The River is Never the Same River, Iara and Tereza Guede’s butoh-inspired performance for the opening of the exhibition, enacts through the language of movement the plight of such polluted waterways. Shingo Yoshida’s video Réprouvé is striking for its very absence of water; turning a garbage strewn wasteland in Chile into a beautiful sound installation, it is nevertheless a frightening glimpse of what our planet may soon look like if we do not take better care of it, and if we do not curb overproduction of waste. The plastics clogging such landscapes the world over are repurposed into beautiful light objects by South African artists Magpie Art Collective, and are mirrored in Imitation, the simulated waterfall created by Joanna Keler, where plastic flows across a rocky streambed. In another artful imitation, Andreas Blank fashions out of quartz a perfect replica of a plastic bag. In Landscape Metaphor II, Blank highlights the enduring impact on our environment of the litter we disregard too easily: by virtue of being carved in stone, these apparently ephemeral objects achieve monumental permanence. India Rose Klap has also created a plastic bag, only hers provides a solution to the plastics filling our oceans and landfills: Klap’s plastic bags are edible. Giving us all food for thought, her bags are served during the opening of the exhibition in a Plastic Soup. Shaakira Jaasat’s Tea Drop also posits a solution to a future of impending water shortages: she has created a device to condense water vapor out of the surrounding atmosphere. Jaasat’s tea machine is as beautiful in its impracticability as Nezaket Ekici’s Water To Water, the documentation of her performance at Berlin’s Haus Am Waldsee, where over the course of several laborious hours she manually filters five pitchers of lake water, drunk with varying degrees of reluctance by her audience.

These and the other outstanding works situated in Steinplatz for Food Art Week may be only tangentially about food, and yet each work illustrates in its own way the vast diversity in which water impacts upon the cycle of life on our planet. From the desertification of climate change to the predicted floods of melting glaciers, water is as deadly in its scarcity as it is in excess. And yet, life cannot exist without it. WATER(PROOF) is about such paradoxes. In our utter dependence on water, we nevertheless contrive to poison and squander it. Nothing is waterproof, in the sense of being impervious to water, when water is perceived as integral to most every industry which sustains our lifestyles and quality of life. Yet our lifestyles are poisoning our planet. WATER(PROOF) assembles the positions and experiences of over twenty international artists, each proving, in their own way, the precarious paradoxes of the cycles of water consumption and production, integrally linked to what we eat and how we eat it.

In addition to the exhibition at Momentum Worldwide, Food Art Week is occupying Steinplatz, a public space in Berlin across from the University of the Arts (UdK), for the whole month of August, with greenhouses designed by Tainá Guedes, one in collaboration with BSR and the other with the Bio Water Rheinsberger Preussenquelle, that will host educational art installations on the subject of the festival. On Saturday 17th of August, there will be curated art performances, workshops for kids and adults lead by NGO restlos glücklich, a panel discussion, and info booths from environmental organisations working on water preservation.

Food Art Week Berlin this year takes place in August in collaboration with MOMENTUM, UdK, Programm der Kulturagenten für Kreative Schule Berlin, Berliner Stadtreinigung (BSR), Rheinsberger Preussenquelle and Stabstelle Bildung für nachhaltige Entwicklung und internationale Projekte Bezirksamt Charlottenburg- Wilmersdorf von Berlin.

Food Art Week, created by artist Tainá Guedes in 2015, is a non-profit project, whose mission is to promote positive change in our environment and society by raising awareness about many important topics related to our eating habits. It is the first contemporary art and food festival focused on educating people through various activities which includes exhibitions, workshops, panel discussions, talks, performances and film screenings. It has been held in various cities since 2015, including Berlin (2015, 2017), Bologna (2017), Paris (2016, 2018) and Mexico City (2018).

With a special focus on sustainability, animals and human rights, and environmental-social-economic issues, the festival analyses this year’s theme “water” and how the production and consumption of our food is affecting this essential natural resource.

Andreas Blank

Landscape Metaphor II
2014, sculpture, quartz

German artist Andreas Blank is a sculptor working exclusively with stone. He is conscious of his chosen medium as a material reflecting the very substance of time; in its strata are recorded the ages of the planet. In Landsape Metaphor II (2010) Andreas Blank fashions out of quartz a perfect replica of a plastic bag, turning his art to sculpting the detritus of our planet. In so doing, Blank creates an ideal metaphor for the enduring impact on our environment of the litter we consider so ephemeral. In his sculptural practice, Andreas Blank combines the abstract and the realistic, the conceptual as well as the technical. He sources stones from quarries from all over the world, carves them with elaborate deliberation and assembles them into deceptively realistic objects of the everyday. Only upon close inspection one discovers that light bulbs, transport boxes and plastic bags are made of marble, alabaster or sandstone. The gravity of stone, in Blank’s work, acquires the seemingly casual character of the mundane and wasteful. And yet by virtue of being carved in stone, these apparently ephemeral objects achieve monumental permanence. The first in his series of plastic bag scultpures, Landsape Metaphor, is in the Collection of the Ministry of the Environment, Berlin.

Andreas Blank – BIO

Andreas Blank was born in Ansbach in 1976. He attended the Karlsruhe State Academy of Art (Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste) and was Meisterschüler under Prof. Klingelhöller. He held a scholarship with the German National Academic Foundation and received his MFA from the Royal College of Art in London. In 2009 he was a finalist for the New Sensations Award by Channel 4 and the Saatchi Gallery. He lives and works in Berlin.

Nezaket Ekici

Water To Water
2015, video documentation of live performance

Having participated in FAW2017, we are proud to invite Nezaket Ekici back to Water(Proof) for FAW2019 with documentation of her performance Water To Water (2015), and her video performance together with Israeli performance artist and filmmaker Shahar Marcus, Salt Dinner (2012).

In her performance Water To Water (2015), commissioned for her solo exhibition at Berlin’s Haus am Waldsee, Nezaket Ekici transforms the dirty water of the lake into drinkable water which her assistants offer to the spectators. With a performance practice indebted in equal measure to the visual opulence of the theatrical and the physical excesses of the durational, Ekici here embodies the spectacle of our water cycle. Seemingly floating above the lake in a voluminous red gown which also forms her water delivery system, Ekici laboriously pulls water up from the lake, bucket by bucket, and operates a hand-pumped water filter to channel the clean water through her dress into pitchers held by her assistants below. The performance, lasting several hours, results in five pitchers of water, drunk with varying degrees of reluctance by the audience. Ekici embodies through her own labor and sweat a metaphor for the invisible process delivering clean water to our taps. This most essential of resources is what we most often take for granted. Ekici’s performance subtly asks the questions at the back of all our minds: How clean is our water, really? And how much longer will we have clean water on tap?

Nezaket Ekici – BIO

Nezaket Ekici (b. 1970 in Kırşehir, Turkey) studied art pedagogy, art history, and sculpture at Ludwig Maximilian University and the Fine Arts Academy, Munich, and received her MA degree in art pedagogy (1994–2000). Thereafter, she studied performance art with Marina Abramovic at the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste Braunschweig, where she received her BFA and MFA (2001–04). Nezaket Ekici recently participated in the prestigious international Artist Residency Programs of the German Academy in Rome at the Villa Massimo (2016-2017), and the German Foreign Ministry Residency in Tarabia, Istanbul (2015-2016). Recent group exhibitions include: 56th Venice Biennale (2015); Petach Tikva Museum of Art, Israel (2015); The Pleasure of Love, 56th October Salon, Belgrade (2016); The Contemporary Art Gallery of Georgia, Georgia National Museum, Tbilisi (2016); MOCAK, Museum of Contemporary Art, Krakau (2016); Museum Villa Rot, Burgrieden (2016); Tel Aviv Museum (2016/2017); Gabriele Münter Preis, Akademie der Künste, Berlin & Frauenmuseum, Bonn (2017); Oslo Museum (2017); Tiroler Landesmuseum Innsbruck (2018); Sanatorium Istanbul (2018); The Gallery for Israeli Art at the Tivon Memorial Center (2018); Seoul Museum, Seoul (2018); Großen Kunstschau,Worpswede (2018/19); Museum of Islamic Art and Near East Culture Be‘er Sheva (2019). Nezaket Ekici lives and works in Berlin and Stuttgart.

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Iara Guedes

The River is Never the Same River
2019, performance (with Tereza Guedes)

Iara Guedes and her Mother Tereza are Japanese Brazilian multidisciplinary artists. For FAW2019, they present the latest performance in a series begun in 2017 on the theme of the anthropocene: the new geological age wherein the impact of the human being on nature becomes a significant and permanent layer on planet Earth. This series, titled Beyond Narayama Mountain: An Anthropocenophagic Ballad, refers to Japanese director Keisuke Kinoshita’s film about Obasuke’s legendary practice in Japan, where the elders are sacrificed to leave enough resources for younger gnerations to survive. The series reflects on today’s values in relation to the past, present and future; eliding moral judgment, conclusions and explicit discourses with the intention of establishing a delicate interaction between dream and reality.

The River is Never the Same River presents on one side an entity; a hybrid of the spirit of the planet Earth, Pachamama, Mother Nature, Virgin Mary, Shaman. On the other side the spirit of a polluted river. Pachamama blesses the space and audience while the spirit of the river undergoes an exorcism, removing the dirt from within. Though this performance is strongly influenced by Japanese Butoh dance, it is not Butoh. Aesthetically, it takes from Butoh the use of make up to erase the person within the body. And in a more philosophical way, it takes from Butoh the lack of moral judgment, the nothingness and self-annulment. As in Butoh, the performance is not about virtuosity and explicit statements. It suggests signs that can be interpreted symbolically by the audience so they can become viewer-creator.

Iara Guedes – BIO

Iara Guedes (b. 1976 in São Paolo, Brazil) is a Japanese-Lebanese-Brazilian artist, performer and director based in Berlin Germany. As an interdisciplinary artist, experiment is key for Guedes. She examines her own experiences and feelings as a migrant creature to invite her audience and collaborators to constantly shape the moment, the ephemeral state of being present, and to adapt to circumstances of their environment through transformation. Her practice breaks down boundaries between conceptual and theatrical performance, and finds in Japanese Butoh a philosophical and visual component layered by digital animation and effects to build immersive, cathartic, anthropophagic experiences. Using audiovisual elements as poetic layers for a sensorial activation, her work is focused on living forms and that which connects all of us: evolutionary processes, dualities, cycles, repetitions, transformations. Guedes studied dance and performance at the University of Communication and Arts of the Body (PUCSP) from 1999 to 2002. In parallel to her performance and dance studies, she grew interested in animation and its possibilities with performance. Graduating in Digital Cinema from the International Academy of Cinema and Animation at Melies School in 2010, she is dedicated to apprehending the practice of computer graphics and related technologies to create an environment where live performance could be incorporated.

Tereza Guedes – BIO

Tereza Guedes, the daughter of Japanese immigrants, was born in Brazil in 1947. She has degrees in Philosophy and Art from the University of Sao Paulo, having studied with Decio Pignatari, one of the founders of Brazilian Concrete Poetry. She founded Entretempo Studio in 1976. Until the studio closed in the mid-’90s, it was known for its exemplary silkscreen technique and for working with many outstanding artists, including concrete poet Augusto de Campos and visual poets André Vallias and Walter Silveira. Tereza Guedes also managed the artist residency program at Sacatar Foundation in Bahia, Brazil.

Bonnie Tchien Hwen-Ying

Femme Homard, Dada Tai-Chi
(2019), performance

For FAW2019, Bonnie Tchien Hwen-Ying is commissioned to create a new performance for Steinplatz. In an homage to Dali, Bonnie Tchien Hwen-Ying sees her performance as “gestures of hope or desperation – a simple cry of survival”. Femme Homard is a work in development since 2016, continuously evolving with each iteration in response to the world’s excesses.

Bonnie Tchien Hwen-Ying – BIO

Throughout her performances, France-based Taiwanese artist Bonnie Tchien Hwen-Ying (b. 1950 in Taipei, Taiwan), conveys her legacies resulting from this two-fold cultural substance. She embraces ancestral Chinese rituals of Tai-Chi, martial arts, and traditional dances, which she conceptualizes and reinterprets in a contemporary fashion.
This duality brands the essence of her artistic approach, where revisited costumes and make-up meet with glorified accessories, thus creating her own style and vocabulary to redefine symbolic figures anew. Chinese opera is given a choreographic dance twist and transformed into an utterly dramaturgical act in which the artist, like an alchemist in search of the philosopher’s stone, morphs her body by means of inspired and motivated gestural. Bonnie Tchien Hwen-Ying is the founder of: “The Cabaret of Performance”, 52 rue JB Pigalle, Paris France; the artist residency “Chantons Aux Vaches”, Migné, France; and Founder & Creative “Miss China”, France.

Janet Laurence

H2O: Water Bar
2016, site specific installation: various rain and spring waters, scientific glass vessels, acrylic containers, mirrors, wood

For FAW2019 we have commissioned a new site-specific version of Janet Laurence’s H2O: Water Bar, realized at MOMENTUM by Leslie Ranzoni. Installed as a glistening laboratory with scientific glass vessels, H2O: Water Bar is a participatory installation, allowing visitors to sample a variety of water sourced from diverse regions of Germany, and to better understand the complexity and fragility of this vital resource. Renowned Australian artist Janet Laurence is known for her work with the environment, often undertaken together with scientists engaged in international conservation initiatives. Laurence’s practice is a direct response to contemporary ecological catastrophes, positioning art within the essential dialogue of environmental politics to create and communicate an understanding of the impact that humans have upon the threatened natural world, in order to restore our vital relationships with it.

Janet Laurence – BIO

Janet Laurence (b. 1947 in Sydney, Australia) is among Australia’s most established artists. In 2015 she was the Australian representative for the COP21/FIAC, Artists 4 Paris Climate Exhibition for the UN Climate Conference in Paris, for which she created Deep Breathing – Resuscitation for the Reef and Coral Collapse Homeopathy, both shown in this exhibition. Further selected recent international projects and exhibitions include: the 57th Biennale of Venice (2017); Veiling Medical Glass, A Medicinal Maze, Novartis Campus, Sydney (2017); The Treelines Track, Bundanon, Australia (2017); GASP: Parliament, Hobart, Tasmania (2017); Inside the Flower, IGA Berlin (2017); Schloss Biesdorf, Centre for Art and Public Space, Berlin (2017); Fellowship at the Hanse-WissenschaftKolleg (HWK), Germany (2016-2017); H2O Water Bar, Paddington Water Reservoir, Sydney (2016); Deep Breathing (Resuscitation for the Reef), Australian Museum, Sydney (2016); Cuenca Bienal, Cuenca, Ecuador (2016); Deep Breathing: Resuscitation for the Reef, Musée National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris (2015); The Skullbone Experiment: A Paradigm of Art and Nature, Queen Victoria Museum, Tasmania (2014); Animate/Inanimate, TarraWarra Museum of Art, Healsville, Victoria, Australia (2013); 1⁄2 Scene, Australia China Art Foundation Shanghai (2013); SCANZ: 3rd Nature, New Plymouth, New Zealand (2013); After Eden, Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation, Sydney (2012); The Alchemical Garden of Desire, McClelland Gallery, Victoria, Australia (2012). Janet Laurence is a recipient of Rockefeller, Churchill, and Australia Council Fellowships, and the Alumni Award for Arts, University of New South Wales. She was a Trustee of the Art Gallery of New South Wales, a former Board Member of the Visual Arts Board of the Australia Council, and is a Visiting Fellow at the New South Wales University Art and Design. Janet Laurence lives and works in Sydney.

Shahar Marcus

Nezaket Ekici & Shahar Marcus Salt Dinner
2012, video performance, 3’19”

Turkish/German artist Nezaket Ekici and Israeli artist Shahar Marcus together address geopolitical and environmental forces through the medium of performance in their video Salt Dinner (2012). Shot in the scorching heat of Israel’s Dead Sea, their performance ironically confronts human endurance with the extremes of nature and culture. In this actual and political hotbed, Muslim and Jew share an opulent feast. Whether a wedding or a wake remains unclear, but what looks like an absurd aquatic picnic is in truth a brutal endurance test for both artists. The excess of salt they are consuming with the sea water is as lethally dehydrating as the midday sun. Shot in a rapidly shrinking ocean in a part of the world fought over for millennia, this international summit offers no solutions for political and environmental stability.

Nezaket Ekici and Shahar Marcus both work separately as artists but started to collaborate on projects in 2012. Their ongoing project In Relation revolves around an exploration of time, space, culture, religion, and the often absurd ways in which people interact with the environment. In this, as a German-based Muslim and an Israeli-based Jew, they collaborate on performances and videos that bridge cultures and religions as well as the long distances between Berlin and Tel Aviv. Focusing on the origin of the latin word relatio (relation), meaning ‘bringing back’, they set out to bring back a knowledge that has been forgotten by most of us: a relation with ourselves and our environment. Since 2012 they have produced ten video works together: Salt Dinner, Sand Clock, Floating Ourselves, Clean Coal, Fossils, Fields of Breath and Lublin Beach, TBQ, all concentrating on the Ancient Greek aphorism γνῶθι σεαυτὸν: know thyself.

Shahar Marcus – BIO

Shahar Marcus (b. 1971 in Petach Tikva, Israel) studied Linguistics and History of Art at the University of Tel Aviv. Marcus primarily works in the medium of performance and video art. His initial works dealt with the exploration of his own body and its limitations- incorporating various perishable materials, such as dough, juice and ice. His body served as an instrument, a platform on which various ‘experiments’ took place: lying on the operating table, set on fire, dressed in a ‘bread suit’ and more. Food is also a major theme in Marcus’s works. For instance, his recurrent use of bread as a symbol of essentiality and survival is juxtaposed with military symbols. By working with food, a perishable, momentary substance and by turning it into a piece of clothing or a set, Marcus also flirts with art history; transforming arbitrary objects and materials into something immortal and everlasting. Shahar Marcus is an active artist for over a decade and has exhibited at various art institutions, both in Israel and around the world, including: The Tate Modern; The Israel Museum; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; Petach Tikva Museum of Art; Copenhagen Kunsthalle; Moscow Biennale; Poznan Biennale; Moscow Museum of Modern Art; The Hermitage, Saint Petersburg; and at other art venues in Poland, Italy, Germany, Georgia, Japan, USA, and Turkey. His works are in many important museum collections, such as: The Israel Museum, Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Petach Tikva Museum of Art, as well as intuitions in Poland and Italy. Shahar Marcus lives and works in Tel Aviv.

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India Rose Klap

Plastic Soup
Interactive performance

For the opening of Water(Proof0, we invite India Rose to make her Plastic Soup performance, sharing with visitors this most unusual of meals.

The amount of plastic waste that ends up in the ocean is growing at a fast pace. This is not only the waste we throw on the streets, but also the microplastics that remain after washing synthetic clothes or that come from cosmetic products. About 8 million metric tons of plastic waste ends up in the ocean each year, if this doesn’t stop there will be more plastic than fish in the oceans by 2050. To address this problem, India Rose created a recipe for a consumable intervention; a futuristic bouillabaisse; the edible plastic soup. The recipe has been printed upon a bio-plastic bag. The bags are made from cassava, they are 100% biodegradable and they dissolve in warm water. The bags can be used as a binder and garnish for the soup. India Rose makes her edible plastic soup in both fish and vegan versions. To serve the bouillabaisse fish version as sustainably and deliciously as possible, she uses the residual products of fish production; she makes the soup with the fish trimmings and bones. These parts of the fish are usually thrown away, but often contain most of the flavor. The word bouillabaisse comes from the two French verbs: bouillir (to boil) and abaisser (to reduce heat, i.e., simmer), which means that the recipe includes more of a preparation method then a fixed recipe. The bouillabaisse was originally a dish made by fishermen. They prepared the dish on the beach after returning from fishing. In a pot filled with seawater they cooked all the fishes that they couldn’t sell, added some locally available vegetables and herbs. Plastic is harmful to the sea and its inhabitants but a new type of bioplastic might bring the solution. There are a lot of products on the market that are being sold as environment-friendly products. Biodegradable bags sound amazing, but often they leave behind substances that are toxic to both the sea, animals and plants. But bioplastic bags that are made out of cassava and other plant-based materials, those bags are not only biodegradable but also recyclable, they soften in cold water and within months they are converted into carbon dioxide, water and biomass. When they are put in warm water they dissolve. In that way, they are also safe to consume for the inhabitants of our planet.

India Rose Klap – BIO

Being the daughter of a chef, India Rose (b. 1995 in Amsterdam, Netherlands) grew up in a Spanish tapas restaurant. She played with octopuses and crayfish and did afternoon naps in paella pans. From an early age she spent many hours in the kitchen, which is how she grew up with an enormous love for food. With her art projects she tries to make the consumer aware of the problems in the food industry with a real portion of ‘food for thought’. At the same time she wants to reassure the consumer, by providing a series of possible solutions. She bundles all concepts, culinary experiences, and recipes she creates in the utopian manual for the kitchen of tomorrow. An ever growing collection of creations which are far from standard, sometimes not even feasible so far. But they do form the steps towards a better food industry. The utopian manual exists both online and as a printed version. The printed version is made from agricultural waste products and is embedded with seeds. Because of this, the utopian manual can be transformed into a vegetable garden. The utopian manual is filled with many creations; the recipe for the edible plastic soup is one of them. India Rose Klap lives and works in Amsterdam.

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Shingo Yoshida

Réprouvé
2018, 4K video, 3’37”

Photographer and video artist Shingo Yoshida finds inspiration in travelling, myths, traditions and the overwhelming beauty of nature. Yoshida considers the world as his studio and therefore a place of constant creation. In his video and photographic works Yoshida expresses his deep reverence for nature and its power, as well as his sense of wonder at encountering new cultures and ways of living. Shot in Calama, Chile, Shingo Yoshida’s film Réprouvé takes us through a garbage-strewn wasteland at the edge of the city, where the artist creates an oasis of beauty, turning discarded bear bottles into a sound installation. In an exhibition about water, Réprouvé is striking for its very absence of water. Creating beauty in the most unlikely of places, it is nevertheless a frightening glimpse of what our planet may soon look like if we do not take better care of our most necessary natural resource – water.

Shingo Yoshida – BIO

Shingo Yoshida, born in 1974 in Tokyo, and currently lives and works in Berlin. Yoshida received his MA with highest honors from Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Art, Villa Arson in Nice France in 2004. In 2005 he earned a post-graduate diploma at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, France, and subsequently in 2007 he received another post-graduate diploma in the Program La Seine of Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux- Arts de Paris. in 2013 Yoshida completed the prestigious international artist residencies at Villa Arson Nice France – Centre National d’Art Contemporain, and was awarded the Fellowship of Overseas Study Programme for Artists by the Agency for Cultural Affairs of the Japanese Government. Yoshida’s work has been shown in many international exhibitions, including: Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2007, 2012); the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo MAC, Santiago, Chile (2012); the 60th International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, Germany, (2014); Videoart at Midnight #67: Shingo Yoshida, BABYLON, Berlin (2015); POLARIZED! Vision Competition Winner, Lapland, Rovaniemi, Finland (2015); Gunma Museum of Art, Tatebayashi, Gunma, Japan (2016); Mulliqi Prize, National Gallery of Arts, Prishtina, Kosovo (2016); Instituto Zappa (Accademia Di Brera) Viale Marche, Milan, Italy (2016); Onufri International Prize, National Gallery of Arts, Tirana (2016); IkonoTV (2017). In 2016 Shingo Yoshida’s works entered into the following Collections in Berlin: Berlinische Galerie, Akademie der Künste, and Fluentum.

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Students of the University of Gastronomic Sciences (Pollenzo, Italy), in the Master of Gastronomy: Creativity, Ecology,
and Education Program

The the University of Gastronomic Sciences (UNISG) was founded in 2004 with a focus on a holistic and interdisciplinary approach to food and sustainability. It was founded by the Slow Food movement, in the area where this movement began. The different programs host students from all over the world and various lecturers, such as academics, farmers, food producers, artists, and many others. For FAW2019 Tainá Guedes developed a project with members of the Master of Gastronomy: Creativity, Ecology, and Education program at UNISG.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS

Giovanni Giorgi,
Nuha Saegh & Nuwella

Unfiltered
2019, Live Performance

This performance talks about the impact of pesticides on people’s health and environment. We usually think of pesticides only as something that is contained in food and we tend to forget about fact that water gathers these substances in fields and makes them circulate.

Still, we hear from many scientists that the water that we drink or use is cleared out from pesticides and that it contains only a small and non-harmful amount. Unfortunately, this solution does not erase the many issues that are connected to the use of certain kinds of pesticides and, more broadly, to our food production: there are many health problems concerning the use of pesticides, especially for humans or for other natural species that are staying in direct contact with them, right in the fields where they are sprayed; these issues include different types of cancers, infertility, malformations, and animal migrations that change the local ecological balance.

The students of UNISG (Pollenzo, Italy), Master of Gastronomy: Creativity, Ecology, and Education, will perform a piece called “unfiltered” to raise awareness on the existence of these problems in those areas where these are “not filtered” from water, as it instead happens for the one people consume in many urban spaces, for example. The information concerning these problems will be directly revealed on what constitute a direct target for pesticides and a system for which we all usually feel a lot of concern: the human body. The performance will include a pesticide-sprayer person and one “unfiltered body”, to be observed by the audience and that will communicate to them the problems related to this current reality.

Concept:
Giovanni Giorgi (from Prato, Italy; student at UNISG)
Performing artists:
Nuha Saegh (from Aleppo, Syria; student at UNISG);
Nuwella (Kenya/Canada/Berlin; Founder of “Ó Water”)

Giovanni Giorgi

Born in Florence in 1995 and grown up in Prato, Italy, his background is in gastronomy; after undergoing the undergraduate degree at UNISG and approaching the world of food journalism, his interest in creating narratives and exploring different dimensions of how food can make the world more sustainable, he decided to apply to the Master of Gastronomy: Creativity, Ecology, and Education at UNISG to discover how art can be a powerful key for conveying narrations and for community building. He is currently working as a design intern at Food Art Week.