Living Table

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Living Table *

Living Table is an ongoing, evolving project initiated at Forgan Arts Centre during a year-long residency in 2023, that delves 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 centers 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.

At Forgan Arts Centre

Honey – An exploration of interspecies relationships between humans and non-human beings through meals based on honey.
Guests: A local beekeeper; an expert on the Melipona bee (a wild Mexican species); and an artist whose work involves creating architectural beehives inspired by human design.
Final Meals – A meditation on human agency, mortality, and systems of power, explored through final meal requests from death row inmates in Texas.
Guest artists: Lucky Pierre (Chicago-based collective) and Kevin Kaempf (U.S.-based artist).
Flora – Investigating human dependency on, and potential domestication by, the botanical world.
Presenters: Amanda Thomson; Susanne Nørregård Nielsen; Dr. Helena Simmons (biologist based in Fife).
Imbolc – Reflecting on the importance of ritual in fostering community connection.
Guests: Dundee Gaelic Choir, writer Rebecca Sharp, and Dianne Murray.

This project finalised with the printed publication:

Living Table

The Living Table project has reflected upon and discussed the relationships, connections, and antagonisms in the politics of food and the poetics of food.

This publication develops from these conversations: At the ‘Honey’ event, we confronted the relationship between humans and non-humans, nature, ethics, and landscape; in ‘Final Meals’ we discussed the relationships between humans and power, access and discrimination andculture; and at ‘Flora’ our conversations were around the complexities of agriculture, more-than-human relationships with plants, food sovereignty, food security, food access, land use and the cost of living.
For more information please go to Publications section.