How to Eat a River. Curatorial Practice, Metabolic Literacies and Cultures of Care
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
In this talk, Dr Lisa Blackmore reflects on curatorial practice as a mode of stimulating critical reflection on hydrosocial well-being and thinks with eating as an aesthetic medium to support metabolic literacies of riverhood (Boelens et al). She weaves these inquiries through the Piquete del Río Bogotá—a communal lunch curated through the entre—ríos collective in 2023 to gather 16 river defenders and caretakers at Tequendama Falls to share a menu of food grown in the watershed. The gathering was part of RIO BOGOTÁ, an ongoing curatorial collaboration created to address the protracted ecological crisis affecting the Bogotá River in Colombia, one of the most polluted watersheds in the world. The project connects and disseminates the care-taking efforts of Indigenous Mhuysca councils, ecological restoration projects, community aqueducts, environmental education, nature tourism, heritage initiatives, and organic food producers at different points of the river basin protection, to uplift their actions as a culture of care manifested in “vital ethico-affective everyday practical doings that engage with the inescapable troubles of interdependent existences” (Puig de la Bellacasa).
Contact name:
Mara Polgovsky Ezcurra