ABOUT
Initiated in Winter 2014, The Politics of Food, was the first thematic programme introduced by Delfina Foundation. To date, Delfina Foundation has hosted over 90 residencies within the programme’s remit.
The establishment of this programme was an obvious choice, as food had long been at the heart of Delfina Foundation and its predecessor organisation Delfina Studio Trust (1988-2006); with shared meals serving as a site of generosity, conviviality and lively discussion around cultural practice and the world in which it operates, responds to and intervenes in. This continues today through our regular Family Lunches, a core part of our residency programme (and quickly transformed into home deliveries in response to the COVID-19 pandemic).
Artists have long employed food within their creative process and practice, with Renaissance artists Giuseppe Arcimboldo and Caravaggio using food to subtly highlight complex societal issues. In the twentieth and twenty-first century, a host of cultural practitioners have continued in this vein, interrogating relationships between food and environmental, economic and social concerns, as well as notions of cooking and eating as performative acts and of dishes, recipes, and cookbooks as oft-contested markers of cultural memory.
Delfina Foundation programme draws on this history as well as events in society around us, and continues bring practitioners together from across the world to engage with the politics of food.