3–24 April 2024 / Utrecht (various locations)
We’re teaming up with Utrecht University’s Critical Pathways to welcome Tonio Flores in Utrecht!
Food is the most intimate way we conspire with ecologies; it forms and revises landscapes, territories, bodies, and beliefs. Currently, there is a rise of farmers’ protests enraged by increasingly unjust trade and farming policies that drive hunger and dispossession most intensely in the Majority World*. Despite this, the depth of articulation and action for food justice in the Majority World is seeding the change. Movements and initiatives in these territories have been working on community-led food systems adaptive and resistant to globalized corporate food systems. We are invited to learn from, and possibly adapt, these models, not just as case studies, but as ways of being.
In this series of gatherings and workshops, we unravel these ongoing and emerging pathways for just transitions within food systems in the Philippines, through local projects that center on localized farming/gardening systems and community-led processes. An exhibition of works-in-progress and first-draft thoughts on food systems based on my practice, rooted in a larger food justice movement, will be shared. We will gather through time-tested modalities that are used in these interventions: dialogue, creating manifestos, foraging, seed keeping, communal cooking, and eating together.
- The Majority World are territories in which most of the world’s population, natural resources, and landmass are located but are often economically poorer because of their colonial histories.
SESSION 1 – Tanawin: Creating a Food Justice Manifesto
8 April 2024, 15:00-17:30 / Utrecht Botanical Gardens Downtown
How might we critically engage dominant food and land narratives? Who is charting the course of food futures? Through a co-creative process, we aim to surface shared and plural perspectives on food and nourishment in the context of a failing globalized economy.
This dialogue and workshop invites participants to reflect and co-create a shared manifesto/manifestation for food justice. Our food + land memories, experiences, and relationships are fractals of a larger food system. These food narratives are actively shaped by personal and public forces and later manifest in our policies and institutions. As local food actors, preconditions are present for us to notice and actively mold. In this workshop, we use narrative arcs, progressing from an analysis of the past and the present, to prepare for predictable surprises in food futures. This manifesto will continually evolve as it is exhibited for the public to revise, delete, or add layers to the installation.
We invite you to reflect together in the Old Greenhouse at Utrecht University Museum. Please bring at least two images from critical moments/memories in your work/life related to food and land.
SESSION 2 – I took a walk and was fed / Foraging for Food Futures
14 April 2024, 10:00–13:00 / Casco HQ (meeting point)
The farm and forest spill over to the city. We will try to unravel the market logic of food as commodity, peri-urban relationships, and foraging for desirable futures. In this workshop, we will be joined by forager, Toni Kritzer, to take a walk through the urban neighborhoods around Casco and forage for wild edibles commonly thought of as “weeds”. We then record and remember these species through cyanotype prints, and make a snack from the rest. Alongside this, the participants are invited to evolve the manifesto/manifestation. The participants are invited to interact with personal food and farming narratives and visual matter from Tonio Flores’ practice, and heritage ingredients from local artisans, farmers, and gift economies in the Philippines.
SESSION 3 – A Moving Feast
18 April 2024, 18:00–21:00 / Casco HQ
To celebrate our thinking and gathering on just food systems, we will cook a meal together. Produce from Pinoy farmers, artisans, and foragers, will be made into a simple community feast. Collectively we will read heritage ingredients, foraged food, community-shared agriculture shares as anti-commodities, as ways to collectively reimagine our food systems outside of global trade and capital motive. Communal cooking, and eating together is also another form of dialogue, in this gathering we are invited to critically reflect, metabolize, and embody the food and land moment horizon as a shared practice.
