2024
The arts can imagine—and therefore help to achieve—food security, sovereignty, and justice in Canada and Mexico, and across the hemisphere. Bringing together artists, curators, humanities scholars, students, migrant labour organizers, chefs, geographers, agricultural producers and community organizations with expertise in contemporary art, performance, food policy, Indigenous food sovereignty, and pre-colonial agricultural practices, the Visualizing Foodways Field School (VFFS) will provide a platform for embodied learning and for the sharing of knowledge that can imagine alternative food futures.
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) estimates that approximately 8.9 percent of the world’s population is hungry (2019). It has also been widely noted that the current global agricultural systems will not sustain the human population as we approach nine billion inhabitants by the year 2050 (Da Silva n.d.). While already more than one third of global carbon emissions come from the agricultural sector (Gilbert 2012), approximately 1.3 billion tonnes or one third of food produced for human consumption worldwide every year gets lost or wasted (UNEP n.d.). These “wicked problems” are immense, global and complicated. Questions of food systems and security cannot be clearly defined and addressed through a single disciplinary perspective. They necessitate interdisciplinary, intergenerational, and international research and action that brings diverse voices together.
The Visualizing Foodways Field School (VFFS) explores how we can connect arts-based researchers and food justice organizers towards mobilizing meaningful collaborations around sustainable food systems, one of the most critical issues of our time. This field school in Mexico City (17-22 February 2023) will welcome researchers, artists, organizers, and scholars interested in the nexus of art and food in Mesoamerica and across the hemisphere.
Through site visits, meals, lectures, performances, and artist talks, participants will augment their knowledge through embodied learning activities to gain a hemispheric perspective on precolonial cuisines and agricultural techniques, innovative urban agriculture projects, the scale of industrial food systems that feed the hemisphere’s largest city and beyond—and creative practices that engage with these topics.
The Visualizing Foodways Field School will bring together Mexican, Canadian and international participants for meals, site visits, artist talks, etc. in key zones of the city that each have unique and significant agricultural and culinary traditions including Milpa Alta, Xochimilco, Coyoacán, and the historic Centre. This field school is being developed by Zoë Heyn-Jones, Collaborator on the Hemispheric Encounters Partnership and current SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Centre for Sustainable Curating in the Department of Visual Arts at Western University. This project is supported by the Hemispheric Encounters Network (SSHRC Partnership Grant), the Centre for Sustainable Curating and the CISAN (Centro de Investigaciones sobre América del Norte) at the UNAM (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México).
