Introduction

Laurie Beth Clark and Michael Peterson

Part one: The problem

According to the United Nations (UN), roughly 690 million people (9 per cent of the world’s population) live with hunger (United Nations). Yet hunger is not natural, and it is not an accident. Hunger is caused by both malign and inadvertent actions, as well as collective inaction; at the same time hunger can be addressed through collective action. Action is needed to end hunger and to oppose global economic regimes that condemn millions to poverty as if this is inevitable.

It is common in recent years to hear hunger explained as driven by three or four ‘Cs’: climate, conflict, COVID-19, and sometimes cost. The three Cs appear in reports from relief organizations (e.g. Hall); we first heard the shorthand of ‘the four Cs’ in a lecture on food security by earnest United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and non-governmental organization (NGO) employees to an audience of US university students. But these are proximate causes of hunger, and as crucial as they are to address, focusing only on these “drivers” misses the four Cs representing the deeper forces of what Jenny Edkins and others have aptly called “the hunger industrial complex”: capitalism, colonialism, corruption and culture (Edkins; Fisher).

Essential work has been done by many who feel the call to act in response to the ongoing crisis, but less scholarship (particularly in the humanities) has been devoted to analysing these programmes. While critical thinking must not be an obstacle to doing something about hunger, both hunger-causing and hunger-alleviating actions deserve critical analysis. As theorized action, the arts are in a unique position to disrupt such binaries.

Corporeal hunger is exacerbated by other kinds of hunger that cannot be easily located in the body and yet are experienced as material reality. Perhaps because of this reach, hunger also has a long history of deployment in politics and weaponization in geopolitics. Self-starvation and other agential hungers have historically played a significant role as responses to violence, trauma and injustice, from the hunger strikes of political prisoners to the self-denial of sustenance by adolescents seeking ways to cope in a world that is beyond their control.

“Actual” hunger is imbricated in desires and motivations that are not reducible to biological nutrition. Indeed, there is no hard and fast line between the two. Hunger constrains the fundamental human right to life in a way that is brutally material, but it also stifles the fundamental human right to thrive. “Disordered” eating intertwines in contemporary works of fat activist politics that challenge social stigmas and discrimination. Where does the hunger for comfort reside? Where do we locate the hunger and thirst for activity and circulation? The hungry gut or the hungry feet? Grief for all the deaths suffuses the entire body as a desperate hungering for hope and agency.

Whether motivated by the urgency of the situation or by our training, artists often have the impulse to represent hunger in ways that will move audiences, and when we try, we soon find ourselves up against the core problems of representation, from exploitation to inadequacy to inefficacy. Common efforts to move audiences include photographs of children with scrawny limbs and bloated bellies and of passive recipients waiting in long lines to receive rations. Artists working in other media, from painting to film to literature, have also tried to rise to the challenge of representing hunger, and often come up short.

In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag teaches us that such pictures (in her discussion, pictures of war) do not accomplish what she cites Virginia Woolf as hoping: “that the shock of such pictures cannot fail to unite people of goodwill” (Woolf cited in Sontag 6). Rather, Sontag says, without narration, pictures “wait to be explained” and while they can catalogue “destructiveness” they are not in themselves “an argument against”. Rather, she says “photographs of atrocity may give rise to opposing responses” (Sontag 10, 12, 13). When, in 1999, Enzo Cozzi described the impossibility of theatrical representation of hunger,^[1] he was not so much concerned with Sontag’s ambiguity of representation as he was the impossibility of “simulation”. For Cozzi, theatre cannot reproduce the gnawing reality of starvation without enacting it: “hunger cannot even be represented. It must be deployed maskless, bare. Its eloquence is direct” (122).

In the intervening period, much groundwork has been laid for the discussion of hunger in the arts, humanities and social sciences; twenty-plus years later, we re-open this conversation to ask: What now can performance and performance studies contribute to hunger action?

How are the arts useful in the fight to reduce or eliminate hunger? Artists have worked to raise money (as in the benefit concerts of the 1980s) and to represent or dramatize hunger (in novels, photographs, films, plays). Artists are often called upon to aid in communication and in making emotional appeals to the public. Sometimes people turn to the arts to carry us through periods of deprivation. The arts do not typically feed people (although some artists do) and the arts cannot by itself create the structural changes in society that the UN Global Reports on Food Crises show (FSIN) are needed to meet Sustainable Development Goal #2, to eliminate hunger as “a trap from which people cannot easily escape” and that thus limits all other human rights and potentials (United Nations).

But it is a very limited understanding of the arts (and of hunger) to suggest that it provides only surplus, rather than core, value. If hunger is simply a failure of food production, then perhaps artists do not have a particular role in response. But if we understand hunger as a failure of imagination (about how society could be shaped), then artists have a crucial role in devising creative and resilient strategies. The arts can ally with politics, activism and scholarship to witness, remember and re-imagine social structures. As the designer-activists of the Design Studio for Social Intervention write, “ideas are embedded within arrangements which in turn produce effects” (18). Performance can both challenge ideas and experiment with new arrangements. This is what this joint endeavour aims to do.

The concurrent issues of Global Performance Studies and Performance Research that we have edited on the theme of hunger contain elaborations on how intersecting forces of (de)colonization and economic (in)justice, as well as race and gender violence, are integral to both hunger and poverty. While building on crucial literature on the dynamic intertwining of physical and other hungers, we tried to instigate the production of new scholarship that moves away from Western critical paradigms and/or science-centred perspectives. There is no question that the gnawing demand of hunger on a body draws us relentlessly into the present (as Cozzi suggests) but the role that the commemoration of hunger plays in allowing us to imagine nourished futures should not be underestimated.

To compile these volumes, we solicited contributions that analysed hunger and its mitigation as performance. We sought celebratory description and critical analysis of hunger action strategies, from Uruguayan and Chilean ollas populares to Filipino rice hubs, from long-standing food pantries to spontaneous performances of mutual aid. We are interested in the temporality of hunger as well as its putative unrepresentability. We showcase essays that revisit narrative engagements with hunger (both literary and theatrical). We encouraged analysis of the anti-hunger work of celebrity chefs to feed the poor in creative and nutritious ways, as well as the work being done by cooks who are less well known but more community-based; we also welcomed work critiquing the economies of celebrity, philanthropy and development.

What kinds of critical frameworks are productive for understanding hunger? What does hunger look like and how is it represented? What does the end of hunger look like and how is it represented? What role can the arts play in responding to hunger? What creative interventions are already underway that directly address hunger? How does Performance Studies understand the causes, experiences, responses and representations of hunger? Why are models of hunger relief so often built on austerity and efficiency? Can we devise hunger mitigations that integrate pleasure, humour, song and dance? When is hunger? How is its past remembered and how is its end imagined?

The articles anthologized in Performance Research and Global Performance Studies take up our questions in profound, productive and sometimes surprising ways.

Part two: The process

Brother Armin Luistro FSC provided the first impetus for these journals. Luistro is currently Superior General of the Brothers of the Christian Schools but at the time he was president of De La Salle University in the Philippines and in this role, he challenged Professor Dr Jazmin Llana (one of the editors of these volumes) and a team of faculty and staff at De La Salle to take the problem of hunger seriously. In response, Llana convened the Hunger Action Network at De La Salle, which brought together a coalition of campus and community organizations to consider what contributions a university community could make to mitigating hunger.

Llana also brought the challenge to Performance Studies international (PSi) where she was, at the time, serving as vice president in charge of conference planning, and proposed that the organization take up hunger as the theme of its next conference.^[2] That conference (the 27th Performance Studies international) was hosted by a Manila-based team and held online in July 2022. Llana also brought the challenge to the art collaborative Spatula&Barcode whose work on Foodways^[3] has figured significantly in PSi conferences in Melbourne (PSi22) and Johannesburg (PSi28) and featured in past and current volumes of these journals. Spatula&Barcode founders Laurie Beth Clark and Michael Peterson (also co-editors on these volumes) agreed to come to the Philippines for six months (between May and December 2022) and to make Hunger the central focus of their sixth Foodways project.

By inviting scholars and artists to work on hunger, Llana was opening up an important question about what contribution the arts and humanities can make to a realm of research and action that has largely been the purview of scientists and social scientists. In the call she devised for the conference, Llana was adamant that the challenge was for us to consider hunger and hunger action as material conditions, and not to be lost in metaphorical uses of the term.

The journals you are now reading result directly from this cycle of events. Roughly one-third of the contributions have a direct connection to work that was developed for and/or presented at the conference: (Adib Barreiro et al.; Anderson; Bronfman and Soto; Clark et al.; Clark and Peterson; Gough; Kear; Serquiña) although most of these articles have been substantively revised for publication. However, the call for written contributions was also circulated widely and many new articles were solicited for publication.

While the conference presentations and the Foodways projects held fast to the literal considerations of hunger, the call for entries for the journals opened up to a more extended use of the term, including adjacent and symbolic uses. Indeed, in our call we argued (as we do above) that physical and emotional hunger, hunger for food and hunger for freedom, are not readily separable.

A unique aspect of this endeavour is the collaboration of two journals. Global Performance Studies is the peer reviewed online academic journal sponsored by Performance Studies international while Performance Research is a print publication (with online access) that is a project of the Centre for Performance Research and published by Routledge, Taylor & Francis. The two editorial teams agreed that, given the magnitude and the urgency of the theme of hunger, an exceptional collaboration might be enacted.

The volumes contain not only critical and analytical essays, but also artist pages, an online multi-media exhibition and even a short story. Our contributors are not only performance scholars and makers but also ecologists, social scientists, historians, activists and theologians.

For this reason, you may find yourselves as readers engaging with styles of scholarship that are unfamiliar to performance studies. As editors, we firmly believe that this kind of cross-disciplinary discourse is integral to grappling with the world’s most intractable questions.

These two concurrent volumes assemble twenty-nine articles from more than fifty authors who are based in or writing about hunger in sixteen countries on six continents.^[4] The contributions cluster around five themes: context, hunger action, self-starvation, representations, and creative interventions. Elaborations of the subthemes and synopses of the essays contained therein can be found on the divider pages between each section.

We have placed several essays from each thematic cluster into each journal so that, read independently, either volume offers a “well rounded” if partial consideration of the theme. But we have also, repeatedly throughout each volume, pointed to correlating material in its counterpart, hoping that readers of one journal will be drawn to the other to seek out related content.

We have divided the work of reflecting on the production of these issues, with Clark and Peterson writing this introduction and Llana developing a reflection that looks back and comments on the full cycle of events leading up to publication.

Hunger Action

In Performance Research

An Archipelago of Aid: Embodied Hungers and Networks of Civic Support in the Pandemic-stricken Philippines
Oscar T. Serquiña, Jr

“We’ve Never Done This Before”: Creative Methodologies to Food Justice in Crisis and Beyond
Jen Rae

Hunger Action Now: The Art Relief Mobile Kitchen
Jazmin Llana with Alex Baluyut and Precious Leano

In Global Performance Studies

Transforming Food into a Political Device: A Biopolitical Reading of the Olla Común and the Fight Against Hunger in Chile
Paulina Bronfman and Pamela Soto García

Ampersand Aesthetics: Spatula&Barcode’s Foodways Philippines
Laurie Beth Clark and Michael Peterson

“It’s nourishment we need, not just food”: Contrasting Experiences in South and North America to Alleviate Systemic and Emergent Hunger during COVID-19 Pandemic
Alvaro Adib Barreiro, Nithya Attipetty, Geraldine Garcia-Matas, Belén Banegas, Silvana Juri, and Mariana Meerhoff

The second section of each journal takes up hunger action, a term that refers to efforts on many scales to intervene in the material impact of insufficient or inadequate food supply. As mentioned, the conference foregrounded hunger action over metaphoric deployments of the term and so did the call for proposals. We were happy to receive seven essays and a short story that take up this challenge, with four focusing on responses during the pandemic and three attending to ongoing feeding programmes.

Hunger action: Pandemic

Oscar Serquiña describes the community pantries that proliferated in the Philippines during the COVID-19 pandemic in a critical reconsideration of how this scattered and spontaneous form of civic engagement mirrors the archipelagic formation of the Philippines and deviates from the patronizing logics of philanthropy.

Also considering grassroots actions, Paulina Bronfman and Pamela Soto Garcia look at a traditional communitarian activity in Chile—community meals made entirely by volunteers with food donated or collected by members of the community—for its potential to contribute new conceptual grammars and vocabularies to the disciplines of politics and performance.

Jen Rae demonstrates how it is possible to build a community around a systemic problem such as food justice. By narrating her work with Sally Beattie at Fawkner Food Commons during the pandemic, she shares lessons learned about creative crisis response that can help foster a more adaptive and responsive food system.

Finally, in their collaboratively authored study, a team of social scientists, artists and activists (Adib Barreiro et al.) compare pandemic responses in food insecure communities in the United States and Uruguay with the goal of developing a stronger and more resilient food system. Particularly interesting is how certain responses depended on government structures while others depended on social solidarity.

Hunger action: Ongoing

In this section, Jazmin Llana interviews the artists Precious Leano and Alex Baluyot about their work with Art Relief Mobile Kitchen, which, since 2013, has mobilized artists to respond to crises that include typhoons, earthquakes, volcanic eruption and state terrorism by serving meals.

Laurie Beth Clark and Michael Peterson detail the work of their art collaborative Spatula&Barcode who, in collaboration with Jazmin Llana, joined forces with ongoing hunger mitigation efforts in the Philippines to bring “a little something extra” to the table.

Creative Interventions

In Global Performance Studies

Insatiabilities
An online exhibition by Ariel Smith, Rima Najdi, Maria Kulikovska, Xena Ni, and Mollie Ruskin
Curated by Aniko Szucs and Dominika Laster

Hunger and Resilience: Collective Agricultural and Artistic Practices in an Area Impacted by Environmental Disaster
Shuntaro Yoshida

peach grove
em irvin

Foraging as an Aesthetic Response to Hunger
Natalie Doonan

Microbial Theatricality: Self-made, Celebrity, and Scales of Hunger
Elizabeth Shiffler

Performing Hunger in Taiwan: Images, Objects, and Reflections
Lily Wei

In Performance Research

¿Qué vamos a comer? Colombia's mojojoy!
Ana Martínez, Verónica Martínez, and Juan Ochoa

Nostalgic Hunger in Zhu Yu’s Eating People
Darja Filippova

La Merda: On what you might need to do to be permitted to sit at the “winners’ table”. In Cwonversation with Cristian Ceresoli and Silvia Gallerano
Vanja Baltić

Finally, the largest cluster of essays explore how artists use various forms of hunger in their creative work, perhaps answering the question of whether hunger can be represented by saying that it can be engaged or deployed. Using a range of media, and writing about their own work or that of other artists, these projects from across the world showcase a range of strategies that artists have undertaken in concert with various kinds of hunger.

The multimedia platform of Global Performance Studies provides an opportunity to showcase an online exhibition from the 2022 conference for which Szucs and Laster brought together five artists with feminist approaches who explore the material practices, embodied experiences, socio-economic conditions as well as the psychosomatic and affective modalities of hunger.

Natalie Doonan takes us on a series of public walking events along the St Lawrence River in Montreal to consider the aesthetics of care necessary to alleviate pain and suffering that are inevitable consequences of eating. Artist pages by Em Irvin document an installation that draws attention to productively unproductive labour of the hungry worker with no prospect for future sustenance. Shuntaro Yoshida writes about the artist Min Tanaka who tells the story of the physical and psychological hunger he experienced following the accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant that caused radioactive rain to contaminate the soil of his “half farm/half art”.

Elizabeth Shiffler reports on a sensory art experience created by Christina Agapakis that foregrounds the microbes in our “hungry guts”. Shiffler describes how in this multi-species performance, cheeses cultured from human bacteria transforms the anthropogenic concept of theatricality to produce microbial theatricality and draws attention to the emergent celebrity of microbes in academia and in food media. Ana Martínez, Verónica Martínez, and Juan Ochoa write about a multi-media happening by a Colombian artistic collective in Lenguajes Gastronómicos's Obsoleta. The collective deploys an Amazonian larva as a source of decolonial knowledge, as an indigenous food source and as a disruptor of contemporary agribusinesses as a force of decolonization against industrialized food, economic injustice and extractivism.

Darja Filippova takes up a provocative and notorious performance of eating a foetus, which is most often interpreted as a critique of the Chinese state abuse of human rights and the one-child policy. In this article, Filippova argues that this reading reproduces Western liberal values and suggests that instead the work illustrates a deep complicity between the Chinese (post-)socialism and global neoliberal capitalism. Writing in conversation with Cristian Ceresoli and Silvia Gallerano, Vanja Baltić explores the artisanal and philosophical aspects of their work, La Merda, in which a character demonstrates a Rabelaisian hunger.

Finally, Lily Wei discusses performances created by her students at Chung Yuan Christian University who created online performances during the pandemic about hunger, food insecurity and food waste. Wei's essay considers the efficacy of performance as a tool for pedagogy about perceptions and representations of hunger.

Introduction

Laurie Beth Clark and Michael Peterson

Part one: The problem

Part two: The process

Context

Hunger Action

Hunger action: Pandemic

Hunger action: Ongoing

Self-Starvation

Representing Hunger

Creative Interventions

Notes

Works Cited