This is a long-term project focusing on the impact of our food production and consumption habits on the environment, and researching how excessive agriculture and our cultural eating habits can contribute to the overuse of resources, degradation of land, and forms of exploitation. Despite climate change, ecological constraints put few limitations on our culinary cultures, and we are able to continue our culinary traditions in latitudes much higher than where we are from, use colonial sources for crops, and introduce neo-colonial pathways to have access to fresh food all-year-around.
As someone whose culture is deeply rooted in food and collective eating, I look at how we eat our land, our cultural and emotional connection to food based on where it’s grown, and less extractivist practices such as disappearing knowledge of foraging. How does our relationship to food differ when it’s locally sourced or imported from 3000 km away? How can we reform and transform our eating experiences? How do we shape our collective experience around food and create more sustainable models?
Within this project, I’m curating various programs around the globe, taking part in residencies, bringing different discourses together, and collaborating with food historians, artists, thinkers, researchers, designers, chefs, and foraging practitioners together to examine Western food consumption through geographies of mass food production. As I’m bringing this research together, I’m exploring alternative ways of curating through discussion and community-based practices that seek long-lasting outcomes and potential nodes of solutions.
*Working title.
CURERA - Research Residency
A nomadic residency organized by Konstfrämjandet Norrbotten, where I had a chance to learn about indigenous land relations of Sámi peoples and politics of land use, indigenous plant and food knowledge, and more. The residency consisted of meetings with local artists, artisans, reindeer herders, researchers, chefs, and those with ancestral knowledge of plants & food, as well as archive and museum visits.
HARVESTING RESILIENCE - Workshop Series
Curated as part of Oyoun's larger program Listening to the Land, the workshop series intends to decolonize and reclaim urban landscapes and ecological narratives from the lens of BIPOC and people with migration backgrounds, and re-establish connection with the plant world and its edibles.
NETTLES IN MY HAIR - Participatory Performance
This is a participatory performance/discussion where crying is a form of reclamation, which aims to uncover and release layers of suppressed knowledge, emotions, and narratives that are intertwined with our food systems and weakened plant relations.
MA UMI - Research Residency
As part of this research, I will look into the specific situation of the agricultural and food sectors in Ishigaki, and extend the conversation to aquaculture. Ishigaki Island provides a distinct case with its meat-based cuisine compared to mainland Japan and its ability to grow highly demanded tropical fruits by the Global North while focusing on microalgae farms.
