Each year, non-profit art organisation Residency Unlimited (RU) invites a curator to imagine a thematic residency that focuses on key issues of our times. This year, artists Siri Lee, Yoko Inoue, Lily Consuelo Saporta Tagiuri, Allie Wist, Carlos Rosales Silva, Rosa Nussbaum and Andrew Vigil-Emerson were selected from a wide pool of applicants for the Thinking Food Futures programme.
The programme reimagines the future of food centred on questions of food resilience in urban environments and food justice. One of the unique aspects of the initiative is that it is structured as a semi-studio and semi-think tank model that create important connections between individual practice and system thinking, addressing larger systemic issues.
The programme’s curator—Dr Livia Alexander—says that an estimated third of greenhouse gas emissions come from our food systems, and that the foods we eat are deeply impacted, endangered and transformed by climate change.
“Whereas sustenance embodies within its core definition a continuation of life through sustaining, nourishing and supporting, it also implies potential precarity, highlighting the bare minimum nourishment required for survival,” explains Alexander.
Thinking Food Futures aims to create a platform for various disciplines to come together for collaboration, and learn from different perspectives and understandings. So, while farmers try to find solutions around seeds and climate change, there are sociologists and political scientists, artists, designers and people in the creative industries, those engaged in hands-on production and researchers speculating about future possibilities.
Given the current demographic shifts driving urbanisation, access to food, food security and food resilience in cities are essential areas to examine as humanity faces escalating ecological crises, polarising inequality and new health risks. From December 12-13 and on December 18, RU has another upcoming series of lecture performances, panel discussions and exhibits looking at harnessing the creative potential to respond to the challenges of social inequality in the face of food scarcity and hunger.
The curators believe that at the moment, these questions are extremely tangled together and that their solutions do not only fall into the realm of professionals, but implicate all of us and further fall into the in-between blurry areas between all these fields. In the future, RU plans to continue offering the programme on an annual basis.
Link to the post on The New Indian Express
