Please join us for a presentation and a tasting by artist, Grace Gloria Denis, and Margaux Schwab, of foodculture days, two residents of IASPIS Umeå. They will do a presentation of their work exploring the ephemeral tastes of the territory.
Ephemerality permeates the landscapes of Vasterbottens in the rapid departure from winter-spring; from the melting forms of ice floating on the water in mid-April to the abundance of birch sap that follows, a series of fleeting elements flow out in an exhalation from winter’s sustained inhalation, acknowledging the breath of life pulsating under and above ground. The thawing of the landscape invokes the image of a gradient, the slow trickle between seasons generating a sort of temporal ecotone that hosts an array of ephemeral ecological communities.
Valorizing spaces of knowledge circulation extraneous to the institutional realm, from forests, fields, sites of food production, cheese factories, gardens, and plant nurseries, Denis and Schwab infused their ongoing research methodologies into their navigation of the territory, mapping the various foodwebs of the Umeå region. Through this tasting, they offer a translation of their observations into a language of intimacy and fragility, juxtaposing the evanescence of ingredients with the residues they leave lingering within our internal landscapes. During their residency, the duo experimented with various food preservation techniques, apprehending fermentation as both a potent metaphor for metabolic processes and a vibrant manifestation of intertwining temporalities.
Parallel to this, the artist and the curator will share some of their reflections germinating from a maintained conversation around the reality and limitations of the field of contemporary art in regard to the temporal and socio-political complexities of food-based research practices and production, implementing the framework of the residency as a zone of respiration.
The duo invites you to bring a local recipe to share to be included in their anarchive; their ongoing and open-ended body of research which deviates from the closed and fixed notions of a conventional archive, in the cognizance of the flux inherent to the act of attempting to archive a landscape.