FOOD AS STRUCTURAL UNIT OF POLITICS, TRANSMITTER OF MEMORY, AND MATTER OF ART

In 1998, the curator of the 24th Bienal de Sao Paulo, Paulo Herkenhoff, titled it Nucleo Historico (Historical Nucleus) and subtitled Anthropophagy and Histories of Cannibalism. It was not the topic itself that attracted my attention, but the perspective which the curator used to revisit and revise colonial processes of Brazilia and broadly Latin America, in other words, Anthropophagy as Cultural Strategy. The subtitle originates from the Manifesto Antropofago (1928) by the modernist poet Oswald de Andrade. Andrade made a specific distinction between anthropophagy and cannibalism, where the former refers to the ritualised translation of a worldview through the act of ingestion, whereas cannibalism opposes this spiritual understanding, describing instead the materialistic and disavowing interpretation of it by the Jesuits and colonisers. The topic of the Biennale obtained another dimension, referencing a work of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, a famous Brazilian anthropologist, for whom symbolic anthropophagy was a key to study together Amerindian perspectivism and a concept of multinaturalism embracing an idea of multiplicities of viewpoints as an inner quality of reality. De Castro redefines anthropology into an independent philosophical system shifting and inverting distinctions between nature and culture, animals and humans, family and social ties; where the problem of being – relevant for Western metaphysics – is replaced by the question of becoming (multiple others) to shuttle points of view; so closely echoing with Deleuze and Guattari's concepts. Such an audacious and unexpected direction of the Biennale, according to Herkenhoff's reflections ten years after, was not very well received critically and intellectually: "Paradoxically, at the Anthropophagy Biennal, an antithetical reaction was observed – an absolute refusal to discuss the art or show. According to Claude Levi-Strauss, anthropoemic culture, unlike anthropophagy, is one that does not assimilate any exchange with the other, ultimately it involves to vomit". Some years ago, I began refusing to eat meat entirely. My objection, being based neither on ecological nor ethical grounds, I could only guess at what mechanism of a personal eschatology drove my alimentary choice. The nucleus of Spinebone Soup and Stuffed Rabbits is a reflection on the nature of food politics; the transition of biopolitics into necropolitics; the establishment of ethics as a product of dominant ideologies; and the role of trauma, memory, and speech in the shaping of consumer choice. The Siege of Leningrad served as a point of departure. For me, it is not some speculative episode out of an abstract past, but a humanitarian collapse which directly animated my anamnesis. It is a unique, timeless space behind the looking glass, ever-present, casting a shadow across generations. The Siege is an indelible genetic memory, a trauma, a corporeal imprint. It is revealed in sophisticated figures of omission, in the failure to utter, in postures of violence. The food trauma is not only the remembrance of hunger; it is the horror of extreme survival. Forced cannibalism drives destructive memory and legitimises dehumanisation by the power apparatus. Heroic status is bestowed upon those who, deprived of words, are thereafter eaten. The multiple languages of my work conflate different ideologies. References to the archival representation of plenitude neighbour the familiar tropes of consumerism. The nourishing component of this general approach is reduced to a representation of a shell, a symbol, a signified without a signifier: to a speculative cookbook of words. Chapters: - Fluid Identity of Memory - Ritual and Reenactment - Cookbook of Inedible

For TABOO - TRANSGRESSION - TRANSCENDENCE in Art & Science
26-28 November 2020, University of Applied Arts Vienna
Online Monograph https://www.blurb.com/b/8961423-food-as-structural...