A Choral Accomplishment — 2024
The video installation offers a glimpse of a magic-realist scenery set in an uncanny community kitchen. The scene, centred on three characters cooking cheese together with odd tools and eccentric clothing, appears not to belong to a precise time. Their actions are woven together by an enchanted chorus the characters sing together, referencing the tradition of work songs. These otherworldly images hint at a proposed strategy for refusing capitalist production systems and neoliberal conditions of isolation. Home-cheesemaking here transforms into a collective practice of resistance, fostering communalisation of everyday production work. Looking at cooking as a quotidian labour of production and at eating as an act of breaking the boundaries between our human body and the more-than-human world, the work urges to overcome the separation between political practice and the acts of production of life. It aims at suggesting the role that conviviality and work-sharing—as opposed to isolation and private property—must have in the construction of a desirable common futurity. A collective endeavour in which the more-than-human, like cheese and its bacteria, becomes an active agent for multiplicity and contamination; milk flows through political life, its technological processing being an emblem of modern ideas of separation and purity, ultimately mirroring visions on how we ought to live with one another.
the production of the film unfolded through a series of collaborations with Netherlands-based artists: Lu Lin, Yusser Salih, and Ulufer Çelik (all members of different artists-cooking collectives) as performers; Cristiana Vignatelli Bruni for ceramic props; Esther van der Heijden for costumes; Maria Chiara Ziosi for music; Tisa World, Tara Reece, and Ceola Tunstall-Behrens for vocals. The video was shot in a community kitchen in The Hague run by the collective GoedEten. The sheep wool for the installation has been provided by Hollands Wol Collectief and by De Wolplantage.
film credits
DOP: Lara Varat
Camera operators: Lara Varat and Valentino Russo
Editor and colorist: Valentino Russo
Runners: Adele Dipasquale, Cyan Bae, and Hattie Wade
Boom operator: Dario di Paolantonio
Song recording, mixing, and mastering: Far Out Sound Studio, Rotterdam
Filmed at GoedEten kitchen, The Hague
exhibition view at "Prospects", during Art Rotterdam, Van Nelle Fabriek (NL)
A Choral Accomplishment — 2024
The video installation offers a glimpse of a magic-realist scenery set in an uncanny community kitchen. The scene, centred on three characters cooking cheese together with odd tools and eccentric clothing, appears not to belong to a precise time. Their actions are woven together by an enchanted chorus the characters sing together, referencing the tradition of work songs. These otherworldly images hint at a proposed strategy for refusing capitalist production systems and neoliberal conditions of isolation. Home-cheesemaking here transforms into a collective practice of resistance, fostering communalisation of everyday production work. Looking at cooking as a quotidian labour of production and at eating as an act of breaking the boundaries between our human body and the more-than-human world, the work urges to overcome the separation between political practice and the acts of production of life. It aims at suggesting the role that conviviality and work-sharing—as opposed to isolation and private property—must have in the construction of a desirable common futurity. A collective endeavour in which the more-than-human, like cheese and its bacteria, becomes an active agent for multiplicity and contamination; milk flows through political life, its technological processing being an emblem of modern ideas of separation and purity, ultimately mirroring visions on how we ought to live with one another.
the production of the film unfolded through a series of collaborations with Netherlands-based artists: Lu Lin, Yusser Salih, and Ulufer Çelik (all members of different artists-cooking collectives) as performers; Cristiana Vignatelli Bruni for ceramic props; Esther van der Heijden for costumes; Maria Chiara Ziosi for music; Tisa World, Tara Reece, and Ceola Tunstall-Behrens for vocals. The video was shot in a community kitchen in The Hague run by the collective GoedEten. The sheep wool for the installation has been provided by Hollands Wol Collectief and by De Wolplantage.
film credits
DOP: Lara Varat
Camera operators: Lara Varat and Valentino Russo
Editor and colorist: Valentino Russo
Runners: Adele Dipasquale, Cyan Bae, and Hattie Wade
Boom operator: Dario di Paolantonio
Song recording, mixing, and mastering: Far Out Sound Studio, Rotterdam
Filmed at GoedEten kitchen, The Hague
exhibition view at "Prospects", during Art Rotterdam, Van Nelle Fabriek (NL)