Explore the profound presence and evolving role of food throughout art history in our online course, delving into the cultural, symbolic, and aesthetic significance of culinary representations across diverse artistic epochs.

This course will be delivered by Kevin Bellò and Inês Coelho da Silva. Inês is an artist and researcher based between Porto and London. Thinking mainly through sculpture and food-making, she identifies the kitchen table as a multi-layered topos for reflecting upon shared traditions, identities and emotions, while thinking about the simultaneous acts of eating and being eaten as forms of care. Kevin is an Italian curator and researcher investigating edible knowledge, politics, and inter-species collaborations. He is co-founder of the pan-European art collective The Sympoietic Society to explore environmental activism, practices of co-creation, and healing through storytelling.

Image credit: Bees (Hymenoptera: Apidae) That Drink Human Tears by Hans Bänziger et al

By the hand of Salma Serry, we will look at our modern culinary realm, where the origins of our food have seemingly faded, severing ties to the stories behind our meals and their broader impact. As urbanization and industrialization disrupt our connection to nature, a counter-movement emerges—urban community farms, rooftop gardens, and communal cooking workshops. Despite their sometimes romanticized appeal, these initiatives serve as vital respites, offering a bridge between urban life and the natural world. They prompt a crucial question: How can we nurture this movement through food, seamlessly weaving tradition, nature, and community into our daily lives?

Salma is a food history researcher, filmmaker and founding curator of Sufra Archive, a library dedicated to the modern food history of Southwest Asia and North Africa, housing the largest collection of +600 historical Arabic cookbooks and culinary ephemera.

Delivered by PhD candidate Roo Dhissou, this course will look into ideas of community and collective dining and position these via à vis the climate crisis, colonialism and care, considering what concepts of "commoning” (Vandana Shiva) allow for? We will explore “entanglements” after Eva Giraud, Donna Harraway and Isabelle Stengers and speculate possibilities for more intersectional ideas, as well as questioning what comes after entanglement and how might this manifest in activism beyond theory? We consider at large the exploitation of indigenous and global majority communities through colonisation and bring issues of land justice and food justice to the dinner table. The prompt “let’s eat together” promotes ideas of the collective and of communities with land and food justice at the centre of it all.

Roo is an artist and researcher who works with communities, diasporas and her own histories. Using community engaged practice, craft, cooking, performance and installation she explores how communal and individual identities are formed. Roo has worked with across institutions in the UK such as Niru Ratnam, The Bluecoat, Tate Liverpool, Primary and internationally in Spain, Canada and Poland. Roo is currently working on a practice based PhD using food, social gathering and critical race theory. She is interested in DIY culture, care and ethics both in and outside of institutions.