Visual Artist and Cultural Manager Miño Pérez Martina

7200 €

Artists’ Recipes in Confinement: A Living Cookbook.

| Yksivuotinen

How can we digest our present circumstances collectively from the confinement of our homes? In his book The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard argues that our homes are poetic spaces that become alive through the way we inhabit them. They are indeed a reflection of ourselves. Our kitchens are living laboratories, and one of the few places in our homes where we can create and experiment. Herbs, vegetables, fruits, and spices bring growth, energy, and transformation into our intimate spaces and invite us to act upon the present. Who knew, the unannounced arrival of a global virus would displace every possible future and force us to live in the moment. How can art exist purely as a process? How can our practice adapt to a socially distanced world? Cooking in times of COVID-19 has helped me deal with feelings of anxiety about uncertain futures. To cook is to express and enact care. It involves reflection, imagination, experimentation and nurturing. During this home residency, I plan to cook, write, document, and investigate the act of cooking as artistic practice and as an act of resilience and resistance in times of crisis. I will build a virtual cookbook/archive that will contain my recipes and reflections and also welcome recipes/notes/sketches from other artists in confinement. This artistic-culinary living archive will be updated regularly and is meant to help us cope with living in the moment and creating spaces for warmth and creativity inside our homes. It is also meant to be a reflexive and philosophical tool. My artistic practice currently examines the various ways in which food works as symbolic, poetic and political devices in Contemporary Art. The edible installations I have built such as The (disintegration) of Faith (2019) in Berlin, and Memory Popsicles (2018) in Helsinki, show how food in itself is both matter and process. It involves change and transformation, concepts that resemble what we are now observing in our surrounding world.