Is an ongoing, iterative and evolving project initiated at Forgan Arts Centre during a year-long residency in 2023. The Living Table delve into the politics and poetics of food.

Each iteration of Living Table is site-specific, ephemeral, and grounded in community engagement. Structured as both a gathering and a performative inquiry, each event centres around particular ingredients or themes—shaping itself anew each time in both form and experience. The project draws inspiration from the Manifesto Antropófago (Cannibal Manifesto) by Brazilian modernists Oswald de Andrade and Tarsila do Amaral, proposing acts of ingestion and digestion as metaphors for cultural synthesis, critique, and embodiment.

Participants are invited to prepare, cook, and consume elements of a meal as a visceral and symbolic engagement with the subject matter, prompting them to reflect through the first research frame—the body.

One variant of the living table is the series titled The Epicurean Garden. The Epicurean Garden was a garden where Epicurus, a Greek philosopher, established a philosophical school opposing the academy, aiming to relate to and observe the world through a connection with life in the landscape, in opposition to the enclosed academia. The Epicurean Garden was more than a garden; it was a gathering space in 306 BC where traditional philosophers, students, and individuals excluded from mainstream academia gathered. They welcomed men, women, and even enslaved people, fostering a rare environment of equality that challenged the norms of the era. 

This space, where people lived and learned collectively, can be seen as an early form of a decolonial, non-hierarchical, inclusive, and welcoming school for thinking and knowledge production. Inspired by this approach, The Living Table Epicurean Garden series is designed as a site-specific iteration that explores the relationship between artistic knowledge and embodied research within practice-based research as a system for exploring, relating to, interacting with, and collectively thinking about our bodily relationship with knowledge and landscape.

All graphic design and illustrations for the Living Table are created by artist and lecturer Killian Dunne, who oversees the publication´s printed matter and editorial design for this project.

Living Table has been a space for sharing in Scotland, England, Ireland, Northern Ireland, and Austria.