Presence of Food

Presence of Food is a body of work in which Miche Fabre Lewin honours the sacred and transformative potential of food. Durational happenings, installations and multimedia artworks are invitations to enliven our consciousnesses through being with and sensing the energies, forms, ecology, processes and geographies of food. By un-obscuring the intimate and life-giving connections between each other and the more-than-human world through food, Presence of Food is a convivial praxis which counters the industrial consumerist food systems that degrade land, denature soil, disconnect agriculture from culture, impoverish communities and undermine human health and dignity. Presence of Food encourages new narratives of active food citizenship that recover the links between food sovereignty, human well-being and ecosystem diversity - the conditions for a sympoiethics of care in the everyday. In September 2022 Miche was awarded Arts Council of England funding to continue developing her creative practice encompassing Presence of Food.

First Know Food

First Know Food was commissioned by Dr Rika Preiser of the Centre for Sustainable Transitions, Stellenbosch University, as part of ‘ARThropocene: Art-Science-Humanities Dialogue to Re-imagine the Anthropcoene’ (2016). The convivial happening invited a group of artists, scientists, academics and community educators to sit around a table in the Sustainability Institute Food Garden to share a 4m long tableaux of vegetables grown within the garden.

 

Specially commissioned flatbreads made with organic grains; preparing food within the Sustainability Institute Good Garden; participants experiencing the tableaux with their hands.

“The convivial gathering First Know Food opened a quiet yet fertile space for participants to slow down and experience food as connection to life: to soil and microbes, atoms and air, water and the bees, the tissues of our own organs, and of course each other — a feast for the imagination and all the senses”. Megan Lindow, Centre for Sustainable Transitions.

Notes on the evolution of a practice

“In the late 1990s I was invited to support a friend cooking on a Zen retreat in Wales. So began my contemplative cooking practice. Here, in the rural hills in an old, off-grid farmhouse, I was a regular Zen artist-cook for over twenty years. My research around Eastern healing food wisdoms became a lived and embodied inquiry. I experienced a slow and deepening awareness of the sacred practices of preparing wholesome food, gaining insights into my own eating behaviour and discovering ecological food traditions. These spaces of retreat helped reveal how food affected my own body’s mental and physical well-being and those of the retreatants. In the silence of the retreats and the spacious flow of the kitchen, I reflected on how food decisions impact on the environment, every day, every mouthful. This contemplative cooking was a practice in consciousness – my bodymind in a daily becoming-with, a coming to know the world, and contributing to worldmaking through food.” Miche Fabre Lewin