Comfort Commons and Radical Red Hots (or: The Politics of Comfort Food)
Juliane Foronda | Stéphane V. Bottéro (FR / CA)
This event in two parts takes the seemingly simple hot dog as a catalyst into a larger conversation regarding support, access, care, class, migration. It starts with a workshop that aims to unpack the dynamics of comfort and food, weaving together materials from theory, architecture, cooking, and poetry, followed by a convivial gathering around food and drinks in foodculture days’ open kitchen turned temporary hot dog stand.
𓇣 Menu :
Hot dogs (vegan, meat option on request) with pickles
Bar: Local beer from Brasserie Haut Lac
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Foronda+Bottéro is a newly formed duo exploring and challenging contemporary notions of care and hospitality by researching comfort food practices. In contrast with the capitalist appropriation of care and the market of feeling good, comfort foods speak to a working-class cultural heritage, and resistance against food gentrification, but also means to cope, to stick together, and to share.
Juliane Foronda (she/her, *1991), is a Filipina-Canadian artist, writer, and researcher. Her work is invested in notions of radical care, feminist hospitality, and traditions of gathering, and is marked with an investment in the relationship between architecture/space and emotion. Through her work and research, she’s constantly asking and (re)visiting the questions: do we (as women) want to, and why do we have to? as a means of unpacking how domestic practices shape our understanding in cultural, societal and political ways with their ability to preserve and decolonize. Working predominantly through object, intervention and text, her practice is influenced by found and fabricated structures, built environments, and hidden labour. Her work negotiates how these notions play with the tension between reality and possibility, truth and imagination, knowing and not knowing.
She earned her MA in Fine Arts from Listaháskóli Íslands/Iceland University of the Arts, and her BA (Hons.) in Studio Art from the University of Guelph. She’s currently based in Glasgow and Toronto.
Stéphane V. Bottéro (he/him, *1987) works at the intersection of social practice, installation, education, writing, gardening and cooking. He is interested in the entanglements of community, materiality, body and place. Based on site-specific research and durational interventions, his practice seeks to open spaces to unlearn and unsettle ways of inhabiting the world. It involves participative approaches to collectively explore and recompose the emotional, sensorial and symbolic attachments that connect us to the land we live on.
His recent works, such as the ongoing, long-term projects School of Mutants and Notes towards a permacircular museum, combine assemblies, happenings and community education formats to explore pedagogies of repairing and institutional transformation, using ecological and decolonial perspectives.
In addition to a master’s degree in environmental science, he holds an MFA from Central Saint Martins (London). His work has been exhibited internationally at biennials, museums, and festivals, including: ZKM, Karlsruhe; Centre Pompidou Metz; 12th Berlin Biennale; 14th Dakar Biennale; RAW Material Company, Dakar; Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam; 12th Taipei Biennial; 7th Oslo Triennale; Le Lieu Unique, Nantes; Sheffield DocFest.
He collaborates regularly with ZKM and has had institutional collaborations with Taipei Fine Arts Museum, NA Project (Paris), Institut Kunst (Basel), dOCUMENTA (13). In 2018, he co-initiated School of Mutants, a collaborative art and research platform in Dakar.