Mouthings Symposium

A symposium day of conversations, eating and discussion, hosted on a long table with performances, talks and demonstrations by artists and critical thinkers, exploring intimate and global complexities of food production. Lunch was created from our discussions and shared collectively.

With performances, talks and demonstrations:

Under/Valued Energetic Economies’ and ‘Recipes For Resistance’

Raju Rage

These current projects are in progress exploring value, care, sustainability, colonialism, capitalism and alternative economies and memory, migration, adaptability and resistance respectively.

Becoming with Wheat (and Other More-Than-Human Others)

Amanda Couch

‘Becoming with Wheat (and Other More-Than-Human Others)’ explores our companioning with wheat as well as the other human and more-than-human entities that are entangled within this relationship. Through cultivation, observation, conversation, filming, photography, anthotype making, etching/nature printing, wheat weaving, performance, writing, cooking and eating, Amanda Couch hopes to practice a more sensitive way of being in the world, to connect landscape, food and the body.

East End Jam

Clare Qualmann

Clare shared her experiences of East End Jam a walking, foraging, picking a preserving project that celebrates the unexpected fruitfulness of the urban environment. This followed an urban foraging expedition led by Clare in Folkestone earlier in the festival.

Casa De Comidas

Marta Fernández Calvo

Casas de Comidas is an intriguing phenomenon whereby power was seized by women through food and recipe-sharing during the dictatorship in Spain. This talk examines both the historical context as well as the current situation in which social changes are precipitating the decline of the tradition whilst the recipes it produced continue to echo through family dinners and kitchens.

Lunch – provided by Custom in conversation with Raju Rage

POTATO contours and migrations

Daniella Valz Gen

A mytho-poetic meandering through stories of the potato, exploring the potatoes ecology, based on indigenous kinship with the non-human. This is both an origin story and a hero’s journey about a root vegetable that has shaped migrations across the world

The Cucuzza Channel Drift / The Channel Drift / Channel Drift /

Leone Contini

As vessels to secure and disperse genetic information across space and time, seeds rove and germinate beyond the State borders, transmuting foreign soils into a piece of home, from the Chinese family-farms in Tuscany or the Bengalese ones in the countryside of Palermo, to the Italian gardens in the industrial periphery of Lyon. Old and new migrants, future natives.

Deprivatizing the Digestive System

Jorge Menna Barreto

The fires in the Amazon rainforest have made it to the headlines around the globe. Despite the international population’s concern, little has been said about why these fires are happening and what will become of these vast areas. What does art have to do with that and how can we engage in such issues?

Gaping Maw

Helen Davison

An intermittent performance work exploring the role of the mouth in vocal / sensorial / palpable communication. Building on previous work exploring the mouth and the voice.

What Next for Kent Farmers

Rajindra Puri

Dr Raj Puri trained as an ecological anthropologist and ethnobiologist, and over the past 25 years has been studying the historical ecology of a rainforest valley in Indonesian BorneoHe is now thinking about how anthropologists can contribute to climate-change science and specifically developing mixed methods for studying local responses to environmental change. To this end, he is now studying responses to complex transformations in rural landscapes in Europe (iberian cork oak landscapesand Kent agriculture).

Part of SOMETHING HELD IN THE MOUTH