[-empyre-] week three: ArtTechFood

Tue Mar 22 03:27:52 AEDT 2016

Hi everyone!

I have really enjoyed this discussion hosted by Amanda and am honored to be
part of a dialogue that includes so many brilliant artists. And thanks,
Renate, for making it possible for us all to come together via empyre!

Some background: I'll focus on my creative work here, which I undertake in
collaboration with Cary Peppermint. Our practice explores evolutions of
ecology, food, media, and memory in industrialized society. Our engagement
with that thing called "the environment" includes geographical, natural,
and virtual spaces but also the wild ecosystem of the human gut and the
interspecies and ecological relationships at play with every meal we eat.
Our goal is not to create solutions to the world's problems so much as to
simply adapt artistic methodologies to working with the public in order to
figure out, What is this world we live in? What can we know? What have we
forgotten? We create participatory situations and social sculptures in an
effort to bring to life new modes of feeling-perception and poetic
visibility.

Here's what we're working on these days:

EDIBLE ECOLOGIES
This is a series of projects that work collaboratively with local
communities (human, microbial, and ecological) to resuscitate endangered
food practices in order to facilitate recovery from a cultural memory
disorder that we call “industrial amnesia.” Our use of a discourse of
"problems" (amnesia) and "solutions" (art will help!) here is not
accidental. As environmental artists, we are often pushed to articulate our
work in a scientific manner: What's the problem? What's the solution? We
find that highly problematic because it closes down new ways to imagine, to
think, to experience and perceive. So we are adopting that discourse to
make our non-practical, non-instrumentalist artistic research "legible"
while attempting to break it at the same time. Cultural memory might be a
problem. Not just climate change. As Christiane Paul said so succinctly at
our recent panel discussion at NYU, "Art asks the questions we didn't know
need to be asked."

ECOLOGIES OF INCONVENIENCE
For many years I have been teaching Nikolaus Geyrhalter's film "Our Daily
Bread" in my Food Studies courses. It depicts scene after scene of
industrial food processes, some mundane, some horrifying. But what bothered
me about this film was that it didn't raise that many questions for my
students. A few scenes stuck out for them, especially the ones depicting
labor, which is often absent from even the most well-meaning food advocates
these days, but otherwise, the students all felt like, "Yeah, things are
fucked up. We get it."

Ecologies of Inconvenience (which is currently in sketch form) tries to
complicate the inquiry begun by "Our Daily Bread" by posing contradictions,
tensions, and unresolved questions, by actually dealing with the dilemmas
that we all face in being immersed in industrialized food but wanting
alternatives. It is also is autobiographical. For over a decade, Cary and I
have been maintaining a wilderness studio for half the year on a remote
50-acre property in the woods. Our dwelling there is off-grid, like really
off-grid, with no budget or fancy infrastructure, and so we have pioneered
all sorts of D.I.Y. systems to run water, to use a toilet, to manage waste.
These break down all the time, and we have to reinvent the wheel
constantly. The other half of the year, we live in a city with all the
modern conveniences. Building off this experience, and all the questions it
has inspired for us, Ecologies of Inconvenience juxtaposes industrial
infrastructure of food commerce with a series of personal gestures
performed by us that detail slower, more primitive practices. Preliminary
scenes portray urban quick-marts, fast-food restaurants, military
infrastructure, produce factories, and industrial agriculture (and more)
alongside us building grey-water systems, slow-cooking with microbial
fermentation, making meals from scratch, cooking with a solar oven, digging
out forest springs, and engaging in other off-grid acts. It's a meditation
on sustainability, practicality, reproductive labor, creativity, economics,
and the experience of time in modernity. Climate change might be an
"inconvenient truth," but so is the news that technology might not save us
and creating alternative systems is hard work. And we're also interested in
the possibility of death, death, and what comes after hope. Initial
research and shooting for this project was done during residencies at
CLUI's off-grid Southbase last year, and at Bemis. (Thanks to Amanda!)

OS FERMENTATION
Let me start this project by saying that OS Fermentation is not what it
seems. (I'm currently researching how artists "hack" or break teaching to
teach what might not be able to be taught. I recently had a conversation
with Shaun Leonardo about this re his "I Can't Breathe" Self-Defense
Workshop. The ostensible self-defense tutorial is the medium, a practical
experiential platform, to learn an ethics that is not able to be so easily
practiced or articulated.)

Our official description of OS Fermentation describes it as all the
following a slow-cooking class, a healing ritual, and a spiritual revival
of interspecies collaborations and new networks of open-source
micro-practices. It manifests in many ways, one of which was a three-part
salon series created through collaboration with Amanda at Bemis last year: (1)
a reading group about microbiology, public health, and the industrial food
system, followed by (2) a hands-on fermentation workshop for making veggie
krauts, hard cider, and wine, and two weeks later (3) a fermentation
tasting party, where participants enjoyed their creations in a communal
setting. These acts exist in a space between utility and imagination,
because practical applications and environmental ethics.

Fermentation is not the goal in this project. We don't simply LOVE
fermentation and have to share it with the world! (That's how most press
interprets the salon series.) Rather, we are using fermentation as a medium
and as medicine in this project: as a way to heal industrial amnesia and
generate feeling-perception of the life that we live, including human
beings as superorganisms, food as a sensual interspecies interaction,
bio-art and citizen science in the kitchen, food democracy and
independence, spiritual engagement with life/death cycles, and what Heather
Paxson micro-biopolitics, the "medicalization of food and eating," and the
modern "hyperhygienic social order." You can read more about the project's
start in the American industrial heartland of Omaha here in this essay we
wrote for ASLE:
http://www.asle.org/features/leila-christine-nadir-cary-peppermint-ecoarttech/.

SCHOOL OF LIVE CULTURE
We've also recently received an ASLE Community Grant for a new project that
will create new emergent micro-networks of food justice in the city of
Rochester, the 5th poorest city in the US, and also a hyper-segregated
society. Bringing together youth gardeners growing vegetables for their
food-desert neighborhoods and undergraduates from an elite R1 university,
School of Live Culture will not only build community between usually
disconnected (or segregated) populations; it also upends traditional models
of how universities interact with their immediate locales. Through School
of Live Culture, statistically at-risk youth will be the instructors,
teaching academically trained Sustainability undergrad students how to
garden, farm, and compost, reversing academic models of environmental
management and technoscientific training and expertise.

I'm excited to hear from others and to continue this dialogue!

Looking forward and back,
Leila

*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*:*.*.*.*
Leila Christine Nadir, PhD
Sustainability & Environmental Humanities
University of Rochester
Art//Food//Environment: www.EcoArtTech.net <http://www.ecoarttech.net>

On Fri, Mar 18, 2016 at 10:14 PM, Amanda McDonald Crowley <
amandamcdc at gmail.com> wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------
> Hello -empyre-ians,
>
> So as we enter week three of our ArtTechFood discussion, I am thrilled and
> honored to introduce this week's discussants, Nicole Caruth, Leila Nadir,
> and Jodi Newcombe.
>
> We've heard from Stefani and Marina on their mapping projects, as well as
> Hernani's urban ag interventions. Week 2 we had encounters with futuristic
> and practical art and food strategies from Mary Mattingly and Shu Lea
> Cheang. And many other interesting projects have been introduced besides.
> Personally, I have found it really useful to reflect on projects that have
> inspired me, and discover new ones besides.
>
> Nicole and Jodi will bring a curatorial eye on food justice and
> environmental justice issues, and I feel sure that Leila will talk to
> practical strategies on bio-futures (and pasts) that help us to contemplate
> more healthful futures.
>
> Over to our new discussants to talk about their work. I trust that past
> discussant will chime in as they feel inclined, and that you - empyre-ians
> might also contemplate contributions.
>
> I am re:sending this week's discussants bios below, for reference. Check
> out their web sites: they all do amazing work in this field and beyond...
>
> Amanda
>
>
> Nicole J. Caruth (US) is a writer, curator, and art education advocate.
> Her writing has appeared in a range of publications including ART news, C
> Magazine, Gastronomica, Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Public
> Art Review, Walker Art Center Magazine, and the Phaidon Press volumes
> Vitamin  D2 and Vitamin Green. She is the founding editor of Art21 Magazine
> (est. 2013). Currently, Nicole is the director of pedagogy and public
> practice at The Union for Contemporary Art. Situated in the historically
> African American enclave of Omaha, Nebraska, The Union addresses local
> social justice issues through an artist fellowship program, exhibitions,
> performances, youth classes, and more. Deeply committed to helping people
> live healthfully, in 2012 she founded With Food in Mind, a nonprofit
> developing art-based approaches to child obesity and nutrition disparities
> in low-income neighborhoods and communities of color. Nicole has written
> extensively about food in contemporary art and
>  has been called one of the leading voices on the subject.
> http://www.nicolecaruth.com/
>
> Leila Nadir (US) works as an artist, critic, and creative writer to
> explore evolutions of food, ecology, community, media, and memory. In
> collaboration artist Cary Peppermint, shecreates participatory situations
> that facilitate recovery from a cultural memory disorder they call
> "industrial amnesia," bringing endangered environmental practices into
> poetic visibility, feeling-perception, and simple acts of everyday life.
> Their projects have been supported by Bemis Center for Contemporary Art,
> Center for Land Use Interpretation, NY Foundation for the Arts, NY State
> Council on the Arts, Franklin Furnace, and numerous academic fellowships.
> Leila earned her PhD in English from Columbia University, is an Andrew
> Mellon Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow of Environmental Humanities, and
> currently teaches at University of Rochester as Lecturer of Sustainability
> and Environmental Humanities. She spends most of her time in the kitchen,
> and is currently writing a childhood memoir about the co
>  lorful marriage of her Afghan father and Slovak-American mother,
> including their frequent fights about food.
> http://ecoarttech.net
>
> Jodi Newcombe (AU) founded Carbon Arts following an international career
> as an environmental economist and sustainability consultant. Her work on
> natural resource management and policy design, green technology and low
> carbon urban design inform her work with the creative sector. Carbon Arts
> generates and evaluates creative models for engaging society in imagining
> and shaping a more sustainable future. Straddling the arts, economics,
> science, and technology, our projects foster innovation and dialogue
> between disciplines and the public as a means to address contemporary
> environmental challenges. We do this through targeted and timely public art
> commissions, events, workshops, exhibitions and research. We work with
> forward-thinking governments, businesses, artists and designers to inject
> creative talent and thinking into decision-making and to reach broad
> audience.
> http://www.carbonarts.org/about/
>
>
> --
> Amanda McDonald Crowley
> Cultural Worker / Curator
> http://publicartaction.net
>
> @amandamcdc
>
> food nostalgia is currently on view at Radiator Gallery until March 13
>
> -emprye- currently moderating thematic email listserv conversation on the
> topic #ArtTechFood through March 2016
>
> _______________________________________________
> empyre forum
> empyre at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au
> http://empyre.library.cornell.edu
>
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