#2 AFIELD digital residency with Grace Gloria Denis

For its second edition, Grace Gloria Denis will partake in AFIELD’s digital residency, exploring sensorial pedagogies in an engagement with food systems, delving into two iterations of her series ‘Aural Oral’ that examine fermentation.

Grace Gloria Denis’ work converges agricultural research with interactive installation, braiding together edible matter and sound to propose a convivial and comestible approach to critical inquiry. Implementing the meal as both a medium and a pedagogical tool, her work refers to participatory action research models, engaging in collaborations with actors in local food systems utilizing agroecological techniques. Her work considers the quotidien interaction with the esculent realm as a poetic tool of transmission, inviting a reimagination of sensorial relationships to consumption practices that prioritize reciprocity.

During the residency, ‘Aural Oral’ examines the notion of consumption as an act that traverses beyond the realm of edible ingestion, deviating from the mouth as the epicenter. In consideration of the numerous methods in which we consume, the series examines the perpetual ingestion of matter, energy, labor, and resources.

In which ways do we consume our environment, and is it primarily embedded with intent solely to receive? How do we model a system less predicated upon the root “to take” and further marinate it with the possibility “to give”? A meal as a space to nurture an inquiry into food systems provides a site for the propagation of Tsing’s arts of noticing, that is, our acknowledgement of entanglement.

These will be some of the open questions we will try to explore within the space of AFIELD’s Instagram account.

(This collaboration is part of a #AFIELDdigitalresidency highlighting artistic and social initiatives around the world.)