Description

Gonflables et amuses-bouches (2012), was produced as part of a three-month residency at Montreal’s Darling Foundry and acted as an exploration of art, food and politics, as well as an exploration of their individual and collective possibilities for community building.

As it’s starting point this project took the radical kitchens, the Midnight Kitchen and the People’s Potato, that ran out of the two main Anglophone universities, Concordia and McGill which served free lunches and catered organised activist events if they fit their anti-oppression mandates. They had also catered the recent student strikes against the universities they were funded by and housed within.

The multi-layered project consisted of a series of dinners and discussions; a screening of Robert Frank’s documentary on Gordon Matta-Clark and Carolyn Gooden’s FOOD restaurant and discussion dinner event serving food from the film, a participatory event of ‘food’ party games as a metaphor for collective organising with the Midnight Kitchen and People’s Potato collectives, a picnic in an inflatable architectural structure constructed out of disposable tablecloths, a publication and a giant mapping to explore food and its intersections with art, architecture, radical spaces and radical organising. The publication was launched at the end of the picnic with a stone soup event as a symbol of collective organising.

“De Souza’s work not only made visible the networks and systems present in food activism, but also showed the ways we can manifest and interpret their meanings. Gonflables et amuses-bouches was more than a temporary space to come together and teach each other about the pleasure and power of food—it demonstrated the need for communities to consistently come back to the table to cook up new ideas.”

Montrealers Cook Up New Ideas At Darling Foundry
by Amber Berson in Canadian Art
full text can be read here

Gonflables et amuse-bouches: On the Materiality of Questioning
Project essay by Danielle Lewis can be read here

Gonflables et amuse-bouches was produced during an artist residency October – December 2012 at the Darling Foundry, Montréal, Canada made possible through Artspace, Sydney. The publication was produced with the assistance of a NSW Artists’ Grant through NAVA.

Special thanks to Danielle Lewis; ongoing collaborator, local activist, art historian and member of the Midnight Kitchen Collective.