Food and the process of making and eating are invariably acts of communal participation, stimulating and wholly sensorial - a complex process immersed in our evolution. Food and what we eat is visceral, and this becomes part of us and our bodies. Our bodies are embodied archives of our routes and journeys across time, geographies and cultures. Our bodies communicate through what we sense, and our sensory organs create needs for consumption, our bodies break down all that we consume and become parts of us, fostering these bonds between nourishment, healing and memory. Through our lived experiences, interwoven with community, we develop our sensual understanding of our universe, and it is this understanding that allows us, as individuals, the processes of growth and evolution. The seeds we travelled with and dispersed over lands, the knowledge, learning and recipes we collected on our travels and shared across communities. These learnings have been handed down across generations, encoded in our DNA, and as rituals, practices and stories over the dining table. The process of knowing and making is performative and constituted within our 'body memories'. Our bodies communicate through what we sense, and our sensory organs create needs for consumption through biological, psychological and emotional behaviours.
About Wency Mendes
Wency Mendes is an independent researcher, (documentary) filmmaker who engages with video and technology in theatre and performance and conceptual and installation art projects. He works in Advertising, Broadcast Television and Digital-Web, independently producing award-winning content. He is a cinematographer and editor by profession; practising and working with multimedia and mediums. His practice lies within indigenous and tribal communities through shared concerns of land and water, environment, sustainability and climate change; documenting practices, oral culture and processes of ethno-technologies. He engages with the politics of food, consumption and the processes of 'knowledge' in its making and dissemination through building sensoriums. For him, the local (geospatial and temporal) and indigenous knowledge are both essential and critical towards building an inclusive and sustainable future. His research work lies at the intersection between race and caste across the subcontinent of India. Here the projects closely examine incidents of discrimination and prejudice, purity and segregation, the making of labour and the Indian Prison System. The process of 'co-labour-abling' is the methodology of making work; here, questions are raised and its process and outcomes, are defined together and conjoined with the community, environ and ecosystem from which the language of the work originates.