Artists / Researchers
Joss Allen (Finland/Scotland)
Joss Allen can be found at the edges of the garden, amongst the weeds and compost heaps. Joss is an artworker and amateur gardener exploring how creative practices can shape earthy politics, community economies and ecological ways of being in playful, radical, responsive and meaningful ways. They are interested in collaborations across disciplines, peer education, storytelling and community building. Their work is influenced by time spent as a support worker for adults with autism, a labourer on an organic farm and a refuse collector, among others. Recently, Joss has worked as co-director of ATLAS Arts (maternity cover 2021–22) and project co-ordinator for Town is the Garden at Deveron Projects (2017–2020). They are currently a PhD candidate at the Institute for Global Sustainable Development, University of Warwick.
Jorge Menna Barreto (Brazil/US)
Throughout his practice as an artist and researcher, Barreto has let specific sites determine what he will build and, more recently, what he will eat. Interested in agroforestry, land art, site-specificity, plant-based food and multispecies assemblages, he considers our digestive system as a sculptural tool that has the ability to shape and regenerate the environment. His award-winning, long-term project Restauro: environmental sculpture was first presented at the 32nd Bienal of São Paulo in 2016 and travelled to the Serpentine Galleries in London, in 2017. In residency at the Jan van Eyck he worked collaboratively with Joélson Buggilla at the Food Lab, the Lab for Nature Research and the Printing & Publishing Lab, attempting to create an ecosystem that short circuits the surface of the page, the surface of the earth and the food on our plates.
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.
Marnie Badham (Australia)
With a twenty-five-year history of art and social justice practice Australia and Canada, Marnie’s research sits at the intersection of socially engaged arts practice, community-based research methodologies and the politics of cultural measurement. Marnie is currently focused on a series of creative cartographies registering emotion in public space; expanded curation projects on the aesthetics and politics of food; and a new book project The Social Life of Artist Residencies: connecting with people and place not your own.
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.
Yvonne Billimore (Finland)
Yvonne is an artist, curator, writer and editor based between Finland and Scotland. Their work facilitates situations for collective learning, exchange and experiences, with particular attention given to feminist, ecological and decolonial matters (and their intersections). For the past years, she has been thinking-with Feminist Collective Research Practices and is part of several working groups corresponding with this body of work. Yvonne is the associate curator of Rehearsing Hospitalities, Frame Contemporary Art Finland’s public programme for 2019 to 2023, and co-editor of the Rehearsing Hospitalities Companion series. Previously Yvonne worked as co-artistic director of ATLAS Arts (maternity cover 2021–22) on the Isle of Skye; and Programme Manager at the Scottish Sculpture Workshop (2015–18) in rural Aberdeenshire—both of which host residencies and collaborative projects/activities responding to their locales in all their complexities.
Kathrin Böhm (UK)
Kathrin is a London based artist. Her work is operating in and outside of the art world, practicing in the real economy and connecting different trans-local communities. Kathrin has expanded the terms of socially engaged practice through a wide range of co-produced complex organisational, spatial, visual and economic forms, which often start with familiar everyday formats, such as a school, a shop, wallpaper or a drink. She regularly teaches and publishes, and contributes as a researcher to the wider topics of New Economy, Usership of Art and the Production of Public Space.
Kathrin has established many evolving long term infrastructures such as the Rural School of Economics with Myvillages, Company Drinks and The Centre for Plausible Economies.
colectivo amasijo (Mexico)
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.
Madeleine Collie (Australia / UK)
is a writer, researcher, artist and curator who lives and works on the unceded lands of the Boon Wurrung and Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nations. She works with artists, activists, scientists, and institutions to expand the way publics experience ecological narratives.
She led The Ash Project (2016-2019) an art science collaboration examining plant human encounters in partnership with Kent Downs, Whitstable Biennale, Forest Research and Turner Contemporary. She has produced curatorial projects with Wellcome Collection (UK), Common Ground (UK), Liquid Architecture & CAST (Aus) Live Art Development Agency (UK), Connexiones Improbables (Spain), Australia Council for the Arts (Aus). She initiates the translocal Food Art Research Network (FAR) in 2020 through which artists share long term research practices beyond local contexts. She is a Teaching Associate in Curating Practices and Art History at Monash University.
Leone Contini (Italy)
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
Amanda Couch (UK)
Amanda Couch is an artist, researcher. Cutting across media, her art practice and research straddles the domains of performance, the live and recorded image, print and the book, sculpture, food, participation, and writing. Recent solo show: Extispicy in the Everyday(2018), Ivy Arts Centre, University of Surrey, Guildford. Performances include: Books as Bodies, Wellcome Library, London (2019); Our Palace of Intestines, University of Surrey (2018); A Woman Holding a Liver, ‘Acts Re-Acts Performance Lab’, Wimbledon Space (2017) and at Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery (2016), winning Best First-Time Presenter.
Creative Food Research Collaboratory (Canada)
CFRC germinates collaborations at the intersection of art and food studies, exploring how the arts can imagine—and therefore help to achieve—food security, food sovereignty, and food justice in Canada. The Collaboratory is based at the Center for Sustainable Curating at Western University (London, Canada), and was co-initiated in 2022 by Dr. Amanda White and Dr. Zoë Heyn-Jones with Research Associates Anahí González and Katie Lawson. The Creative Food Research Collaboratory foregrounds collaboration as methodology and seeks to cultivate networks and structures that will allow collaborative artistic practices and knowledge mobilization strategies around food issues to take root and flourish. Our work includes academic research, public events, teaching and workshops, as well as fundraising for community food initiatives. Our forthcoming pilot project is a curated publication series that pairs artists and research-creation practitioners with food studies scholars, food policy makers, and grassroots organizers to create “recipes” to address the most pressing issues related to food justice and policy in Canada.
Grace Gloria Denis’(Switzerland)
Grace’s 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.
Keg de Souza (Australia)
Keg de Souza is an artist of Goan ancestry who lives and works on unceded Gadigal land and explores the politics of space through temporary architecture, radical pedagogy and food politics. This investigation of social and spatial environments is influenced by architectural training, squatting and organising, as well as personal experiences of colonisation – from her own ancestral lands being colonised to living as a settler on other people’s unceded lands. Keg often creates projects that focus on pedagogy to centre voices that are often marginalised – for learning about Place. Keg has made projects for: South London Gallery; Artspace, Sydney; Setouchi Triennale; Biennale of Sydney; Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver; Delfina Foundation, London; Atlas Arts, Isle of Skye; Auckland Triennial and Jakarta Biennale. She is a PhD Candidate in the Wominjeka Djeembana Research Lab; Monash University.
Dupla Molcajete (Mexico) is an emergent collaborative practice between Mexico City-based researcher-artists and cultural workers Beatriz Paz Jiménez and Zoë Heyn-Jones. Dupla Molcajete works to create spaces for experimentation at the nexus of art, food, and culture from Mesoamerican and hemispheric perspectives. Our collaborative practice centres food justice and sustainability, leveraging the resources of art and university spaces to engage with wider communities. We privilege ancestral knowledge and (perma)cultural practices between Mexico and Canada—and across the hemisphere—through cooking, eating, talking, writing, curating, publishing, collaging and making plant-based photochemical images (among other practices). Our recent projects include an ongoing exploration of the Mesoamerican herb epazote through plant-based photochemical image-making (phytograms, anthotypes, etc.) and cultural histories; a chapter on Mexican action artist Roberto de la Torre’s project Harina y epazote [Flour and Epazote] (2010-11) in a forthcoming anthology; and the nascent Entomofagía: Ancestral and Future Foods research-creation project that explores edible insects’ potential for food security and climate action which is generously supported by the Canada Council for the Arts.
Marta Fernández Calvo (Spain)
Marta is a visual artist and researcher based in 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. She has exhibited at No Soul for Sale Tate Modern (London), Utopia Station 53rd Venice Biennale and To want to seem night Ca2m (Madrid). In 2019 she was resident at Delfina Foundation (London) as part of the Politics of Food program, where she developed the performance Food Chorus presented at the Victoria & Albert Museum and at the Centro Cultural de España in Mexico. In 2021 Fernández Calvo developed the project I turn bad things away in collaboration with Ruta del Castor and in residence at SOMA and Proyecto Público Prim (Mexico City). The project was presented at Zona MACO, Proyecto Público Prim and Ex Convento del Carmen (Guadalajara). She is currently developing Cuidadorxs Invisibles project, winner of the Art for Change call of ‘la Caixa’ Foundation. 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.
Shalini Krishan and Anumitra Ghosh Dastidar (India)
Shalini and Anumitra are part of a team that run EDIBLE ARCHIVES a project sited in Goa that researches indigenous Indian ingredients, working directly with small farmers, to showcase these ingredients and the cultures around them at its eponymous restaurant and kitchen garden. They write that “Since each person has an edible archive of their own, consisting of all the foods they’ve ever eaten, Edible Archives aims to create entries into the collective sensory catalogue that belongs to all the people involved in growing, sourcing, creating or eating a meal, via the use of indigenous ingredients.”
Alana Hunt (Australia)
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.
Malini Kochupillai (India)
Malini is a Delhi based photographer and curator whose practice examines the public realm of cities as an alt site for art interventions and social engagement. She develops site-specific projects, primarily in collaboration with like-minded artists and curators, that engage with artists to create accessible, relatable and compelling works that aim to spark new conversations and ideas. Her work is driven by the firm belief that thoughtful creative practices can offer an increasingly volatile world a moment of pause and self-reflection.
In 2018, Malini co-founded Tenacious Bee Collective in rural Himachal Pradesh, nestled in the Western ranges of the Himalaya, with the aim of finding ways to promote collective community action to mitigate the economic and ecological challenges facing these fragile landscapes. By learning from the way bees work together for the survival and resilience of their hive, Tenacious Bee is working closely with our agrarian community to preserve traditional knowledge systems around beekeeping, facilitating organic farming practices and restoring local biodiversity, while creating a lively space for a healthy exchange of ideas between artists, scientists, beekeepers, and the community.
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.
Rubiane Maia (UK & Brazil)
Rubiane is a Brazilian visual artist, Her artwork is an hybrid practice across performance, video, installation and text, occasionally flirting with drawing and collage. She is attracted by states of synergy, encompassing the invisible relationships of affect and flux, and investigates the body in order to amplify the possibilities of perception beyond the habitual. In 2014/15 she launched the book ‘Self Portrait in Footnotes’ and participated in the exhibition ‘Modos de Usar’ at the Museu de Arte of Espírito Santo. In 2015, she took part in the exhibition ‘Terra Comunal – Marina Abramovic + MAI’, at SESC Pompéia, São Paulo with the long durational performance ‘The Garden’ (2 months). In the same year, she produced her first short film ‘EVO’ that premiered at the 26th Festival Internacional de São Paulo and 22nd Festival de Cinema de Vitória.
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.
Mariana Martinez Balvanera (Mexico & The Netherlands)
Mariana is founder of COCINA COLABORATORIO a mobile and on-site project that brings farmers, scientists, creatives and chefs together around the kitchen table to connect, exchange knowledge and prototype new trans-disciplinary solutions to farming; a test ground for ideas that conciliate land restoration, conservation, food production and better livelihood in farming communities. A response to the lack of connection between disciplines that are key for new alternatives towards more sustainable and just futures. Mariana graduated with a Bachelor of Interior Architecture from CENTRO in Mexico City 2011, and holds a Master in Narrative Environments from Central St Martins (UAL), London. With diplomas in “Curatorial practice for public spaces” and “Where Art Meets Design” (ELISAVA School of Design Barcelona). Among others, she has collaborated to create the Mediamatic Biotoop, a space for bioarts and future agriculture in Amsterdam; with Estudio Teddy Cruz, designing socio-spatial interventions to rethink post-war housing schemes in London; with Cascoland, creating performatic participation and collaboration tools in public spaces; and is currently resident artist at Pollinaria, space for art in the rural. She is a guest lecturer at arts and design universities CENTRO, ENAP, Royal Academy of Art (The Hague) and The Rietveld Academy (Amsterdam).
Elia Nurvista (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.
Sofía Olascoaga (Mexico)
Sofia’s practice is focused in the intersections of art and education, through the exploration of encounters, think-tanks, and public programs. Sofia was Co-curator of the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo Incerteza Viva; Academic Curator at MUAC (Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporáneo – UNAM) in Mexico City, 2014–15; Research Curatorial Fellow at Independent Curators International, 2011; and Helena Rubinstein Curatorial Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program, 2010. Sofia is a member of Another Roadmap for Arts Education, of Red de Conceptualismos del Sur, and has contributed in specific events with the network Arts Collaboratory. Her long-term research project, Between Utopia and Disenchantment (Entre utopía y desencanto), focuses on the collective memory and genealogies stemming from intentional community models developed in Mexico in past decades, addressing the ideas posed by Ivan Illich at the Centro Intercultural de Documentación (CIDOC), and its influential role in the practice of many Mexican and international thinkers and various self-organised initiatives. Recently, she has been developing the ongoing project The Nurturer: Cooking to Learn (La Nutridora: Una cocina para aprender).
Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez (Mexico/Netherlands)
Yasmine Ostendorf is the founder of many initiatives at the intersection of art and ecology, including the Green Art Lab Alliance (gala)- a network of 60 art orgs across Asia, Latin-America and Europe working towards climate justice, the Future Materials Bank -a platform for knowledge exchange on sustainable materials for artists-, and the Nature Research Department at the Jan van Eyck Academy (NL). She has been curator-in-residence in various institutions, including Kunst Haus Wien (Austria), Ecologic Institute (Germany) Valley of the Possible (Chile), C-platform (China), Bamboo Curtain Studio (Taiwan), with colectivo amasijo (Mexico), Labverde (Brazil) and Capacete (Brazil). After having worked on a shiitake farm in Brazil during the pandemic, she is currently working on a new book called ‘Becoming Fungal’. The book will be published by Valiz (NL) early 2023. She is based in Mexico.
Clare Qualmann (UK)
Clare is an artist/researcher whose work focuses on participatory, site specific, and experimental modes of contemporary creative practice. She was a founding member of the Walking Artists Network. East End Jam is an ongoing artwork that celebrates the unexpected fruitfulness of the urban environment. Through walking, foraging, picking and preserving it instigates an active, activist and creative way to interact with a place in relation to their edibility. The project addresses challenges resulting from the UK context of austerity politics including food poverty, access to green spaces and social isolation.
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.
Meenakshi Thirukode (India)
Meenakshi is a writer, researcher, and educator in the fine arts, and has previously worked as a curator. She runs ‘School of Instituting Otherwise,’ which is a space of unlearning, dedicated to navigating ‘study’ as a radical tool of political agency. Her areas of research include the role of culture and collectivity in the sub-continent within the realm of a trans-nomadic, transient network of individuals and institutions. Her recent projects include organizing the Here, There and Everywhere conference at MAC Birmingham, UK as part of the India-UK 70 years celebration, and Out of Turn, Being Together Otherwise, exploring performance art histories in collaboration with Asia Art Archive (AAA) at Serendipity Arts Festival, Goa, India. Her chapter Towards a Public of the Otherwise, will be published in the Routledge Companion Series for Art in the Public Realm in 2020.
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.
