Talking Food

With Katalin Erdődi, Marta Fernández Calvo, Irene Lucas, Elia Nurvista, Johannes Wiener.

Kunsthalle Exnergasse is a cooperation partner of Zukunftshof with the Artist-in-Residence program "KEX Residence". This former estate is a center for urban agriculture and nutrition as well as a social-ecological oriented district development at the edge of the city of Vienna, in the middle of a projected urban expansion area. 

Within the framework of the KEX Residency, artists, curators or other cultural workers come to Vienna for a period of time, whose practice is located at the interface of art, urbanism, ecology, with a thematic focus on the topics of (urban) agriculture and nutrition, urban expansion, circular economy.

For "Talking Food", a storytelling format with landscape explorations at the Zukunftshof, initiatives, artists, scientists, farmers, curators or urban planners are invited who deal with similar content as the current KEX residents. Guests bring an object, quote, story or tool that represents their own work or content. As they talk about what is important to them, connections are made and experiences are shared, as well as new things are discovered and perspectives are shifted.
 

Participants:

Katalin Erdődi is a curator, dramaturg and researcher with a focus on socially engaged art, experimental performative practices and interventions in public space. Currently, she is researching processes of socio-political change in post-socialist rural space through collaborative artistic and curatorial practices. Selected projects: Collaborative Village Play (2021-ongoing) with Antje Schiffers/Myvillages, a sries of performances/films co-created with rural communities: Watermelon Republic (2021, Nagykamarás/Szeged, HU), The Fish Auctioneer’s Song (2022, Porto do Son, ES), Old Trees Cast Shadows (2022, Bostelwiebeck, DE).

Marta Fernández Calvo is a visual artist and researcher, who lives and works in Madrid. Her situated practice is centred on performativity and the immaterial. She strives to create collective situations of care and reciprocity activated through cooking cultures and storytelling. This engagement and the processes that stem from it translate into ephemeral interventions in art spaces and galleries, public and domestic contexts. Her work has been featured in exhibitions such as No Soul for Sale at Tate Modern in London, Utopia Station at the 53rd Venice Biennale, and Querer parecer noche at the Centro de Arte de Dos de Mayo in Madrid.

Irene Lucas is a visual and social practice artist. She has been working mostly in art collective building-up settings as spacial interventions for situations of communicative interaction (conferences like The Migrating Museum with FOGOLab at the Jan Van Eyck Academy, Maastricht 2007 or exhibition projects like Corridor Breaks with Christoph Euler at the Manifesta8, Murcia 2010) or workshops (like in the frame of the european project DANUrB Urban Brand with a serie of interventions in public schools and local sites in collaboration with local initiatives The expanded garden).

Elia Nurvista employs a wide range of artistic media and an interdisciplinary approach in her focus on the discourse about food. Through food, she scrutinizes hegemonic power regimes and uncovers social and economic inequalities in this world. In workshops, study groups, and publications or site-specific interventions, performances, videos, and art installations, she investigates the social implications of the food system, while critically addressing issues such as ecology, gender, class, and geopolitics. In 2015, she initiated the food study group Bakudapan with colleagues from different disciplines. She is also part of the solidarity plattform Struggles for Sovereignty: Land, Water, Farming, Food.

Johannes Wiener, a gardener by training, works at the intersection of ecology, art, social justice, agriculture, and architecture. Mixing practical, craft, cooperative, animist and theoretical approaches, he seeks to develop new approaches to fundamental questions of ecological and social crisis. He is founder of the association agri_culture.

The residency of Marta Fernández Calvo is supported by the Acción Cultural Española - AC/E.