— 1st Session: The autobiographical. Food as a sign of identity, food practices, and eating bodies.
— 2nd Session: Memory. The waters as conductors of memories, sowers of water. The broth and warmth.
— 3rd Session: The inner-external. Writing, language, and images in the back-and-forth movement between the inside and the outside.
— 4th Session: Cas(A)nto, or the minimal gesture. Awareness of the real and imaginary environment. The possibility of ritual in the experience.
— 5th Session: In the style of. Distance cooking session, reviewing texts, and recounting memories. With interventions by artists Consuelo Méndez, Pedro Terán, Nayarí Castillo, Lourdes Peñaranda, and Hugo Palmar.
(A)nto-biography: Practices of Food Care
past
Online
2023—I
06/29/2023 — 07/13/2023
"To think of food as a concrete construction with grounds that support the erected." By investigating the cooking archive of Antonieta Sosa, Venezuelan artist Malu Valerio explores the accents of everyday experiences that sustain the artist's life. She establishes a dialogue with people that are close, driven by collective displacements and personal travels, in the regional socio-political context.
The Laboratory (A)nto-biography: Practices of Food Care is conceived of as an expanded stove to other kitchens and tables where we weave affections and elevate desires and sensations stored in personal, family, and collective memories.
"Focusing on nourishment, on erecting-producing-transforming food, as an essential factory that supports our life in the way we want, or can, sustain it."
To think of food as a concrete construction with grounds that support the erected. The aspects that arise, the random crossings, preferences that carry with them the feeling of home; a balance carefully maintained and sustained by the daily practice of feeding, cultivation, care, and practices according to each corporeality. All of this comprises the well-being linked to one's very subsistence. Nutrition is a daily choice: intuitive, evocative, sensitive, personal, inherited, appreciated, and day after day, chosen. Memory returns us to the practice that Antonieta Sosa nurtured for decades, the basis of her life-work-teaching practice, which is part of the aspects of her personal and family history.
The feminine is an axis and influence, protection, and manumission. In the distance, it looks after, remembers, maintains, and reproduces what lies inside. It is a close presence, a trace of what seems to have been forgotten from the beginning, but as memory dwells not only in the mind, it resurfaces in the body, through sounds, lights, and shadows that return with the alternating movements of the rhythms of life.
After discussing these premises, we will review some of the milestones in Antonieta Sosa's work, placing them in dialogue with situations close to each participant in the Laboratory. We will start from exercises around the inner-external, memory, and autobiography that Sosa developed throughout her teaching practice, with the aim of mapping collective intimacy, emphasizing personal history, everyday life, and the transformative power of water as a restorative broth; food as a healing and transforming gesture, in its relation to the cycles of feeding, cultivation, and care.
This space for collective making seeks to bring us closer through life experiences. In the course of this Laboratory, we will select recipes that resonate with each other, relating them to readings and conversations with artists, makers, and caregivers. We will demonstrate other ways of coming together where the artistic practice is subjected to the transforming force of the earth, the waters, broths, and food.
Participation
Enthusiasts of the crossings between art, life, daily life, the body, marginality, the domestic, and intimacy. For approximately 15 to 20 people.
5 sessions
June 29 through July 13, 2023
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 6:00 PM (GMT -4)
Via Zoom
Public Presentation
July 15, 2023
06:00 PM (GMT -4)
Via Zoom
Malu Valerio (Cumaná, Venezuela, 1982): Artist and activist. Malu grew up in different cities in Venezuela and South America with her nomadic family. She studied in a rural school in the Venezuelan Amazon and Visual Arts at the Instituto Universitario Armando Reverón (2007); Contemporary Art at the Universidad Metropolitana de Caracas and Sala Mendoza (2019); and Gender Equity and Human Rights at the Universidad de Los Andes (2021). She advocates for human, gender, and environmental rights with the collectives Sobrepasadas and Mujeres contra las violencias. Valerio was recognized as an activist by the Human Rights Commission (Codhez) for her artistic work focusing on gender and the defense of human rights, in 2021.
