Tender Touches: Fermentation Workshop with Inês Neto dos Santos

Can eating bring us closer to our bodies? Can it help us engage with the world? What can it teach us about who we are, where we come from or where we’re going?

Part of Inês Neto dos Santos’s ongoing project Fermen-tour, this workshop seeks to explore food’s potential for story-telling, imagination, empowerment and togetherness. With particular focus on fermentation and other natural preserving methods, this session will present them as relevant metaphors for everyday life: archives of edible stories and history, and hints into how we live today and how our lives might look in the future. While understanding ferments as time-based constructions, holders of site-specific micro-organisms (living particles that shape us and our surrounding environment), participants will be encouraged to experiment with combining various ingredients in order to (re)create new and existing narratives.

Participants will leave not only with a basic understanding of fermentation, and ferments to take home of their own, but also with a consideration of food as a valid tool for empowerment, connections and togetherness.

This workshop is part of the programme of events for Tender Touches, an exhibition curated by Huma Kabakci and Inês Neto dos Santos at AMP Gallery, 17 May - 30 June 2019. Tender Touches takes the form of an ‘art cafe’ where everything – from the food to the furniture and tableware – is both a functional object and an artwork. Drawing on the food-based practice of Inês Neto dos Santos, the exhibition blurs the boundaries between the studio, the gallery and the dining room, using food as a catalyst for conversation and debate.

Inês Neto dos Santos (b. Lisbon, 1992) is a multidisciplinary artist based in London and is co-curator of Tender Touches. She studied at the Royal College of Art (2016) and London College of Communication (2013). Her practice stands between performance and installation - using food, people and spaces as metaphors and prompts for discussion and conversation. Neto dos Santos explores the stories and performative actions behind eating, feeding, and cooking. She has exhibited internationally, including Lisbon, Porto, Madrid, Athens and London.