Dana Haire
She/they
Dutch/British, 1994
danahaire.com
Thesis: Refined, Granulated, White - The reProduction of a Menu
Much of my process involves seeking, or: “fleshing out a language that suits my gait”, to borrow from Ima Abasi Okon.1 This often translates or transcribes into iterative / sequential making processes as a method of inquiry.
Leading up to graduation however, this ‘language’ had gotten rather.. sticky
My bachelor’s thesis "Refined, granulated, white: the reproduction of a menu", metaphorically 'digests' sugar’s colonial legacy from Dutch/British perspective.
It points out the grains of sugar within the gaps of the archive, and how its colonial legacy flavours the hegemenic (white) narratives, and how these narratives are embodied, and reproduced through race, health, fatfobia, and the rational / productive ideal.
'The White Cube is Made of Sugar' "chews on" the topics explored in my thesis.
Drawing on Sylvia Wynter's distinction between plot and plantation, the installation consists of a diptych: 'The Lab' and 'Asylum for the Unproductive'. Together, they examine how extractivism operates through abstraction and preservation.
'Asylum for the Unproductive' sits in contrast and houses sugar creatures that inhabit the gaps, failures and excesses left outside productive systems. Celebrating the challenges of working with sugar materially, the work creates space to consider what escapes preservation, resists abstraction, and what remains excluded from dominant histories.
