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ARTS OF THE WORKING CLASS: ISSUE 16

Food eats the Soul / Essen essen Seele auf

  • Edition

In Corona times we most likely eat where we shit. This issue is part of the tragicomic reality of precarious living and working conditions. Dedicated to nourishment, ingestion and metabolisms – in poetic and physical forms – it is spelled out as recipes from the cookbook of uncertainty with ingredients soaked in folk tales. After passing through these pages, you’ll be able to tell how much we’d like to serve it as a menu, a nutritional guide for social change.

This issue also is a birthday cake. Arts of the Working Class celebrates its 3rd year, covered in buttercream and flavoured by a perceptible collective fear, despite and/or because of COVID’s toll on our (already publicly restricted) senses. Its dough reconstructs histories and spirits responding to socioeconomic questions, instilled with the hard to digest 1970’s melodrama Angst Essen Seele Auf by Rainer Werner Fassbinder. Arts of the Working Class responds to the contained racism and abstraction of fear in the film, mirroring the conspiracies of today, which can easily be entered through the fanatic nutrition guidance of Corona deniers and taken to perfection in kitchen sink psychology between recognition and denunciation, desire and pleasure, uncertainty and guilt, well-aged cheese, fresh fruit, sustainable eggs and leftovers. 

“Money creates taste'' declared Jenny Holzer on a billboard in Times Square, New York. Her work, illuminating the possibility to grasp common sense beyond capitalism while surrounded by banners of a flagrant spectacle, turns into a coordinate that connects contributions gathered to hypnotize you into paying attention to what society feeds itself with. Nickolas Calabrese dives into the price and tastelessness of this reality, while food historian Sasha L. Gora looks into stories of uprooted, migrating people and their vanished worlds.

The Community Kitchen and the urban gardening network of Berlin flesh out what it might mean to make a healthy diet accessible. Texts from Rosalyn D’mello, Mariko Hori and Caique Tizzi reformulate a taste of home, Luigi Coppola researches the weaponization of seeds and Lara Verena Bellenghi offers insights into the violence of refusing to eat. On the margins of hunger, starvation and reward, Lil Deb’s Oasis creates a manifesto at the margins, a ‘liquid’ pairing for dishes inspired by the endless countercultural dreams deposited in artist bars. Letters of workers from local delivery services trapped in the gig economy are conducted by Johannes Büttner and Steffen Köhn, the Center for Plants and Culture examines the sugarcoated funding of the arts, and from Delfina Foundation’s book “Politics of Food” (which gathers some of the most challenging notions of disgust, scarcity and the grotesque), you can find a sweet selection of Candice Lin, Melanie Jackson and the Center for Genomic Gastronomy as an accompaniment through the pages.

In the visual interventions from Radek Brousil, Camille Henrot, Jenna Sutela, Nona Inescu, Kasia Fudakowski and Paweł Sochacki, food is reflected as a part of everyday survival; from scraps to holiday celebration meals, between histories, psychoanalysis and sexual fetishism, between food play as multi-sensory experience, its presentation and photography, invisible paths of eating disorders, nostalgia (as the pain of ignorance, of not knowing, stirring the soul as well as the senses) and anticipation. Sustainability is not rocket science, but somewhere between starvation and dying of thirst versus drowning in products and production.

The methods of perception around nourishment are as varied as the colour of our eyes. Here, forms of hospitality are practiced and celebrated by foodculture days, a festival turned into our spring collaboration partner. The Extrablatt (special sheets) we produced together with foodculture days (re)discover the multiple meanings and functions of food on a daily basis, as well as the tangible or imperceptible impact of our individual choices on the global environment. 

Cultures and societies live through food. Every cuisine tells truths and lies. And bellies listen. 

Guten Appetit, 

Die Editors

Contributions by:

Diego Agulló, Lara Verena Bellenghi, Netzwerk Urban Garden Berlin, Radek Brousil, Johannes Büttner, Nickolas Calabrese, Irene Caravita, Luigi Coppola, Center for Plants and Culture, Rosalyn D’Mello, Paula Erstmann, Max Eulitz, The Center for Genomic Gastronomy, L. Sasha Gora, Camille Henrot, Mariko Hori, Salvador Izquierdo, Melanie Jackson, Dagna Jakubowska, Community Kitchen, Alina Kolar, Matylda Krzykowski, Fruits of our Labor, María Inés Plaza Lazo, Candice Lin, Dalia Maini, Ingo Niermann,Carla Perez-Gallardo and Wheeler of Lil Deb’s Oasis, Chris Paxton, Elvia Wilk and Andreas Petrossiants, Pane Per Poveri, Patricia Reed, Donna Schons, Jenna Sutela, Bilgisaray/Sari-Sari teams, Caique Tizzi and Jo Vávra.


PUBLISHING ADDRESS / VERLAGSADRESSE:

Reflektor Monde gUG (haftungsbeschränkt), Lynarstrasse 38, 13353 Berlin 

Vertreten durch die Geschäftsführer:

Alina Kolar, María Inés Plaza Lazo & Pauł Sochacki 

Founders / Gründerinnen: María Inés Plaza Lazo & Pauł Sochacki 

Advertisement / Anzeigen: hey@artsoftheworkingclass.org 

Alle Vertriebs und Kundenanfragen an:
Arts of the Working Class, Lynarstraße 38, 13353 Berlin, DE /
E-mail: hey@artsoftheworkingclass.org /
Tel: +49 1716292064

Publishers/Herausgeber*innen & Editors/Redakteur*innen:

Alina Kolar
ak@artsoftheworkingclass.org 

María Inés Plaza Lazo
mi@artsoftheworkingclass.org 

Pauł Sochacki
p@artsoftheworkingclass.org 

Art Direction/Layout: Hans Löffler 

Managing Editors: Dalia Maini, Sebastjan Brank

Coordination & Distribution: Chris Paxton, Mohammad Al-Hasani

Interns / Praktikant*innen: Faye Campbell, Giorgia Bellotti

Cover Images:
 Camille Henrot, Jenna Sutela, Radek Brousil

Poster: Camille Henrot, Jenna Sutela

Druck: Druckzentrum Osnabrück GmbH & Co. KG, Osnabrück, DE

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