poetic_food
Roberto de Luca - Alessandro Rolandi
In modern culture, food has achieved a very important symbolic status as the embodiment of our cultural differences. Food cultures are the resulting process of thousands of years of research and refinement in which history plays a predominant role together with that of nature and culture. With this project Alessandro Rolandi and Roberto de Luca wish to blur the unresolved divide between nature and culture and transform the association between food and art in a catalyst to expand the conversation about the sociopolitical aspects of health, ethics, internationalism and localism.
Poetic Food is imagined as a poetic and critical encounter at the crossroad between socially engaged art, food production, market economy, analogic and digital communication. It addresses the local communities in Bern and Thun and it is conceived with elements from the gift economy and from the barter economy brought together in the context of a public space event. The exchange of fruit and vegetables for a creative gesture, recorded through a digital platform, is meant to question the notions of currency and value and transform the nature of the relationships between the different participants from an ordinary quantitative level into an unusual, imaginative and qualitative one.
Poetic Food’s existence is articulated on a collaborative and participative process involving artists as organizers and facilitators, local biological farmers as providers of fruit and vegetables and the local community of citizens in Bern and Thun as the final activators of this ‘micro-utopian’ event which is meant to choreograph an experience where the entanglement of art and life can generate a broader dialogue about the ethics of production, distribution and consumption and foster new possibilities of social imagination.
The messages and texts collected via a whatsapp group in exchange for grocery, together with a photographic and video documentation and a critical and curatorial introduction, will be made available online and also be published in a book.
Poetic Food inscribes itself in the broad conceptual frame of the “food diplomacy interventions”, where food is used as a platform for a critical dialogue to make global issues visible by focusing on local concerns. It attaches itself to various references, from Joseph Beuys’s ‘Social Sculpture’, to N.Bourriaud’s ‘Relational Aesthetics’, reaching out to the most recent and academically established field of ‘Social Practice’ as elaborated by theorists like Grant Kester and embodied in the projects of artists like Pablo Helguera and Rick Lowe.