still life 2016

Each bite is a political act. What, when, how, and why we eat can trigger inhumane working conditions in Spain, soil erosion in Central Africa, or slash and burn practices in the Amazon. The questions that interest us about daily food consumption have nothing to do with diets, recipes, or gourmet reviews but rather with CO2 emissions, fracking, or genetic engineering. Each bite is culture. Each swallow is politics. We want to position food as an essential, political theme at the center of society because daily calorie intake is not just a matter of pleasure and taste; it also reflects a society’s attitude toward life and how it thinks. Supposedly food comes first, then morals. In fact, though, food is almost always linked with moral perceptions. Every society, every culture chooses its food according to moral or ethical rules, designs its edible products based on ritual ideas and ordering systems, and consumes these in compliance with set rules within the community. The rules and design parameters in Western industrial countries follow the notions of a centralized, industrial society. We eat industrial design. This system of monocultures, mass production, warehouses, and fully stocked suburban supermarkets was neither created nor is it suited for sustainable food products. The system of food supply in the Western, civilized world contradicts biodiversity, sustainability, and our responsibility to future generations. The team of artists, scientists, and political activists submitting this proposal seeks to challenge the prevailing system through performance art. We do not believe the rules and design processes that govern our food are predetermined by nature or science but that they are shapeable.