Thesis: Liquid Tales
Daily sediments: a side dish to the main course of remembrance
Food is, to me, a precious tool for imagination because of its sensory stimulation: it initiates intimate and complex conversation with your own body. Considering bodies through the spectrum of food culture and food beliefs implies different levels of observation: an intimate scale of our own bodies and a larger societal scale, both allowing questioning the reality of a universal scale.
For my written thesis I looked into liquid nourishment as matter, symbols, beliefs, as historical vessels, as a tool to understand physical and social bodies. I realised that liquid needs to be held but it remains ungraspable.
I chose not to work with liquid but towards its opposite. The ambition here was to figuratively grasp the ungraspable through its literal materiality; to evoke liquid trough its absence.
I worked with food waste as a continuous and unlimited source of material. I collected, dehydrated, grounded and turned everything to powder, exhausting the matter to its utter. I made up a set of rules, gestures and a precise process that smoothly infiltrated my daily routine. Boarders between food habits, artistic practise and research process became porous and turned to membranes. I found myself surrounded by colourful and pungent powders. Powder was the main actor of my graduation work and I needed to stage them. So I built spaces for them.
One is part of the Rietveld building: a vitrine filled with layers of powders as a proof of time accumulating through matter. The other one is a stage: a box from which walls, ceiling and floor are covered with orange powder. The space is mat and dusty, smells like citrus and invites the body to penetrate it through senses.
I feel the need to build and propose new rituals, new ways of consuming and comprehending our food. I feel the need to update the symbols lying in food products and eating habits. Challenging and transcending my own culture is a way to invent new imageries and typologies, and to open possibilities for new intimate and collective imaginations.
