Earthly Ocean Garden, 2021
Mixed media: macro-algae, water, salt, basin
Ephemeral installation in a privat garden at Montmartre Cité International des Arts.
Part of the Green Open Food Evolution Project
With Green Open Food Evolution - A dietary proposal for an endosymbiotic co-evolution to become Homo photosynthetic I want to propose an artist research project for the residency program of Art Explora held in Paris 2021. The Research is open ended and the final result of this research project would be a speculative cooking book on a potential dietary program followed by performative lectures, workshops and dinner- performances on the subject of Homo photosynthetic. This project will be developed in collaboration with the interdisiplinary research project and art group around Roscomoe - Why did the sea worm wants to go to space, lead by Ewen Chardronnay, Shue Lee Chen and Xavier Bailly & Gaëlle Correc (scientists at the Station Biologic Roscoe, FR).
In my work I center my focus on food and how we see the connectivity to our environment as interspecies relation. Eating as an act of nutrition uptake is the ultimative and only physical activity that bounds us within a daily rhythm. We are still terrestrial and bound to an animistic world of intake and withdraw physical materials. Food has become essential since it is socio- political and economical interrelated and finally understood as a human cultural heritage and alchemy. Our dependency with our planet is inscribed threw our food culture and results in the inter-human relationship with domesticated plants, animals and landscape. Humanity has created a wide portfolio of cultivated and domesticate food and we are witnessing a tendency of a self-adjusting global food movement.
What will be the food of our future. Those are questions the UN Global Food Summit will ask next year 2021 and I am positive that the interdisciplinary research with Art and Science is the key to this challenge. Within my biographical roots (CH/KOR) I call myself a hybrid bastard. Inside this inherited cooking practice i witness the upcoming promises of eating and digesting algae. Algae as a mostly Asian food commodity is also the biological description of an eukaryotic species that lives in water and is capable of photosynthesis. On the events of the origin of cyanobacteria there was the occurrence of the Great Oxidation Event called the Great Cambrian Revolution. Due to this little creatures that is capable of photosynthesis based on endosymbiosis with chloroplasts, live got created in the state we know it. My subject matter of speculation is what if human are capable to use photosynthesis and what effect would it have to our global landscape by reducing food production in agricultural mass scale and create self sufficient human species, Homo photosynthesis.
This as a starting point of my proposal Green Open Food Evolution proposes the potentiality of digesting seaweed and algae to become plant, speculating on the possibilities of Homo photosynthetic. My practice as an artist has found its origin in the Art of Fermentation, since more than half a decade I have been teaching people the secrets of the microbial encounters threw improving their microbiome threw cooking and culinary dietary. It is by this intrinsic knowledge I became associated with the biohacking or DIYbio movement and realized unlike me there are many others in the search of post humanism that are willing to teach the new insights of human race as a multi-species living organism with the potential to change gradually and habitually. I held hundreds of workshops within this subject of DIYbio and the anticipation of sharing knowledge in a collective way drove me into the hackteria.org network to connect with likeminded people from around the globe.
