online dialogues

Each conversation will happen online between 27-30 May 2021, last 1 hour and be live-streamed on our Youtube channel and Facebook Live. The registrations to be a speaker are now closed, the public will be able to attend each dialogue trough a live stream on our online channels. The timetable of the dialogue can be found end of the page.

The act of eating involves not only a muscular impulse to fulfil a need, but a series of decisions that interconnect nutritive, conceptual, ideological, and even metaphysical considerations. A bite makes a statement, whether it is related to the most intense sensory pleasure or the political stance implied by the choice of ingredients, their origin, and the way they were produced. By looking at our plate, we can interrogate the whole world, linked by underground networks of roots that spread across the planet, today amplified by computing systems and artificial intelligence.

In the last decade, resistance movements have emerged all over the world. Many of them have continued to evolve in terms of shape and organization, in part as a result of digital connections. In parallel, certain populist movements and systemic inequalities have become more visible, forcing us to recognize them collectively and to position ourselves in relation to them. In a moment of growing uncertainty and precariousness, the pandemic has made evident the fragility and interdependence of our globalized ecosystems.

While the possibilities of gathering are limited, the table and its surroundings have become familiar territories where reconfigured hospitalities are practiced. For foodculture days, these social choreographies around the table represent privileged moments of synchronisation that are able to generate solidarities, since food connects us to the living as well as to the landscape, to muzzled histories and to potential futures, between abundance and shortfall. The need to support decentralized forms of knowledge and experience the world from within local contexts has never been greater. The health crisis proves that, even if we are all in this together, we certainly do not experience it in the same way.

In this context, a return to "normal" is not an option for foodculture days. A deep questioning of our role as cultural actors as well as our modes of production has emerged, forcing us to think about the dynamics that weave together our ways of living, the ongoing ecological crisis and the pandemic. Instead of responding hastily to a situation that is still beyond us, we wanted to take these months as a field of reflexion, research and experimentation, and to consider the potential of a platform agile enough to absorb the shocks of uncertain times, and, at the same time, attempt to root foodculture days’ initiatives in tangible acts.

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In this framework and for this Chapter 2 of foodculture days, we propose a public program as a communal dialogue to reflect on our coexistences and entanglements through food.

This public program puts forward a series of 15 online dialogues, inviting everybody who is interested in these topics to take part, whether a specialist or not. The proposal is to dialogue, rather than to rely on a discussion. To discover possibilities with dynamic interactions, which focus on listening and not on counter-arguments. To think of new scenarios where all life forms can thrive. 

The main question is: “Cultivating new emergencies - how do we nurture collective imagination in dividing times?” From this main theme, the conversations spread on 15 open topics that aim to approach the subjects in a non-linear way, stretching through the 4 days of the biennale.

1. Eating our emotions - What are we trying to forget? 27 MAY, 10:00
2. Metabolic Thinking - how do we turn food into energy into social change into...? 27 MAI, 12:00
3. Thinking like a forest - What can agroecology teach us about social dynamics? 27 MAY 15:00
4. On Planetary Coexistence - how do we seat at the table with other species? 27 MAI, 18:00
5. Tasting the landscape - how do we reconcile nature and culture? 28 MAY , 10:00
6. Uproot bites - How can displacement/migration fertilize food narratives? 28 MAY, 12:00
7. Licking the screen - what are the sensorial possibilities of the virtual? 28 MAY, 15:00
8. On biodiversity loss - what’s on the tip of our tongues?  28 MAY, 18:00
9. Geopolitics and value - what do we eat when we eat?  29 MAY, 10:00
10. Sowing resilience - how do we feed self-organized resistances? 29 MAI, 18:00
11. Food and (her)story - how can you speak with your mouth full?  30 MAI, 12:00
12. Privileges and accountability - how do we cultivate global awareness? 30 MAY, 15:00
13. On modern rituals - how do we lay the table in a digital rush? 30 MAY, 13:00
14. Between the cracks - why nurturing community gardens? 30 MAY, 11:00
15. Against homogenization - how do we resist through home-cooking and care? 30 MAY, 18:00

The aim is to connect ideas, sensibilities and actions that we experience in our daily lives, and by doing so, surface the diversity of approaches towards these matters. From the emotional value implied in the act of cooking and eating, and the new perspectives that transcend the merely human; to the empowerment of social movements generating positive change, and the accountabilities implied on food narratives, the digital conversations will look to reveal the non-obvious possible futures for art, ecology, humanity and all the species.