On Friday November 30, Judith ter Haar and Danielle Bruggeman gave the workshop 'Talking Food' during the Art Research Conference 'Food Friction', organised by the ArtEZ Graduate School. This workshop was part of the 'Culture' session, which focused on doing embodied and sensorial research through art and design. In this workshop we explored the relationship between the nature of self and the nature of food. We gave agency to food to tell us about who we are: what colour are we? What smell are we? What taste are we? Guided by Judith ter Haar, we created our own sensorial narrative by using food.

Just like fashion, food is a social and cultural phenomenon directly related to the body, the senses, and identity. While food moves throughand inthe body, we wear clothes directly on our physical self, as a second skin to express identity. There are many frictions in food and in fashion. Both food and fashion are fast moving consumer goods. And Fashion's Ego is fed by these mass produced goods. The current fashion system operates in an unhealthy and dehumanized way, and we are collectively exploring how to create systemic change. The human touch urgently needs to be regained. What can fashion learn from food, and vice versa? What can food teach us about how we treat the earth, each other and ourselves? What is the relation between the embodied practice of 'doing' fashion and the vibrant, living and nourishing matter of food?

In the field of fashion, sight – the visual: looking at, and being looked at – is the privileged sense. And a visual aesthetics is continuously conditioned in fashion and in our contemporary culture. Food cannot escape that. Yet, our embodied experience of fashion and of food necessarily engages all the senses. In this workshop, we aimed to move beyond the dominant focus on the visual – drawing more attention to the other underprivileged senses as well, to explore how to create a sensorial and material aesthetics. Food and fashion are the 'living things' - a continuum of living matter - that we are living with. What if food could speak?

To see more please visit foodfriction.artez.nl/culture-bruggeman.