Abstract

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 conversation 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.