Food Futures: Activism and Digital Media

  • Travlou, Penny (Principal Investigator)
  • Prapoglou, Kostas (Principal Investigator)
  • Marketou, Jenny (Principal Investigator)

Project Details

Description

Food Futures is an online research-based initiative and socially engaged art project - a virtual pedagogical platform - implemented by building an interactive website browser accessible for action and participation to provide resources for developing practices of self-reflection, self-care, and cultivating new ways of building community in online spaces. The project will engage participants with Food as Practice to dismantle systems of injustice and inequity in our urban environment.

Food Futures as a pedagogical platform, will capture and give access with clarity, insightfulness, and power to young people who are going to be the great leaders in the environmental and food justice cause of the future. It encourages further exploration of food culture and heritage, superstitions and emotional connections to food in a time where “what we eat shapes the futures”.

As the title suggests, this art project is very timely and resonates with the specific moment in response to the current situation of the Covid-19 pandemic. It is extremely urgent to collectively rethink our present perception of food and nourishment, considering the growing environmental challenges concerning nutrition. In a world where nearly a billion people experience malnutrition and starvation, a third of food produced is wasted every year.

The project will be conducted through a series of webinars, virtual discussions, and workshops on Zoom and Instagram and live-streamed on YouTube that our team will run with Greek and international thinkers, food activists and collectives, chefs, food writers, farmers, youth, cultural producers, migrants and refugees, unemployed and precarious workers in Kypseli, among others.

Goals-Methodology

The goal of Food Futures is the design of an open-source website that creates and shapes content, encourages collaboration and offers exciting, meaningful interactions with a vibrant diverse and intergenerational communities among and especially youth in schools and universities in Greece and worldwide in order to thrive in an increasingly complex world, which cares for Food Justice as well as about the current and future state of food and culture.

The open-source website ( browser) is used as a fundamental toolkit to support all aspects of a creative approach to food ecologies. It is designed as the container of all our research which will be open and accessible for free.

Layman's description

Food Futures is a research-based initiative and socially engaged art project which: a) consid-ers how digital and networked technologies may promote forms of knowledge production and introduce kinship bonds with the environment and one another; b) explores how the digital sphere enables connectivity and provides resources to reimagine today’s primary relationship to our food production and consumption at times of pandemic, and c) integrates artists, cultur-al producers, researchers and young generations with a shared space to educate and engage with a radically innovative model for thinking about the future.

Food Futures is convened by Jenny Marketou, multidisciplinary practicing artist, professor of New Media Art and Social Engagement at The New School of Social Research in New York with Penny Travlou, cultural geographer and ethnographer, assistant professor at Edinburgh College of Art in collaboration with Kostas Prapoglou, archaeologist-architect, independent curator and art writer based in Athens.

Key findings

Food Futures is imagined as a digital garden, where seeds can be ideas and members of the public are the farmers/gardeners, who can either plant their own seeds or help them grow with their input and opinions.

Some of the topics we want address related to our relation to food and the new realities as a result of the pandemic.

* How does each of us experience the ritual of food and eating during isolation?
* How has each of us been experiencing the food system and food chain depending on their current location?
* What best practices could we share and gather information about on food sustainability and food justice both locally and globally?
* What changes do we feel that should be made?
* What strategies can be used in order to re-shape and rearrange our wellness and our interrelations with food, nature and climate changes?
* How do we see ourselves reacting towards a new pandemic?
* Are we trained enough by the current pandemic to face a new one?
* What mistakes can we avoid in order to make it easier next time?
Short titleFood Futures
AcronymFF
StatusFinished
Effective start/end date1/08/2128/02/22

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