| art.description.project | The work was realized through a collective process of food production (J. Doyle and A.C. Institute production team); the performance of a series of texts (written by M. Wilson, performed by C. O’Carroll); and a programme of YouTube screenings. The construction of the meal, and the selection of recipes used for this, were based on previous events produced under the aegis of the foodthing project, and were designed to propose linkages across micro-processes of daily food consumption and macro-processes of political and cultural economy.
The script for the event – included here as part of the documentation – indicates the ways in which the relationships between foodways, gustatory themes of aesthesis (ingestion, the salivating mouth, tongue, taste, and so forth) and the political and juridical dimensions of international food systems are woven into the form of a meal with courses of food interspersed with short interventions of text and image.
While building upon work previously done, the event also entailed the development of new elements, particularly with regard to the question of slave labour in the chocolate industry and the challenge in the US courts vis-à-vis the complicity and agency of the large chocolate multinationals (e.g., Cargill, Nestlé) with the practice of child slave labour.
In terms of the ongoing research process, the function of this event was threefold: (i) review of project development to date – in preparing a simple event with modest means, it was necessary to identify some of the core concerns and insights from previous work; (ii) content development – acquiring new objects and themes of investigation from participants and contributors; and (iii) development of the meal-event device as both mechanism of producing enquiry and means of presentation.
In this last function, the foodthing sampler menu allowed the further development of the device of the meal-event as a means to integrate diverse materials and themes into a coherent whole. This device of the meal-event allows wider terms of analysis and concrete experiences of bodily ingestion and social gathering around food to be brought together for a general non-specialist participant group.
A key challenge in this meal-event was working through several layers of delegation in terms of event production, whereas typically the foodthing has been based on direct hands-on engagement in the production process. The delegation process, is strictly speaking a process of co-production whereby certain aspects of the decision process are delegated to the team working on site. A key tension in this is the relationship between pragmatic demands of the location and available materials and means for food production and the wider conceptual investments of the project. This is a recurrent tension in all meal-events, however, it is accentuated by working remotely and through a delegated co-production.
The longer term goal is to render these tensions generative rather than simply to remove them. This is an ongoing challenge.
An important dimension of the event was to contextualize the foodthing with reference to a vast array of historical and ongoing food-based art practices. This was accomplished through the opening screen-show that looped while guests arrived and waited for the meal proper to begin. | sv |
