GPS: Global Performance Studies is a peer-reviewed, Open Access academic journal. We provide a platform for scholars and artists engaged in a broad range of performance studies, including contemporary performance practices; theory, politics, social and cultural contexts of and as performance; performance and visual arts and media; and practices of resilience and care for everyday life. We emphasize a global perspective on these themes and practices, and aim to support under-represented narratives and epistemologies that trouble and contest the discipline of performance studies.
“It’s nourishment we need, not just food”: Contrasting Experiences in South and North America to Alleviate Systemic and Emergent Hunger during COVID-19 Pandemic
The COVID-19 pandemic has reflected our failures and successes as global society in responding to crises, particularly regarding food insecurity. Responses varied greatly around the world. Here, we aimed to identify and compare the government and civil society’s responses to food insecurity and hunger during the pandemic in Montevideo, Uruguay and Wisconsin, USA. We analysed official data on hunger and hunger alleviation strategies and conducted a series of interviews with several Uruguayan and American stakeholders, from NGOs, grassroot organizations, and governmental officers, among other social actors. We also conducted online surveys addressed to Uruguayan consumers and farmers which were answered by over 750 people in the first months of the pandemic. Our analysis and narrative therefore builds on a mixture of qualitative and quantitative data. We enriched our analysis with a series of lived experiences that provided better insights into the feelings, actions and perceptions recorded in the interviews and surveys. We highlight different response strategies (largely top-down in Wisconsin, and a mix of top-down and bottom-up in Montevideo), discuss some of their successes and failures, compare official and popular narratives, and reflect on potential changes to be made to help shape more resilient local food systems but also to enhance the resilience and dignity of communities facing hunger.
Copyright (c) 2024 Alvaro Adib Barreiro, Nithya Attipetty, Geraldine Garcia-Matas, Belén Banegas, Silvana Juri, Mariana Meerhoff https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Transforming Food into a Political Device: A Biopolitical Reading of the Olla Común and the Fight against Hunger in Chile
This paper explores the transformative role of the Chilean olla común (common pot) as a political device in the fight against hunger, framed within a biopolitical context. The olla común, a traditional form of community meal preparation by volunteers using donated or collected food, has historically emerged during crises such as earthquakes, political upheavals, and health emergencies. By providing nourishment and fostering social cohesion, the olla común transcends its immediate practical function to become a site of political and cultural significance. We analyze the olla común through the lens of biopolitics, considering how these communal meals operate as tools of resistance and empowerment in times of crisis. The concept of performativity is employed to understand the olla común both “in” performance—where it is represented in a theatrical or stylized manner—and “as” performance—highlighting the everyday theatricality and transformative actions inherent in these communal practices. Post-dictatorship Chilean theatre and art often depict the olla común, emphasizing its role in redefining social norms and identities within a liminal space that challenges conventional structures. The liminal dimension of the olla común allows it to transcend typical social boundaries, fostering solidarity and mutual support. This paper examines how these communal meals facilitate shifts in individual and collective identities, challenging established social hierarchies and promoting new forms of community connection. The ritualistic aspects of the olla común, with shared practices and symbols, further unite communities, serving as expressions of resistance and sources of healing. Ultimately, this study positions the olla común as a powerful biopolitical device, transforming food into a medium of social transformation and political action. By analyzing the olla común through the frameworks of biopolitics and gastropolitics proposed by Appadurai, Montecino and Foerster, and Escobar, we highlight its significance in addressing hunger and fostering resilience in Chilean communities.
Copyright (c) 2024 Paulina Bronfman, Pamela Soto https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Microbial Theatricality: Selfmade, Celebrity, and Scales of Hunger
In 2013, Christina Agapakis, a UCLA postdoctoral fellow in molecular biology, swabbed celebrities' armpits, belly buttons, and feet for microbial samples to make cheese. The “human-made” cheese resulted in the art exhibition Selfmade, a sensory installation inviting audience members to confront intimate and smelly relationships between humans and microbes, all through fermented edible matter. Artist Olafur Eliasson, food journalist Michael Pollan, and baker and writer Ruby Tandoh all offered their bodies as cultivators for cheese production. The prominent figures, and their companion bacteria, validate and complicate the relations that Selfmade claims to produce. At first glance, the installation invites a sensory entanglement with nonhuman matter. There is, of course, more than meets the eye. Hunger, eating, and even cooking are not exclusive to humans but perhaps intrinsic to planetary life. Human, celebrity, and microbial actors blur across the many mediums materialized in the food performance. As much as Selfmade is a nonhuman performance, it is also because of its very humanness, celebrity, and theatricality that we find an essential entanglement in food and performance studies: a nearly imperceptible (or non-sensible) proximity of human and nonhuman, at the microscopic scale.
Copyright (c) 2024 Elizabeth McQueen https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Claiming Agency in the Disappearing Body: Performing Hunger as Necroresistance and the Decolonial Self
In my performances, installations, and writing at the nexus of social justice and stories of marginalized and minoritized identities, I contemplate the psychophysical implications of lack of fundamental necessities caused by withholding of company, sleep, letting go, food, water, movement, and agency. Whether such lack is imposed on bodyminds by torture, protest due to oppression, or experimentation, it creates deprivation and hunger for breath, rest, nutrition, contact—nourishment and healing not just for the physical body but for the entire self. The effects of such physiological lack is always social, emotional, and mental. The mark of such hunger remains on the mind even when the body heals. Like air, shelter, and water, food is a fundamental human right—and it has been widely evidenced that the planet has enough resources for all. However, states and institutions use slow violence of hunger to perform power and practice control over others, often minoritized, impoverished communities of color or disadvantaged countries. In this article, I discuss how educator activists in hunger strike, fighting for their right to make a living, subvert the dynamics of control hunger provides by claiming agency of their own bodies, in Turkey. I trace hunger as a performative in the silent and still protest of these university and college teachers whose careers were ended due to political retaliation by the state and discuss how performing hunger serves as a disidentification strategy for the already starved minoritized groups. I also engage with the connection between corporeal and metaphorical agency of the body/self as I also claim that these protests of what I call necroresistance do not belong within traditions of nonviolent protest.
Copyright (c) 2024 Serap Erincin https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Creative Interventions In Global Performance Studies Insatiabilities An online exhibition by Ariel Smith, Rima Najdi, Maria Kulikovska, Xena Ni, and Mollie Ruskin Curated by Aniko Szucs and Dominika Laster Hunger and Resilience: Collective agricultural and artistic practices in an area impacted by environmental disaster Shuntaro Yoshida peach grove em irvin Foraging as an Aesthetic Response to Hunger Natalie Doonan Microbial Theatricality: Self-made, celebrity, and scales of hunger Elizabeth Shiffler Performing Hunger in Taiwan: Images, objects and reflections Lily Wei In Performance Research ¿Qué vamos a comer? Colombia's mojojoy! Ana Martínez, Verónica Martínez, and Juan Ochoa Nostalgic Hunger in Zhu Yu’s Eating People Darja Filippova La Merda: On what you might need to do to be permitted to sit at the “winners’ table”. In conversation with Cristian Ceresoli and Silvia Gallerano Vanja Baltić Finally, the largest cluster of essays explore how artists use various forms of hunger in their creative work, perhaps answering the question of whether hunger can be represented by saying that it can be engaged or deployed. Using a range of media, and writing about their own work or that of other artists, these projects from across the world showcase a range of strategies that artists have undertaken in concert with various kinds of hunger. The multimedia platform of Global Performance Studies provides an opportunity to showcase an online exhibition from the 2022 conference for which Szucs and Laster brought together five artists with feminist approaches who explore the material practices, embodied experiences, socio-economic conditions as well as the psychosomatic and affective modalities of hunger. Natalie Doonan takes us on a series of public walking events along the St Lawrence River in Montreal to consider the aesthetics of care necessary to alleviate pain and suffering that are inevitable consequences of eating. Artist pages by Em Irvin document an installation that draws attention to productively unproductive labour of the hungry worker with no prospect for future sustenance. Shuntaro Yoshida writes about the artist Min Tanaka who tells the story of the physical and psychological hunger he experienced following the accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant that caused radioactive rain to contaminate the soil of his “half farm/half art”. Elizabeth Shiffler reports on a sensory art experience created by Christina Agapakis that foregrounds the microbes in our “hungry guts”. Shiffler describes how in this multi-species performance, cheeses cultured from human bacteria transforms the anthropogenic concept of theatricality to produce microbial theatricality and draws attention to the emergent celebrity of microbes in academia and in food media. Ana Martínez, Verónica Martínez, and Juan Ochoa write about a multi-media happening by a Colombian artistic collective in Lenguajes Gastronómicos's Obsoleta. The collective deploys an Amazonian larva as a source of decolonial knowledge, as an indigenous food source and as a disruptor of contemporary agribusinesses as a force of decolonization against industrialized food, economic injustice and extractivism. Darja Filippova takes up a provocative and notorious performance of eating a foetus, which is most often interpreted as a critique of the Chinese state abuse of human rights and the one-child policy. In this article, Filippova argues that this reading reproduces Western liberal values and suggests that instead the work illustrates a deep complicity between the Chinese (post-)socialism and global neoliberal capitalism. Writing in conversation with Cristian Ceresoli and Silvia Gallerano, Vanja Baltić explores the artisanal and philosophical aspects of their work, La Merda, in which a character demonstrates a Rabelaisian hunger. Finally, Lily Wei discusses performances created by her students at Chung Yuan Christian University who created online performances during the pandemic about hunger, food insecurity and food waste. Wei's essay considers the efficacy of performance as a tool for pedagogy about perceptions and representations of hunger.
Copyright (c) 2024 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Representing Hunger In Global Performance Studies Deliberate Starvation: Hunger artists in Kafka, Różewicz, and Sinking Ship Stefano Boselli A Comparative Study of Hunger and Satiation of Hunger in the Literary Works of M.T. Vasudevan Nair and Perumal Murugan Maya Vinai and S. M. Mithuna Internal Workshop: The Third Theatre Methodology of Embodying Hunger Sandip Debnath In Performance Research A Different Hunger: World spectatorship and the violence of representation https://doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2023.2363651 As discussed in the opening section, the putative unrepresentability of hunger, like the putative unrepresentability of pain, is a point that is affirmed and/or contested by our contributors. Looking at works for the stage and the page, our writers consider cases in Asia, Europe and North America that have tried to (re)present hunger for their audiences. Through the examination of two stage adaptations of Kafka’s short story “A Hunger Artist”, Boselli demonstrates that hunger can become a performance, even in a fundamentally static situation, because of the power differential between the starving artists themselves and the well-fed spectators. Maya Vinai and S. M. Mithuna explore the representation of memories of hunger among the rural agrarian communities in India and the role that mothers play in mitigating hunger and creating a feeling of illusory self-sufficiency (of food) among children. Using the works of three Indian authors, they argue that memories of hunger and dearth are forged not just by the physical lack of food but by the experiences of lack of social security and the denial of identity. Sandip Debnath builds on his experiences with Third Theatre to suggest that a strategy for representing hunger is not to enact but to react. This gives Third Theatre activists an avenue for communicating hunger while remaining critically and politically aware of the acuteness of the absence. Such representations, he contends, do not generate reactions of pity and fear but rather of resistance. Adrian Kear suggests that a racialized regime of representation continues to support the social production of global hunger and sustain its operation. Kear asks, how can a cultural politics of hunger activism disrupt this scene, and resist the theatrical regime of representation that it supports and sustains? And he asks us to move from Rob Nixon’s “slow violence” towards enacting Jenny Edkins’ “slow justice”.
Self-Starvation In Performance Research Becoming Anorexia: The pathologization of “self-harm” in performance Adriana Disman Political Paradigms of Hunger: Force-feeding and the choreography of carceral power Patrick Anderson Lady Tyger: A legacy starved into existence Sarah Crews and Solomon Lennox In Global Performance Studies Silver Tableaux: Memoir vivant Caitlin Mary Margarett Sørensdatter Claiming Agency in the Disappearing Body: Performing Hunger as Necroresistance and the Decolonial Self Serap Erincin This section includes writing on both hunger strikes and anorexia. While one may be tempted to think of anorexia as pathological and hunger strikes as volitional, all four of our authors articulate mechanisms of agency and control at work in the denial of sustenance. Adriana Disman draws our attention to the dangers of pathologizing and thereby censoring performances of self-wounding on the part of both social media and academic scholarship. Similarly, Caitlin Mary Margarett Sørensdatter condemns the social media platforms that monetize anorectic behavior, arguing that the “recovery construct” often neglects joy, desire and pleasure of the anorectic individual. Patrick Anderson’s essay revisits his earlier work on self-starvation to consider the state’s monopoly on hunger through both force feeding, as well as considering philanthropy as a form of policing. In their essay about “Lady Tyger”, Sarah Crews and Solomon Lennox consider the ways that the boxing champion’s hunger strike performed “intersectional activism” while Serap Erincin demonstrates how educators in Turkey used their hunger strike to subvert the dynamics of state-controlled hunger.
In Performance Research An Archipelago of Aid: Embodied hungers and networks of civic support in the pandemic-stricken Philippines Oscar T. Serquiña, Jr “We’ve Never Done This Before”: Creative methodologies to food justice in crisis and beyond Jen Rae Hunger Action Now: The Art Relief Mobile Kitchen Jazmin Llana with Alex Baluyut and Precious Leano In Global Performance Studies Politics as performance: A performative reading of the Chilean ‘ollas populares’ and the fight against hunger in Chile Paulina Bronfman and Pamela Soto García Ampersand Aesthetics: Spatula&Barcode’s Foodways Philippines Laurie Beth Clark and Michael Peterson “It’s nourishment we need, not just food”: Contrasting experiences in South and North America to alleviate systemic and emergent hunger during COVID-19 pandemic Alvaro Adib Barreiro, Nithya Attipetty, Geraldine Garcia-Matas, Belén Banegas, Silvana Juri, and Mariana Meerhoff The second section of each journal takes up hunger action, a term that refers to efforts on many scales to intervene in the material impact of insufficient or inadequate food supply. As mentioned, the conference foregrounded hunger action over metaphoric deployments of the term and so did the call for proposals. We were happy to receive seven essays and a short story that take up this challenge, with four focusing on responses during the pandemic and three attending to ongoing feeding programmes. Hunger action: Pandemic Oscar Serquiña describes the community pantries that proliferated in the Philippines during the COVID-19 pandemic in a critical reconsideration of how this scattered and spontaneous form of civic engagement mirrors the archipelagic formation of the Philippines and deviates from the patronizing logics of philanthropy. Also considering grassroots actions, Paulina Bronfman and Pamela Soto Garcia look at a traditional communitarian activity in Chile—community meals made entirely by volunteers with food donated or collected by members of the community—for its potential to contribute new conceptual grammars and vocabularies to the disciplines of politics and performance. Jen Rae demonstrates how it is possible to build a community around a systemic problem such as food justice. By narrating her work with Sally Beattie at Fawkner Food Commons during the pandemic, she shares lessons learned about creative crisis response that can help foster a more adaptive and responsive food system. Finally, in their collaboratively authored study, a team of social scientists, artists and activists (Adib Barreiro et al.) compare pandemic responses in food insecure communities in the United States and Uruguay with the goal of developing a stronger and more resilient food system. Particularly interesting is how certain responses depended on government structures while others depended on social solidarity. Hunger action: Ongoing In this section, Jazmin Llana interviews the artists Precious Leano and Alex Baluyot about their work with Art Relief Mobile Kitchen, which, since 2013, has mobilized artists to respond to crises that include typhoons, earthquakes, volcanic eruption and state terrorism by serving meals. Laurie Beth Clark and Michael Peterson detail the work of their art collaborative Spatula&Barcode who, in collaboration with Jazmin Llana, joined forces with ongoing hunger mitigation efforts in the Philippines to bring “a little something extra” to the table.
In Global Performance Studies and Performance Research Introduction Laurie Beth Clark and Michael Peterson Reflection: Beyond metaphor. Hunger and the response-ability of performance Jazmin Llana Food, Performance and Hunger Richard Gough Including a reprint of the article ‘Hunger and the future of performance’ Enzo Cozzi In Performance Research Global Action to End Hunger compiled by Laurie Beth Clark with content by Gastón Ares, Br Armin Luistro, Michelle Miller, Mpumelelo Ncwadi, and Matilda Baraibar Norberg In Global Performance Studies “Aqui plantamos sueños y esperanzas”: la experiencia de El Nido durante la pandemia (“‘Here we plant dreams and hopes’: the experience of El Nido during the pandemic”) a video by Alvaro Adib Barreiro and Mariana Meerhoff In the first section, we offer essays that provide the context for our work. These include both essays that address the global contexts in which we understand hunger and the creative contexts in which we understand how artists have responded to it. Four essays from the context section will be published in both journals. In addition to the introduction and Jazmin Llana’s reflection, we have Richard Gough’s expanded conference keynote that takes us on a survey of efforts by artists, chefs and activists who respond to hunger both aesthetically and pragmatically. Gough’s essay begins with a reframing (and reprinting) of the aforementioned essay by Enzo Cozzi, which was a touchstone for many writers and presenters. The final context essay also builds on a conference keynote in which five panelists (one of whom is the aforementioned Brother Armin Luistro) from different continents and varied professional expertise (history, natural science, social science, religion, farming) each focus on a different aspect of the hunger problem by responding to shared questions. The textual component of this essay (the revised staged dialogue) appears in Performance Research, while its creative components (a video by Alvaro Adib Barreiro and Mariana Meerhoff) is hosted online in Global Performance Studies.
La Merda: On what you might need to do to be permitted to sit at the “winners’ table”. In Conversation with Cristian Ceresoli and Silvia Gallerano
Copyright (c) 2024 Vanja Baltić https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Nostalgic Hunger in Zhu Yu’s Eating People
Copyright (c) 2024 Darja Filippova https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Copyright (c) 2024 Ana Martínez, Verónica Martínez , Juan Ochoa https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
A Different Hunger: World Spectatorship and the Violence of Representation
Copyright (c) 2024 Adrian Kear https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Lady Tyger: A Legacy Starved into Existence
Copyright (c) 2024 Sarah Crews, Solomon Lennox https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Political Paradigms of Hunger: Force-feeding and the Choreography of Carceral Power
Copyright (c) 2024 Patrick Anderson https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Becoming Anorexia: The Pathologization of “Self-harm” in Performance
Copyright (c) 2024 Adriana Disman https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Hunger Action Now: The Art Relief Mobile Kitchen
Copyright (c) 2024 Jazmin Llana , Alex Baluyut , Precious Leaño https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
“We’ve Never Done This Before”: Creative Methodologies to Food Justice in Crisis and Beyond
Copyright (c) 2024 Jen Rae https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
An Archipelago of Aid: Embodied Hungers and Networks of Civic Support in the Pandemic-stricken Philippines
Copyright (c) 2024 Oscar T. Serquiña, Jr https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Copyright (c) 2024 Laurie Beth Clark, Gastón Ares, Br Armin Luistro, Michelle Miller, Mpumelelo Ncwadi, Matilda Baraibar Norberg https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Copyright (c) 2024 Richard Gough https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Copyright (c) 2024 Laurie Beth Clark, Michael Peterson https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Reflection: Beyond Metaphor: Hunger and the Response-ability of Performance
The essay forms part of the Editorial of the concurrent issues of Performance Research and Global Performance Studies on the theme of Hunger, picking up from the 'Introduction' written by Laurie Beth Clark and Michael Peterson, co-editors of these issues. Styled as a conversation with key contributors to the journal issues, the keynote speakers in the PSi conference, and authors that inspired the initiative on hunger, Jazmin Llana recalls the contexts and prompts of the journal issues and the 2022 conference of Performance Studies international (PSi) from which many of the featured articles began. She identifies the challenges that hunger as a material condition poses to performance and performance studies, tracing key critical threads on the supposed 'unrepresentability' of hunger in performance and the critique of humanitarianism as a framework for hunger relief and world aid, among others. The reflection ends with possible ways forward in responding to hunger.
Copyright (c) 2024 Jazmin Llana https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
A Comparative Study of Hunger and Satiation of Hunger in the Literary Works of M.T. Vasudevan Nair and Perumal Murugan
The ‘presence’ and ‘absence’ of food, has been an oft-deliberated topic right from the Palaeolithic Age in India. Starting from the Bhimbetka Rock paintings to the famous Raja Ravi Varma’s paintings to Nandlal’s artworks depicting the famine and drain of economy due to the imperial greed in Bengal - all of which depict the creative artist’s and writer’s colossal engagement with hunger and satiation of hunger. Likewise, several fiction writers have explored the idea of hunger, especially in Malayalam and Tamil language. The idea of hunger has been used as a trope by several indigenous writers to explore multiple social turmoils and transformations. For example, writers like M.T. Vasudevan Nair use memories of hunger by child narrators to depict the fall of the feudal system, collapse of matrilineal structures, social neglect and gender marginalisation. In the present essay, we focus on two aspects of hunger a) the representation of memories of hunger amongst the rural agrarian communities b) the role that mothers play and the methods that they incorporate in mitigating hunger and creating a feeling of illusory self sufficiency (of food) amongst children. The essay argues that memories of hunger, dearth, and abundance of food are forged not just by the physical lack of it but by the experiences of lack of social security, denial of identity and the rupture of familial ties. To substantiate our arguments we draw upon the literary works of M.T. Vasudevan Nair, and Perumal Murugan and use the theoretical framework of memory studies.
Copyright (c) 2024 Maya Vinai, S.M. Mithuna https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
“Aqui plantamos sueños y esperanzas”: la experiencia de El Nido durante la pandemia
Copyright (c) 2024 Alvaro Adib Barreiro, Geraldine García Matas, Belén Banegas, Mariana Meerhoff https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
In July 2022, the Performance in Historical Paradigms Working Group brought together five artists whose creative work engages with issues related to food, hunger, and insatiability. Taking up the provocation of the PSi #27 conference theme “Hunger,” we explored the matrices of the material practices, embodied experiences, socio-economic conditions, as well as the psychosomatic and affective modalities of hunger. The formally diverse works that comprised the online exhibition–and which are now included here–approach these issues from a distinctly feminist perspective: they problematize the fetishization of the deprived female body, the oppressive powers that generate inequities of food distribution, and the heteronormative gender norms that perpetuate women’s responsibilities as nurturers, providers, and caretakers. Further, they examine the ways in which these processes are socially structured and transmitted intergenerationally. The pieces demonstrate how instances of contemporary crises are rooted in enduring historical legacies and entrenched in systemic inequities.
Copyright (c) 2024 Maria Kulikovska, Dominika Laster, Rima Najdi, Xena Ni and Mollie Ruskin, Ariel Smith, Aniko Szucs https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Performing Hunger in Taiwan: Images, Objects, and Reflections
In 1982, Hungarian-American artist Agnes Denes planted and harvested two acres of wheat on the Battery Park landfill, Manhattan, to draw attention to mismanagement, waste, and world hunger. More recently, from 2014 to the present, American environmental activist Rob Greenfield addressed food waste and demonstrated food freedom by dumpster diving and foraging. The ethos of these two examples align with Environmental Art, a general education course that I teach at Chung Yuan Christian University (CYCU), Taiwan. Environmental Art is an umbrella term for art that interacts with or comments on the environment. Among its subgenres, Ecological Art emphasizes the preservation and remediation of life, resources, and ecosystems of Earth. This article explores the online teaching pedagogy for the Environmental Art course final assignment, The Hunger Project, and its ramifications in relation to performance. Using Ecological Art and hunger statistics as a springboard, students examine hunger in Taiwan and in the global context. They consider various dimensions of hunger, such as access and distribution of food, and the question: why do the lack and the excess of food coexist? Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, I and students realized the entire “The Hunger Project” online. The pedagogical methods facilitated the “The Hunger Project Website,” where students staged texts, images, and objects to visualize their reflections on hunger. Working in groups, students addressed metaphorical “hungers”, such as the hunger for being healthy, linked social class to food consumption, and proposed education as an antidote to poverty and food deficiency. This essay considers the performative and educational significance of this learning process in relation to hunger action.
Copyright (c) 2024 Lily Wei https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Drawing on personal experience in performative memoir practice, Caitlin Mary Margarett Sørensdatter discusses the redefinition of the self in the midst of anorectic suffering. While asserting that social media can be an extension of memoir development, she compares highly visible micro-celebrities who represent different aspects of the public's consumption of anorectic stories—the unrecoverable and the recovered. Refuting the damaging simplification of recovery narratives, this essay explores the inherent value of stories emerging from the crossroads of anorectic experience.
Copyright (c) 2024 Caitlin Mary Margarett Sørensdatter https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Ampersand Aesthetics: Spatula&Barcode’s Foodways Philippines
This essay documents and reflects on a complex of social practice art actions addressing hunger that the authors, who work under the name Spatula&Barcode, undertook in the Philippines in 2022 in collaboration with Jazmin Llana. The article gives background on Spatula&Barcode’s prior work with food, art, and performance and their prior engagement with hunger as a theme, then describes several exploratory actions and two larger-scale community-based projects. The theoretical section takes up themes of agency, sovereignty, and hospitality as ethical concerns in both hunger action more broadly and in the possible role of artists in enhancing that work. The essay concludes with a discussion of the “lagniappe”—something extra, above and beyond the necessary—and the symbolism of the ampersand in the artists’ thinking about their work.
Hunger, hunger action, spatula&barcode, PSi, Philippines, social practice art, ethics, food
Internal Workshop: The Third Theatre Methodology of Embodying Hunger
Enzo Cozzi in his essay “Hunger and the Future of Performance” argues on the performative impossibility of representing hunger except through a state of trance. In contrast, for Third Theatre, the representation of hunger is a political act of empowerment and activism. Badal Sircar, the founder-director of the Third Theatre group Satabdi, introduces the phenomenon of hunger “practically, non-verbally” that enables the participants to “leap to another state of being,” says Jo Trowsdale in the article “Sitting in Badal’s Circle: Artist and pedagogue; the theatre of Badal Sircar.” The process of effecting this transition in the Third Theatre is called the Internal Workshop. Drawing on personal interviews with Third Theatre practitioners, my experiences of being a participant-observer in three Third Theatre workshops, and similar records of experiences by practitioners of this theatre, as a counterpoint to Cozzi’s view, in this essay I elaborate on the Internal Workshop process as the Third Theatre methodology of embodying and representing hunger.
Copyright (c) 2024 Sandip Debnath https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0