Stirring the Pot of Story: Food, History, Memory

As part of The Politics of Food (Season 2): Sex, Diet & Disaster, Delfina Foundation launches a group exhibition Stirring the Pot of Story.

Curated by Nat Muller, this exhibition explores how power relations have shaped how and what we eat by looking at individual and collective memories of food in written and unwritten histories. The exhibition’s title is borrowed from J.R.R. Tolkien’s concept of the “Pot of Story”, the idea that story begets story. World events, issues of governance, class, identity, geography, nationhood, and gender are all brought to the boil in the cauldron of food politics.

The exhibition focuses on the direct link between power and the control of food. It rethinks narratives of the past such as colonialism, war and migration, and how these continue to inform our relationship to food in our current social and political contexts. Participating artists include Mella Jaarsma (The Netherlands/Indonesia), Mounira Al Solh (Lebanon/The Netherlands), Raul Ayala Ortega (Mexico) and former or current resident artists: Cooking Sections (UK), Christine Mackey (Ireland), and Leone Contini (Italy).

Mella Jaarsma looks at the colonial history of the Dutch tea trade in the East Indies. Christine Mackey pays homage to an Irish pea that was repatriated from Russia back to Ireland while Mounira Al Solh offers an intimate account of food, war and desire during the Lebanese civil war.

In newly commissioned works Leone Contini looks at the iconography of Italian food cans of WWI, and the London-based collective Cooking Sections research how the foodways of the British Empire resonate with mobility and bio-warfare today. Meanwhile, Raul Ayala Ortega constructs a Tower of Babel of fat and bones, an apt metaphor for ruin and decay of our times.