Abundant Futures: Food Politics
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Pictured: Experimental Food Festival, 2023_Dana Olărescu at In-Situ. Photo by Diane Muldowney
A socially engaged project by Dana Olărescu
Abundant Futures is a long-term, socially engaged project commissioned by ArtHouse Jersey and led by Dana Olărescu in collaboration with contributing artists and organisations such as Dhaqan Collective, Kaajal Modi, William Bock and Counterpoints. Abundant Futures seeks to empower individuals from migrant and forcibly displaced backgrounds by providing them with platforms to use their expertise in food growing and cooking through creative activities. The project delves into the resources, capabilities and agency present within Jersey's migrant nationals and native populations, focusing on food justice. It aims to highlight and honour the diverse insights and skills they bring from their homelands.
Throughout the project's duration, food will be a catalyst for workshops, performances, interventions and installations, as well as a research platform into building power and capacity between diverse demographics. Abundant Futures aims to foster solidarity across migrant groups while addressing barriers such as environmental, racial and social injustices that may hinder certain residents from engaging in such dialogues. Individuals and groups are encouraged to get in touch if they would like to participate in the project.
Click HERE to learn about Dana’s upcoming talk in Jersey ‘Abundant Futures: Food Politics’ on Saturday 4 May 2024.
Pictured right: Food Resilience workshops 2022_Dana Olărescu & Noemi Gunea, POMOC. Photo by Anca Rusu.
Dana Olărescu
A socially engaged artist working at the intersection of performance, installation, and social design, Dana focuses on challenging minority exclusion and environmental injustice. Through participatory methodologies that democratise access to art and knowledge, she aims to give agency to migrant individuals and groups to become active co-producers of culture. In 2021-2022, Dana participated in the 'Home' artist residency program with ArtHouse Jersey. During this time she collaborated with the local Romanian community and created artworks for the ‘Home’ art exhibition, which reflected on the diverse and multicultural essence of modern Jersey.
Food is a recurrent theme in Dana’s practice. In the summer of 2024 Dana will collaborate with Super Slow Way in Nelson, Lancashire, to design activations and slow feasts at a pop-up café, aiming to engage residents in shaping a local food strategy. In 2022, commissioned by POMOC, Dana partnered with artist Noemi Gunea on Food Resilience, a series of weekly workshops discussing food politics with Londoners of Eastern European heritage. During the pandemic, she authored Towards Resilience: A Manual in Support of the Immune System, a recipe book drawing on ancient healing systems from around the world.
Pictured left: Do You Dream of Labour_Dana Olărescu Photo by Maxim Honcharuk
Kaajal Modi
Kaajal Modi (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist and heritage researcher working through creative practices to explore how making in collaboration with diverse communities (human, ecological and otherwise) can be a way to open up new speculations on how we might live in the future. Kaajal works through critical creative practices in the kitchen, lab and landscape to explore how humans continuously negotiate ecological imaginaries through food, medicine, spiritual and sensory modes, as well as poetry, song and storytelling. Their practice is rooted in co-creation, and incorporates listening, fermenting, foraging, image making and live interactions to create lively and situated encounters between people, organisms and ecosystems. Kaajal’s project Native Tongues is an artistic research project that explores the interrelationship of land, language and food biodiversity. The project aims to bring together older Jèrriais speakers and migrant children who are learning the language and their families, to recover and discover vernacular ways of being with and caring for soil, as one way to imagine more generous relationships with the other organisms with whom we share our environments.
Pictured right: Kitchenette of Future Dust. Image: Sofia Victoria Rodrigo. Madrid 2019.
William Bock
William Bock is a multi-disciplinary artist based in south west Ireland and working internationally. His work explores relationships between people and the environments they inhabit. Drawing from folk traditions and vernacular history on the land, the artist creates socially engaged projects rooted in place that engage with experiences of migration, ecology, colonial history, climate change and identity.
The artist brings his Green Rope project to Jersey which uses the act of Sugán rope making (an Irish straw rope) to bring people, nature and conversation together across cultural and social barriers. The rope is twisted by many hands from wild plants harvested locally. The project considers Jersey island's position at the intersection of invisible tracks stretching far out beyond its shores connecting plants, animals and humans from around the globe. The Green Rope offers itself as a social sculpture and tangible process, extending through space as the public conversation and connections between culturally diverse communities emerge.
Pictured left: May Daily XXVI (for sore eyes) 2023 photograph by William Bock
Fozia Ismail - dhaqan collective
Fozia Ismail is a Researcher, Creative Producer and Artist. She is the founder of Arawelo Eats, a platform for exploring politics, identity, and colonialism through East African food and what it means for our understanding of belonging in a post-Brexit world. When not criticallyeating her way through life’s messiness she can be found plotting at the Pervasive Media Studio and Spike Island with her sister in arms Ayan Cilmi as part of dhaqan collective, a Somali feminist art collective in Bristol. The collective uses everyday materials, cassette tapes, food, textiles, to create spaces of communion, joy and healing that centre the full range of Somali diasporic experiences. Their creative ecology is rooted in the collective thinking of Somali nomadic life and the creativity at its heart.
In Milk Songs, here, there and everywhere, Fozia and the dhaqan collective will be exploring migrant rituals, stories, and songs related to the act of milking. How do these milk traditions relate to the story of the people who inhabit the Island, past and present? What insights can we draw from exploring the intimacy of this relationship between people, land and animals through the lens of milk cultures and song.
Pictured right: Omar Sultan - Fozia Ismail, Playtesting week for House of Weavings Songs, Playable Cities, Bristol, May 2023
Instagram: @dhaqancollective