On the 10th of November Food Art Research Network and Liquid Architecture hosted a digital listening and eating event with invited guests as part of larger art-research project between RMIT, UNSW and partners. Meeting together we consider the intersection of the politics of listening and the politics of food with provocations from artists Stephen Loo, Keg de Souza, Elia Nurvista and Alana Hunt. The collective meal asked that we attend to the politics of listening, remembering that we are vibratory, sounds act on our bodies, on our metabolisms and shapes our sense of being together. Melissa Van Drie reminds us that “Food is a meeting place, a performance of transformations” and “there are myriad vibrational filaments set into motion between animals, plants, organic and inorganic materials that permit humans to eat.” (Van Drie, 132)
Over the four courses artists shared morsels from their creative practice to examine how eating and the mediation of the various modes of attention (tasting, smelling, seeing, feeling, hearing) are (and are not) available in a shared online experience, from our disconnected contexts of culture and place. This shared performative dining experience aims to connect bodies and geographies to notions of justice through complex and entangled social realities and ecological histories. These works connect us to the wider earthly metabolisms that we engage with as we imbibe, consume and are even eaten by larger geologies, specific violence and longer time frames that haunt the diners at a table.
Curated by Madeleine Collie, Marnie Badham & Stephen Loo (Food Art Research Network).
Over three courses and amuse bouche interludes, the artist presented sounds and readings from much larger research projects.
Professor Stephen Loo, Careful Whispers, three parts, entree, main course and desert. These tracks are best listened to through headphones
Keg de Souza, Human Vessel, created by Madeleine Flynn and Tim Humphrey, this is an excerpt from a multichannel sound installation as part of Keg de Souza’s Not a Drop to Drink, presented at Arts House in 2021. (this work is best heard through headphones)
Elia Nurvista, The Sound Of Mollo, video, made with Lakoat Kujawas; Dicky Senda and Marlinda Nau (Mama Fun) http://lakoatkujawas.blogspot.com
Alana Hunt, Cups of nun chai, video of readings from the book published by Yaarbal Books in 2020
This is a special collaboration between Food Art Research Network, Liquid Architecture, CAST research at RMIT, and UNSW School of Art and Design. The event is a pilot for a longer term research project with partners 4A Centre for Contemporary Asian Art and Performance Space in Sydney and the National Taipei University of Education.
This project takes place online, and across multiple unceded Indigenous Lands. Liquid Architecture and Food Art Research Network acknowledge the people of the Kulin Nations as the custodians of the lands on which we work. We pay our respects to indigenous Elders, past, present and emerging.
