Spain: Sara Garcia and Adrianna Szojda

Sara García aims to expand the way we approach the unknown through the creation of experiences.

For her, the unknown embodies the Other with whom collaboration is possible: the host and the guest. It is also about what we cannot master, control, or name. From this point of view, she is interested in questioning the look into the darkness from a rationalist perspective; she seeks recognition of the hidden in our experiences and tries to explore other ways of approaching what we call reality.

She uses a variety of techniques, including the use of fermented foods, local clays, and foraged plants, to create intimate sensory experiences that explore the concept of hospitality and, by extension, our relationship with the Other.

Her project moulding mourning mouths explores food ethics, multi-species eating and coexistence, using bread and sourdough.

It consists primarily of a series of ceremonies in which offerings made of bread will be given to the Earth, to more-than-humans-beings, and to the audience.

The project looks at the table for its potential for coexistence. It is a place that allows us to ask ethical questions about the best way to get closer to each other. At the table is possible to propose a hospitality open to difference, seeking responsibility and welcome towards and from others.

Multi-species eating reveals our interconnectedness with other forms of life. Both farming and eating are gestures that link us to ecologies, in which ourselves as well as others are fed.

Fermentation is a key strategy for addressing multi-species appetites, as it transforms food through the feeding of others that are actually different from us, the micro-organisms. Bacteria, fungi and enzymes break down molecules, making them more digestible, less toxic and tastier for us.

In moulding mourning mouths these ideas are materialized through bread.

Bread is a generator of bonds, it is a clear example of hospitality. At the same time, we can review western history by looking at the history of bread, especially its connection to the origin of agriculture. It is thought that wheat cultivation changed us from nomads to settlers, seen by some as the beginning of our planet's decline.

Bread changed at the same time as production in wheat agriculture changed. Genetically modified agriculture, flour separation, bleaching and accelerated leavening go hand in hand with climate change, leading us away from the slow wholemeal sourdough bread and the community of bacteria.

The project intends to initiate a shift in perception, to produce a change in thinking, and to discover experiences to form new narratives.

Adrianna Szojda researcher, ecofarmer. She maily works at the intersection of art, education and agroecology. She investigates human and more-than-human interrelationships, looking for possible ways of communication between species through plurisensoriality and non-hegemonic epistemologies. Her field of interest embraces ecofeminist education, food sovereignty and justice, regenerative practices and ways to create communities based on care and collaboration. Attented to the relations that occur on the margins of the im/possible, she finds a great inspiration in spontaneous and ruderal plants.

The aim of Adrianna Szojda´s project for SAiR residency program is to trace local interdisciplinary regenerative practices, specific for every place and context. The project looks for the practices that already exist within every ecosystem, considering its human and more-than-human habitants, the relations between them and the materiality of the place. Regenerative practices have a long history, usually difficult to track as in almost each case they were developed as a way to cope with oppression, violence, abandonment, in opposition to the dominant system. The purpose of this project is to share the knowledge about those other, usually non-hegemonic practices, to make them visible, and to think together how they may help us to think/feel/make/be with and for damaged, overexploited world we all live in and co-create.

The idea comes from a longer research which materialized in Adrianna´s MA final project that consisted of studying the similarities between soil regeneration practices and certain practices that occure within the ecosystem of La Escocesa, an artist-led contemporary visual arts organisation and residency space in Barcelona, Spain.

By learning and inquiring with the territory and with the community, always considering its complex context and local particularities, the project seeks the ways to reinforce community resilience in the face of ecosocial crisis by recognizing hot spots and needs, and providing space to discuss them collectively.

The project will be carried out mainly through interviews and field recordings, and will materialize in a podcast or a multimodal installation which collects different voices and experiences of the habitants of the ecosystem of each of the art organisation engaged in the SAiR project.