The Sounds of Justice Are Music To My Mouth

Liquid Architecture hosts a digital listening and eating event with invited guests as part of larger art-research project between RMIT, UNSW and partners. We consider the intersection of the politics of listening and the politics of food with provocations from artists Alana Hunt, Elia Nurvista, Keg de Souza and Stephen Loo. Convened and curated by Madeleine Collie & Marnie Badham (Food Art Research Network).

Over the four courses, each artist shared morsels from their creative practice to examine how eating and the mediation of the various modes of attention (tasting, smelling, seeing, feeling, hearing) are (and are not) available in a shared online experience, from our disconnected contexts of culture and place. This shared performative dining experience aims to connect bodies and geographies to notions of justice through complex and entangled social realities and ecological histories.

On the 10th of November Food Art Research Network and Liquid Architecture hosted a digital listening and eating event with invited guests as part of larger art-research project between RMIT, UNSW and partners. Meeting together we consider the intersection of the politics of listening and the politics of food with provocations from artists Alana Hunt, Elia Nurvista, Keg de Souza and Stephen Loo. The collective meal asked that we attend to the politics of listening. Remembering that we are vibratory, sounds act on our bodies, on our metabolisms and shapes our sense of being together. Melissa Van Drie reminds us that “Food is a meeting place, a performance of transformations” and “there are myriad vibrational filaments set into motion between animals, plants, organic and inorganic materials that permit humans to eat.” (Van Drie, 132)

These works connect us to the wider earthly metabolisms that we engage with as we imbibe, consume and are even eaten by larger geologies, specific violence and longer time frames that haunt the diners at a table.

Prior to the event guests were sent a small pot of MABU MABU’s dried salt bush for entree, guests were asked to prepare something made of corn for the main course and Alana Hunt shared a packet of nun chai tea which guests boiled for the final course.

Food Art Research (FAR) Network is a wide international network of over twenty established artists that engage with the politics and aesthetics of food. FAR fosters connections between researchers, through dialogue, written texts, recipes, public learning outcomes, and long-term collaboration. FAR Network was established by Madeleine Collie in 2020 with the support of funding from Arts Council England and the network continues to expand ways of supporting artists’ long term research practices through transdisciplinary exchange and encounters.