« Seeking beauty at the expense of the good, the nourishing? »
Media : performance , Photography, Participatory , Field Investigation
Themes : Food, Image & Manipulation , Body,
In 2016, I led the workshop Actualité mise à plat. Corps politique et mise en bouche with Master’s students at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels. Together, we explored the possible connections between food and current political affairs, focusing on a central question: capitalism and consumer society.
Our thinking quickly turned towards the excesses of the logic of “always more.” Throwing away in order to have more. Seeking beauty at the expense of nourishment and quality. Producing perfect images to sell a dream. Behind the marketing of consumer goods, we wanted to look at what is left behind: food discarded because it is overripe, bruised, blemished, or simply “not beautiful enough.”
Armed with a shopping trolley, we took to the streets of Brussels and the back rooms of food shops. We collected these rejected foods, destined for the bin. Back at the Academy, we decided to reveal their full potential through unretouched photo sessions. Instead of hiding the bruises, imperfections, or damaged parts, we chose to highlight them. In a professional photo studio, these fruits and vegetables became the stars: contemporary still lifes, sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied by other salvaged foods, arranged in carefully composed settings.
The project was then extended into a critical fiction: imagining the resale of these foods on eBay. We created a fictional auction house called En chaire et en or and organised an online auction on November 18, 2016. The salvaged foods — too ugly, slightly mouldy, damaged — were offered for completely surreal prices. Each image was accompanied by a description written as an absurd and humorous form of contemporary poetry. The product itself was worthless, but the entire apparatus sold the dream attached to it.
Auction presentation text:
“From wandering to discoveries, we reinvent, sublimate and exalt your everyday life with objects that will become indispensable to you. Do not be misled by the withered appearance of our products: they are unquestionably not adulterated. Concealed behind an apparent state of decay, they were abandoned, neglected, forgotten in a corner of a rubbish bin or at the bottom of a gutter. We rescued them and gave them a second life by creating a new function for them. We believe in the potential of our salvaged foods and wish to offer them all the honour they deserve, within the finest collections.”
For the final presentation of the workshop, we produced a catalogue made up of screenshots of the eBay listings, accompanied by an installation in the Academy’s exhibition space and photographs documenting the entire creative process.
This workshop was a way of questioning the value we assign to things, the manufacture of desire, and our relationship to consumption through something as everyday — and as political — as food.
→ See also: Collective Iconophagy - Come to the Table!