In my second experiment for my Design Activism topic I decided to go for the classic approach of trying out some collages. For this I first had to decide on a topic, since Design Activism can come in many different forms and it would’ve been harder to work on several different topics at once. So for this first try in collage, because I haven’t done them in a while and I also haven’t liked my previous tries at collage very much, I have to say that I’m quite happy with my process, as well as, the outcome.
Firstly, I gathered some materials, luckily since I cannot seem to throw away stuff easily, I’ve already been preparing for doing collages for years, in case I someday want to do them. Therefore, I had a big box full of magazine scraps and textured papers that I wanted to scour for some useful things that I might be able to integrate in my collages. To add to that, I prepared some differently coloured papers as a background for my collages.
It took me quite a while to think about what kind of topic might be the right approach for these experiments that I’m doing, therefore I decided on trying it with the topic: “food is political”. Food is something important to every human being, since it is necessary for survival and, therefore, one of the central topics of life, whether we want it to be or not. Some people eat food to have energy to do the things they enjoy or have to do in life and some see food as something that can be enjoyed and does not only serve to keep the body functioning. As we all know, food is something that can put countries in crisis since it is so very necessary for our survival, this means that food has always been and will always be political, even if many people might not want to see it that way. Even in earlier times, farmers could not freely decide, who gets their food, because there was always someone else they had to listen to and they had to serve to even be able to afford having their own fields. Nowadays, access to food is also not certain for everyone. Depending on how privileged you are, in which country you live and what kind of work you are able to do already changes the accessibility that you might have to daily goods for survival. Usually it also depends on how much money you have, whether you can afford to make healthier choices or have to stick to whatever is available for cheaper prices. To add to that, many cultures build their identity based on typical foods, which makes different types of vegetables or grains culturally loaded and also victims to colonization, as can be seen by researching African plants, for instance.
Food has also been used as a symbol for several different political mouvements. Whether it is by throwing different kinds of food at pieces of art or vandalizing statues of people that have been doing questionable things during history or just using a certain type of food for a certain mouvement, e.g. watermelon for Palestine. These are all things that I have kept in mind during my collaging process. If you’re interested and want to follow along and see what kinds of collages I made, there will be a part two of this long process. 🙂
