Visitors Sample Recipes from ‘Starvation Cookbook’ at Aspinwall House

KOCHI:
Cookies made from clay, potato peels, black sugar, grass and water mixed with petrol were on the menu today at a ‘buffet’ in Aspinwall House that provided Kochi-Muziris Biennale (KMB) visitors with a taste of life in famine belts and warzones.
Documenting 14 historical and contemporary instances of extreme starvation from across the world, the installation – titled ‘Hunger is/isn’t an object’ – laid out on a mirror surface by Polish artist Karolina Brzuzan offered samples of what was or is the “last resort” in each situation.
From the jelly made from carpenter’s glue that sustained the citizens of Leningrad during the 900-day siege by Nazi forces in World War II to the water and salt ‘soup’ eaten by the residents in the Syrian resort town of Madaya, each plate told a different story of deprivation.
The common thread were the artificially created twin issues of poverty and hunger: whether through conflict, corruption, ideologies, people un-friendly policies or failing power structures. The artist studies starvation as an artificial phenomenon, even a “weapon of mass destruction”.
“The empty plate is a good surface to reflect problems around the world. Food is something we all have to consume daily to survive regardless of other differences between us. The need for and enjoyment of food is a language we all share,” Brzuzan said.
The Warsaw-based artist is collecting such ‘recipes’ for a long-term project called ‘Starvation Cookbook’, which explores the condition of extreme hunger, the political or economic reasons for it and the survival mechanisms and sustenance measures adopted by local communities.
Inviting the public to come partake of the ‘feast’ laid out lent a touch of the performative to the installation – with several visitors taking Brzuzan up on her request to “try the raw onion”. The installation’s director Katarzyna Sobucka and KMB 2016 volunteers were on hand to dissuade people from items that were especially inedible, like the grass gruel, or the petrol water cooler.
“The minimal aesthetics of the items reflected the scarcity of local resources for those starving around the world. In Syria, food inflation means a kilo of rice might cost you a car. I chose food that it is hard to think of as such to show how hollow ideas like trickle-down economy are when confronted by empty bellies,” Brzuzan said.
“Ninety per cent of food scarcity today is artificially created. It shows how poorly our contemporary systems and structures are constructed,” she added.
The use of hunger-meals as sculptures is also intended to show the linkages between a common vocabulary of human experience and art.
“Art is language that communicates without the need fo
r verbalisation – like how we know ice-cream tastes great without having to say it,” Brzuzan said.
For KMB co-founder Bose Krishnamachari, the installation was a “critique of politics, religion and location”. “It’s not about the food. It’s about the othering of the people forced to eat it to survive. The actual evidence from plates around the world has been archived to contextualise it against the root causes of hunger and starvation,” Krishnamachari said.