Description

Abundance: Fruit of the Sea, Bounty of the Mountain (2016) was developed in the fishing village of Kou on Teshima Island, Japan for the Setouchi Triennale.

Abundance: Fruit of the Sea, Bounty of the Mountain highlights the commercialisation of traditional food cultivation practices and their interconnection to globalised industrial systems. Nori, traditionally gathered locally is now commercially grown off the Teshima coast, using seeds & nets, to keep up with export demand. The structure, made with the local residents uses stale processed nori sheets from their homes, that change colour over time. The nori sheets are sewn onto commercial nori nets, the type used to grow this nori through industrial farming.

Local recipes were gathered through a cooking workshop with Kou residents, ending in a communal meal. The recipe were turned into postcards and packaged with local ingredients, dried using a dehydrator purchased by a local resident to preserve excess produce – an example of how traditional techniques, such as drying fruit inside roofs, are adapted in contemporary culture.

Postcards are purchased through a vending machine with proceeds going to the community, attempting to establish a local micro economy based on Kou’s recipes & ingredients and disseminate local knowledge to a global Triennale audience. This combines a critique of the complexity of the economics of global food systems & convenience vs evolving traditional food practices and local food cultivation.

Abundance: Fruit of the Sea, Bounty of the Mountain explores local preservation in both contexts of food and culture, and the ways in which it shifts and changes over time, demonstrating the need for communities to consistently adapt to sustain themselves and highlighting the importance of food in people’s everyday lives.

This project was commissioned for the 2016 Setouchi Triennale and generously supported by the Australian Embassy, Japan, the Australia Council for the Arts and the National Association for the Visual Arts.