including Dhaka Art Summit in Dhaka (2020), Karachi Biennale in Karachi (2019) and The 9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art, at QAGOMA, Brisbane (2018) among others.

Lia Pa’apa’pa (Australia)
Lia is an artist whose ancestors hail from Samoa and the Luiseño nation of Southern California. Born and raised in Australia, Lia is committed to delivering innovative arts and cultural programming that support BIPOC communities.  Lia is an artist Creative Producer and Community Arts Cultural Development practitioner working across art forms.  Lia is developing her practice with a focus on ancestral arts and cultural practices that support mothers during the first 1000 days. Lia’s practice explores her cultural connections, learnings and nourishment as a Woman of Colour and mother living as diaspora in Australia. Lia’s cooking, hosting and sharing are deeply rooted in her desire to provide everyday solutions that support the wellbeing of her people

Joana Quiroga (Brazil)
Joana Quiroga’s work investigates everyday life and its philosophical depth. At the moment her main research is on how it is possible to reflect on social inequality through bread. Graduated in Philosophy (Ufes, Vitória, Brazil, 2006) and master in Philosophy of Art (Ufes, Vitória, Brazil, 2010, with Fapes scholarship), Joana thinks about her work in dialogue with social causes and struggles for civil rights.

Rain Wu (UK/Belgium)
Rain is a British-Taiwanese artist and architect living and working between London and where her research takes her. Her work is conceptually driven and materialises in different forms and scales from drawing, sculpture, food performance to architectural installation. She is currently working with the temporality of perishable materials as sculptural mediums to instigate questions and discussions around our manifold relationships with nature.She graduated from the Royal College of Art and University College London. Her artwork has been exhibited in Sharjah Biennial, Taipei Biennial, The Palestinian Museum, London Design Biennale, Lisbon Architecture Triennale; she is one of the Designers in Residence at the Design Museum (London) in 2016, an artist in residence at The Van Eyck (NL) 2018-9, and currently an associate lecturer at University of the Arts London.