[-empyre-] time is of the essence

[Renate Terese Ferro]

Thanks you Catherine and Marissa, 
I am fascinated so much by the sour dough DIY bread baking and somewhat nostalgic in fact.  My mother was a sour dough enthusiast and made bread a few times per week.  She also tended a large garden, made jams, jellies, pickles and canned and froze many of the vegetables that she harvested in her huge garden.  This all sounds so nostalgic now to me but she worked at home all day incredibly hard from morning to night time.  The frost over the last few days prompted me to go out to my own garden to pick the very last batch of late lettuce I planted in August. I barely had the time to make it to the garden before dark because today was a long teaching day for me.  “Rhythms,” “cycles”, are at the heart of this presence as you wrote as does “nurturing” and “attention.” For me time is of the essence. 

Catherine and Marisa I’d love to hear about  your art practices and how food extends from your research through to your art production.   Some month’s ago Amanda McDonald Crowley hosted an entire month of guest artists and researchers whose practice revolved around food, nurturance, and the environment.  -empyre- subscribers Leila Christine Nadir and Cary Peppermint have been doing fermenting and fermenting workshops for the last few years. Leila might be lurking in perhaps and could share a bit about their work. 

Looking forward to both of you sharing some recent work.  And empyre subscribers anyone else doing food as it might relate to contamination? 

Also please feel free to post photos on our FB and twitter pages.  
 
Best, 
Renate


Renate Ferro
Visiting Associate Professor
Director of Undergraduate Studies
Department of Art
Tjaden Hall 306
rferro at cornell.edu





On 11/8/17, 12:23 AM, "empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of Catherine Grau" <empyre-bounces at lists.artdesign.unsw.edu.au on behalf of catherine.grau at googlemail.com> wrote:

>----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------Just a quick response to Marisa and questioning feasibility of
>remediation...
>Maybe rather than remediation, we can think about transformation.
>Cultivating transformation.
>
>On a small scale (for now), recovering traditional / ancient cultures of
>food-making, such as making bread with sourdough or lievito madre, are a
>path for disrupting the dominant commercial food paradigms of highly
>processed foods that cater to global markets and economic viability. Rather
>than having GMO seed monopolies and a long shelf life of flour, we opt for
>the nutrition and longer shelf life of a handmade sourdough bread, which
>maybe requires returning to local and small scale grain farming.
>Besides the glyphosate tangent, what I struggled with most in making bread
>with natural leaven were the rhythms, cycles, the time commitment, the
>process of nurturing and attention... The form of presence it entices.
>Working with an obviously living agent, a living process. But the fact that
>it is difficult to balance DIY bread baking with precarious contemporary
>urban lifestyle is also what is actually so exiting and promising about it.
>What would it look like to restructure my lifestyle around symbiotic
>nourishment?
>
>I listened to this interview with Anna Tsing today where she speaks about
>her book "Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet":
>http://edgeeffects.net/anna-tsing/
>And, although I struggle, I would love to find the enthusiasm with which
>she engages the subject of contamination.
>What I love about her is this radical openness to the concept of change
>rooted in the celebration of life that is surviving and emerging from the
>"ruins".
>
>I'm just beginning to nurture that narrative. Hope it rises!
>
>xo
>Catherine
>
>