The latest announcements, events and articles on Gaia Art Foundation projects, artists and collaborators.
Christine Eyene
Christine Eyene is an art historian and curator. She is a Lecturer in Contemporary Art at Liverpool John Moores University and Research Curator at Tate Liverpool. She is also completing her PhD in Art History at Birkbeck, University of London.
Eyene is the founder of Bikoka Art Project, a new initiative developed in the village of Bikoka in Lolodorf (Cameroon), to provide creative and professional opportunities to young people and women. Through this project, she is also embarking on new research into Lolodorf’s history, traditional knowledge, natural environment, and contemporary culture.
In the context of Orchids, she is currently presenting Portrait of a Community – Features of a Land, a photographic display by Cameroonian artist Yvon Ngassam, depicting the people and landscapes of Lolodorf. She also curated a soundscape with field recordings by Ngassam and compositions by sound artist Elsa M’bala.
Christine Eyene has organised exhibitions internationally. She is currently artistic director of the Biennale Internationale de Casablanca (2022-2023). In 2021-2022 she was on the selection committee of The London Open 2022 (Whitechapel Gallery), Jerwood/Photoworks Awards 2022, and member of jury of the Turner Prize 2022.
Cooking Sections
Cooking Sections examines the systems that organise the world through food. Using site-responsive installation, performance, and video, they explore the overlapping boundaries between art, architecture, ecology and geopolitics. Established in London in 2013 by Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe, their practice uses food as a lens and a tool to observe landscapes in transformation. They have worked on multiple iterations of the long-term site-responsive CLIMAVORE project since 2015, exploring how to eat as humans change climates. In 2016 they opened The Empire Remains Shop.
Their work has been exhibited at Tate Britain, Serpentine Galleries, SALT, Bonniers Konsthall, Lafayette Anticipations, Grand Union, Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh, Atlas Arts, HKW, Storefront for Art and Architecture; the Taipei Biennial, 58th Venice Biennale, Istanbul Biennial, Cleveland Triennial, Shanghai Biennial, Los Angeles Public Art Triennial, Sharjah Architecture Triennial, Sharjah Art Biennial, Performa17, Manifesta12, and New Orleans Triennial among others. They have been residents at Headlands Center for the Arts, California; and The Politics of Food at Delfina Foundation, London. They are part of British Art Show 9. They lead a studio unit at the Royal College of Art, London, and were guest professors at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich.
Cooking Sections were nominated for the Turner Prize in 2021. They were awarded the Special Prize at the 2019 Future Generation Art Prize and were nominated for the Visible Award for socially-engaged practices. Daniel is the recipient of the 2020 Harvard GSD Wheelwright Prize for Being Shellfish.
This multi-part evening opens with a viewing of the first iteration of Maya Marshak’s work Vision Fields. Produced during her residency, this mural, comprised of painting and moving image projection, is an outcome of her research in South Africa and the UK around lost agroecological knowledges.
Following the viewing, L. Sasha Gora will deliver a lecture (18:30) titled Down the Wrong Way: Toward an Environmental History of Cuisine, considering the idea of culinary extinction through the ways recipes map how cultures eat and adapt to the worlds around them.
Responding to the themes of environmental and culinary ghosts explored in Maya and Sasha’s work, David Bates will then present Against the grain… and back again, sharing with guests a selection of wheat grains and breads. This will include sourdough bread made with a recipe devised specifically for the evening, which will include ancient, heritage and modern grains. Together, these encompass the past, present and potential future of our interaction with wheat. David is the Library and Information Services Manager at Chatham House (the Royal Institute of International Affairs) who Maya met during her research into agricultural policies as a part of her residency supported by Chatham House.
Finally, bringing the event to a close, Sasha will be offering a ‘mock mock turtle soup’, as featured in her lecture.
Vision Fields
Maya Marshak
A ‘vision-field’ is the area which can be seen while the eye is focused on a fixed point. Maya’s work looks at how ideas of control and standardisation rooted in post-enlightenment thinking and enacted through imperial and green revolution agriculture have impacted agroecological knowledge, practice and ecologies – and how they continue to shape agricultural visions in the face of climate change.
With a previous focus on maize in South Africa, and here in the UK, through a lens on wheat and an interest in patterns, Maya has been tracing the ideas underpinning industrial agriculture and the social-ecological worlds that these ideas have created and displaced.
During her residency at Delfina supported by Chatham House, Maya has been exploring archives, visiting farms and scientific research spaces, and talking to people with knowledge about wheat farming. During this process she has been ‘collecting ghosts’ from wheat’s ancient and vast journey, as it has crossed continents and climatic zones and shape-shifted in relation to ideas, politics, science, climates and social-ecological entanglements. These ghosts of things lost and things created take the form of nutrients, roots, insects, recipes, chemicals, ideas.
As part of this collaborative evening, Maya will present her first iteration of Vision Fields, taking the form of a mural-sized agricultural monoscape painting and an evolving animation. MayaShe invites participants to engage with the work and offer ghosts that may be added to the story.
Down the Wrong Way: Toward an Environmental History of Cuisine
L. Sasha Gora
How do human appetites shape plants and animals, land and water, the world’s present and its future?
Because eating is one of the most direct ways that people interact with environments, by literally digesting them, fashions in food not only map changes in taste but also social, environmental, and technological transformations.
In Down the Wrong Way: Toward an Environmental History of Cuisine, cultural historian L. Sasha Gora shares her research about culinary reactions to climate change. Reflecting on how humans know, endanger, and perhaps even conserve flora, fauna, and their habitats through culinary practices, her work seeks to merge food studies and the environmental humanities.
Zooming in on the history of turtle soup, Down the Wrong Way considers culinary extinction – which is to say the ghosts of appetite’s past –, how recipes map how cultures eat and adapt to the worlds around them, and the entanglements between people and plants, cuisine and climate.
Against the grain… and back again
David Bates
David’s presentation of a selection of wheat grains and breads reflects the way that, until the 19th Century, farmers actively cultivated diverse fields of wheat – known as landraces. Since then, and especially during the Green Revolution, the focus has been on developing monocultures – vast crops which are genetically identical. However, in recent years, there has been push-back against this with a number of small farmers reintroducing landraces and deliberately encouraging genetically diverse crops. The NIAB (National Institute of Agricultural Botany) is also conducting research which involves going back to ancient grains from which modern wheat emerged. The idea is to restore genetic diversity in order to create resilience and reliability in the face of climate change and emerging disease threats.
The Library and Information Services Manager at Chatham House, David is passionate about baking and enjoys working with textures and flavours but also baking in resistance to industrial bread and its impacts on human and environmental wellbeing.
A communal tasting – celebrating biodiversity and fermentation, movement and fluidity.
Curated by Delfina Foundation resident L. Sasha Gora and Delfina Foundation resident & Asymmetry Curatorial Fellow Erin Li, in collaboration with chef Songsoo Kim.
Playing with forms of hospitality and co-existence, this communal tasting at Asymmetry HQ aims to nurture a curious yet welcoming social situation that breaks down the boundaries and conventions of the collective meal – which is to say a script of courses, a hierarchy of seating, and a repertoire of flavours organised according to national allegiances.
Polyphonic Bodies II instead serves an edible landscape and invites visitors to graze, “forage”, and freely combine bites, the process of which catalyses connections and conversations related to biodiversity, cultural plurality, the climate crisis, and the generosity of the bacteria that choreographs good health and pleasure.
Please note vegetarian and vegan options are available but are limited.
This event takes place in collaboration with Asymmetry Art Foundation, and forms part of the public programme of Delfina Foundation’s fifth season of the Politics of Food, in partnership with Gaia Art Foundation and with additional support from a range of individuals and partners.
SongSoo Kim. Made up of two characters Song is like the English word, and Soo means Life to live with song. It’s all in a name, the song I sing with this body I occupy, I try and observe the things that move me. In the process of meeting myself and others, I have met food as a practice and medium and have been learning what taste is, bitterness, sensing, fermenting, movement, and being moved. In this play, I think of pleasures and desires. Through “tasting” together I’m learning what possibly “taste” could be.
Bringing together season’s residents, the group has been reading a discussing an evolving constellation of texts – spanning wide histories, geographies and ideologies – about and produced by movements that have sought to challenge extractive relationships to the land.
In this first public meeting of the group, those who have been involved in the group to date will read selected extracts from the texts studied so far and engage in an open discussion on the texts, the learnings of the group, its future trajectory.
If you would like to browse the reading materials the group has engaged with over the first six sessions, click here.
A light spread of Armenian food, prepared by Agnes Cameron and her co-residents, will be available for guests to help themselves to from 19:00, with the reading group session commencing at 19:30.
Emerging out of his work in recent years around group world building, at Delfina Foundation David has been developing a tabletop game as a means to embark on a collaborative exploration of his research around the legacies of the Swynnerton Plan.
For this workshop, we invite you to watch or play an early version of Gathering Storm, the collaborative world-building game created by David. Players will take it in turns to add elements to a map, imagining a post-colonial sci-fi world and then creating a set of characters to inhabit this space. They will then respond to prompts, coming to terms with hidden histories and present injustices. No previous experience of tabletop gaming is necessary to play.
The evening will commence with an introduction to the game by artist David Blandy. Guests will then break into groups to play, supported by specially invited guests Susuana Amoah, Annie Jael Kwan and Jamie Sutcliffe.
Complementary alcoholic and non-alcoholic pineapple-based drinks will be provided to the audience.
Please book via Eventbrite. If you have any questions, please contact us on events@delfinafoundation.com.
This game is a starting point for a wider project David is developing, incorporating text, installation, games and moving image.
The monsters’ time is over. But some still remain along with the alien fruit that fills pockets and their bellies. We strive for another world. Perhaps the world from before. But the world from before is gone. So we must grow something new.
Please note this event is now sold out.
Taking place around the kitchen table, the local territory and in our imaginaries – and enacted through cooking, eating and sharing together – these four gatherings are inspired by the practice of Comunalidad.
Comunalidad is a set of collective practices enacted by the indigenous communities of Oaxaca in southern Mexico: it is a way of living and working that emerges from a specific relationship with nature proposing other organising mechanisms and an alternative to sustainability.
Over the course of the gatherings, participants will develop a collection of formulas, strategies and practices to build up trans-local learning environments and experiment with collaborative ways of strengthening our relationships with nature in order to aid its regeneration.
This series is for participants who seek to challenge, overthrow, and replace the systems that oppress and exploit nature, humans and other species.
The workshop series is free but limited to 20 participants. Participants must commit to join all four gatherings and must be over 18.
If you are interested in participating please email events@delfinafoundation.com (subject line: Tierra Sostenible) with just a few sentences about yourself and why you wish to participate. As some events will involve food, please also mention in the email any dietary requirements.
The event is open to all with an interest in the subject and activities.
For those who apply before midday on Monday 17 October, places will be confirmed via email that afternoon.
Further information about the locations of gathering 2 and 3 will be shared with participants in due course.
In Autumn 2022, Delfina Foundation will launch its fifth season of residencies and public programming focusing on The Politics of Food. As the most pressing issue of our time, this iteration will take as its focus the climate emergency, engaging with it through the specific lens of eco-social interdependence. Through a wide range of activities, the programme’s participants will take food as their entry point to explore the interconnections between the ecological crisis and our economic, social, cultural, and political crises. The climate emergency is an interdependent one, thus addressing our relation to food and its complex infrastructures is a critical component to the survival of both human and non-human species.
Spanning cross-disciplinary collaboration, speculative creative outcomes and hybrid realities, the panel will include innovators and leaders from the technology sector, the design world and across the creative industries, giving participants a front row seat to the dreams, anxieties, & projects at the forefront for London’s futurists. Join us for a series of conversations and performances at the intersection of technology and design, curated by Suhair Khan.
The event is currently sold out, but a live recording will be available. For more details, head to the London Design Festival website.
This evening gathering will commence with an oat-sowing ritual, collectively performed in a sonic landscape developed by Cherry in collaboration with sound artist Helga Mendes daFonseca.
Under the full moon, guests will be invited to plant seeds, grown by Cherry herself, in earth taken from the ground in Somerset where they were first nourished – completing one growth cycle and beginning another.
This ritual will be followed by a feast, created in collaboration with chef Grace Gibbons (Spring, Maremma, Kitchen W8).
This event launches THE ANIMIST ALMANAC, a six-year programme of arts-based research and practice initiated by artist Cherry Truluck around oat cultivation and fugitive temporalities.
This April, Serpentine will begin work on the first London incarnation of artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg’s Pollinator Pathmaker, kickstarting Back to Earth 2022 activations that will include an exhibition presented at Serpentine North from 22 June to 18 September 2022. Back to Earth is Serpentine’s continuous multidisciplinary programme evoking reactions to the environmental emergency.
In collaboration with The Royal Parks, this third edition of the garden at North Flower Walk, an area measuring 227 metres long in Kensington Gardens, will comprise 4,471 plants including over 60 different species. It will come into bloom early summer after its planting launch this April.
Insect pollinators see the world quite differently from humans. Flowers may appear a different colour to a bee or to a butterfly or to the colour we see. This is because insects’ eyes sense different parts of the colour spectrum and so gardens look very different to insect pollinators.
Working with Eden’s horticulturalists, leading pollinator experts, and an AI scientist, Ginsberg devised a living artwork, built using a unique algorithm, to look at this problem – Pollinator Pathmaker. Creating this tool to design with empathy for other species is at the heart of Ginsberg’s artwork. You can now use the algorithm tool to generate a garden design. All you need to do is describe where your garden is, how big it is, and its soil and light conditions, and you can play with the algorithm’s empathy tools.
Head to pollinator.art now to create your own garden!
Becoming CLIMAVORE, a project by Cooking Sections, explores the gap between the appearance and the reality of salmon—their inability to escape intensive farms. For this UK-wide project, 21 museums have now removed farmed salmon from the menus of their cafés and restaurants, and introduced CLIMAVORE dishes made with ingredients that improve soil and water quality, and cultivate marine habitats. This move continues Cooking Sections' collaboration with restaurants in Skye and Raasay since 2017.
You can now taste CLIMAVORE dishes at:
Aberdeen Art Gallery
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford
Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead
BFI Southbank, London
Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry
Holburne Museum, Bath
London Transport Museum
Manchester Art Gallery
Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh
Royal Museums Greenwich
Science Museum, London
Science and Industry Museum, Manchester
Serpentine, London
Tate Britain, London
Tate Liverpool
Tate Modern, London
Tate St Ives
The Whitworth, The University of Manchester
Turner Contemporary, Margate
Victoria & Albert Museum, London
Wellcome Collection, London
And in Skye and Raasay:
Edinbane Lodge
Eòlach
Isle of Skye Baking Company
Loch Bay
Raasay House
Rosedale Hotel
Scorrybreac
The Ferry Inn
Three Chimneys
Visitors can taste a CLIMAVORE meal and collect one of the postcards from a twelve-part mosaic at participating restaurants filled with CLIMAVORE stories and recipes.
The project at the Herbert is accompanied by Cooking Sections' installation Salmon: Traces of Escapees, the second chapter of the salmon trilogy.
𝘉𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘊𝘓𝘐𝘔𝘈𝘝𝘖𝘙𝘌 was developed as a Back to Earth campaign at the Serpentine in collaboration with Benugo.
Gaia Art Foundation and Delfina Foundation are delighted to announce an open call for UK and international practitioners to participate in season 5 of ‘The Politics Of Food’ 2022. The programme will focus on the most pressing issue of our time: the climate emergency.
Agriculture alone is responsible for 30% of greenhouse gas emissions, 92% of global water use, 38% of earth’s ice-free land, and is a major source of biodiversity loss and land degradation. In our oceans, the impact of the world’s fastest growing food production system – intensive aquaculture – encapsulates the complexity of future “sustainable” diets as nutritional, policy and environmental factors rub against one another. Addressing how and what we eat is critical to the survival of both human and more than human species.
Since 2014, ‘The Politics of Food’ programme has worked with artists, activists, agronomists, artisans, bakers, butchers, chefs, economists, farmers, fermenters, foragers, historians, scientists, policy makers, nutritionists and more, delivering over 100 residencies with public programmes taking the format of meals, exhibitions, walks, talks, pickings and a pop-up cafe. The first book dedicated to the topic was published at the end of 2019 and is distributed by Sternberg Press.
For this open call, Gaia Art Foundation and Delfina Foundation are open to a variety of responses to our sub-theme, but we are particularly interested in interdisciplinary collaborations between artists/curators and researchers seeking to evolve ideas beyond this residency and traditional art spaces. In addition to creative practitioners, we are keen to receive applications from researchers, including but not limited to traditional knowledge holders, academic researchers, scientists, ecologists and gastronomes alike, who are interested in this form of collaboration. Opportunities will be available for in-person residencies and virtual engagement, as well as public programme events. This open call should therefore be considered as an expression of interest to participate in a range of ways.
Before applying, we strongly encourage applicants to look at Delfina Foundation’s previous seasons of The Politics of Food and book, as participants will be selected based on how they are building on and complementing our existing body of work.
To apply please head to the Delfina Foundation website and complete the application form.
We are delighted to share that artist duo, Cooking Sections (Daniel Fernández Pascual & Alon Schwabe) have been nominated for the 2021 Turner Prize. Gaia Art Foundation proudly supports Cooking Sections and their on-going project CLIMAVORE, initiated in 2015. The Turner Prize jury applauded the ingenuity of CLIMAVORE, which explores how our diet can change in response to the climate emergency.
The members of the Turner Prize 2021 jury are Aaron Cezar, the director of the Delfina Foundation in London; Kim McAleese, the programme director at the Grand Union complex in Birmingham; the actor Russell Tovey; and Zoé Whitley, the director of Chisenhale Gallery in London. The jury is chaired by Farquharson.
The Turner Prize 2021 exhibition will be held at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum in Coventry from 29 September to 12 January 2022 as part of the UK City of Culture 2021 celebrations. The winner, who receives £25,000, will be announced on 1 December 2021 at an award ceremony at Coventry Cathedral.
science_technology_society seeks to support contemporary interdisciplinary approaches that consider, intervene in, and speculate on the world in which we live and its possible futures. The programme fosters cross-sector collaborations, accelerates ideas and supports the development of new projects which aim to make a tangible impact on our lives.
The second edition of the programme will take place in autumn 2020, once again in partnership with Gaia Art Foundation.
Join Artist Anicka Yi, Anthropologist and Philosopher Tobias Rees and 58th Venice Biennale curator Ralph Rugoff for a discussion on dialogue and collaboration between artistic and scientific communities. In this panel discussion led by Ralph, Anicka and Tobias will each present their recent work and projects and the research behind them. The event is organised by Gaia Art Foundation in partnership with Bagri Foundation and Royal College of Art.
Given the relevance of the global pandemic to this theme, the programme will provide a focused virtual and physical environment to address a range of urgent issues shaped by the research, interests and practices of our specially-selected international residents and UK associates.
Launch of The Empire Remains Shop – Cooking Sections' first book following the eponymous ongoing research and installation. The evening will feature an introduction by the book's editor Jesse Connuck, a response to the book by Nadine El-Enany, the lecture-performance "The Next 'Invasive' is 'Native'" by Cooking Sections, and a Q&A; followed by The Plant That Could Sink Your Mortgage Cocktails.
Gaia Art Foundation and Outset Contemporary Art Fund are delighted to launch the Outset x Gaia Art Foundation Hub at the Paint Room, Somerset House. The multi-purpose space will provide a platform of exchange for artists, makers, thinkers and entrepreneurs at the crossroads of the newly opened Somerset House Studios and Makerversity communities. This new partnership sees both philanthropic organizations realizing a new cultural hub and supporting the £1.8m capital campaign transforming former Inland Revenue offices into Somerset House Studios. The joint support is part of the Studiomakers initiative in partnership with The Mayor of London to secure affordable workspaces for creative professionals in London for the long term.
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