This project highlights the continuum of public and private in food. The video offers a window into our private lives as each of us, unobserved except by the camera, makes a meal. In the shared meal and in the sharing of the private space of cooking, we reflect on the fact that though food defines an individual, it welds a group together. The rampant self definition of food in popular culture, sometimes derived from medical necessity, sometimes derived from political or emotional persuasion, as well as the endemic “melting pot” of American food options, means that part of identity is food choice. Sharing a meal becomes a political, social, and economic act of finding common ground among these differences.

We use both the media of pop, small-scale cameras and live performance to offer the meal as a many faceted experience. We are building a hybrid stove/projection screen, referencing Michael Pollan’s claim that we spend more time as a culture watching shows about cooking than we do cooking. (Cooked, Pollan, 2013)

We hope to evoke complex emotional and intellectual intrinsic responses to food. And we hope to share a good meal, in the spirit of Matta-Clark’s Food, Knowles’, Identical Lunch, and Spoerri’s snare pictures. Our piece attempts to mirror the work in Radical Hospitality with a contemporary perspective. Sharing a meal allows us to bridge gaps between viewer and artist, visitor and local, through individual experience and collective sharing.

We will document the event at SITE Santa Fe and include the images in a zine format documentation for SITE’s education program.