If you’ve been reading my blog posts you know that my last experiment was focused on doing collages on the topic: “food is political”. In my last post I got a bit into how my process started and talked mainly about how I was able to find my topic and which factors make the sentence true on several different levels. I focused on privileges and the accessibilty of food, as well as how food is tied to survival and can be tied to cultural identity. To add to that, I already started mentioning that food has been used either as a symbol for political mouvements or as a way of dealing with historical pieces of art or statues of questionable people, when vandalizing these with food.
As I’ve already mentioned in my last blog post, my process was rather messy, but I think with collages this is mostly the case anyways. I started to search my box of scraps to find some things that might be used for food, first I started to search for certain colours that remind me of specific vegetables. But I also searched for pieces of food and things associated with food. In the following picture you can see just how messy my process really was.
I decided to focus on doing three collages that were focusing on different aspects of “food is political”. In one of them I wanted to show different types of vegetables as a symbol for farmers implying the different accessibilty of food over time. In the second one I wanted to show how charged it has become to see objects that are associated with watermelons, and how easily the Free Palestine Mouvement can be implied, when adding a view conceptual changes to it. In the last one I tried to show that food connects people and is also a symbol of identity, people tend to identify themselves through food, especially in Europe a table full with different types of foods shows wealth that isn’t only measurable in money.
As I’ve already mentioned, with the collage you can see on the left below, I was trying to find ways to show vegetables without cutting them out as finished versions already. I searched for different colours and thought about whtat they reminded me of and then proceeded to find the leaves or other parts that might match and make sense for the composition. In the collage you can see a tomato, an aubergine, a carrot, a beet and a zucchini all perched upon a cutting board. These are supposed to show an everyday situation, implying the accessibility of food, as well as, the history of farming.
The poster in the middle is focusing on palestinian identity, as well as the free palestine movement. The watermelon set of tableware just came at the exact right time, to clearly show that it is supposed to make sense in a palestinian context, I added some tiles that reminded me a bit of the palestinian fabrics that also show elaborate patterns. To add to that, the stars above showase freedom and to fight for freedom usually some tools are needed, in this case the cutlery.
Finally, the poster on the right explores cultural identity through food. It showcases a table filled with food, and adds some botanical details reminding that food always somehow comes from nature. This again features the question of accessibilty and that in certain areas of the world having a table filled with food can be considered normal, even if it shows great privilege.
All in all, this experiment was a really fun process and it opened my eyes to making collages in a simpler way that is really fun and also creates outcomes that really make sense and work for certain projects.
