Being Eaten
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2022
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06 - Presentation
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Basel
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Abstract
Of the concerns of the project of Western, modern design, archi-
tecture and culture, procuring food for ourselves and keeping
ourselves from becoming food for other creatures, is central
amongst them. How we eat and avoid being eaten, keeping our-
selves on top of the food chain(s), constitutes metabolic anthro-
pocentrism, or metabolic privilege, that also clouds and trauma-
tizes the communal act of consume(ation). Yet the acts of eating
and being eaten can help understand life «as in circulation, as a
gift from a community of ancestors... flowing on into an ecological
and ancestral community of origins» (Val Plumwood). The whole
planet is conceived as a giant stomach, pre-preparing photosyn-
thetic energies and unpalatable materialities so they can be ab-
sorbed into our digestive system, our bloodstreams, our organs
and neural tissues. «Plants and the space they occupy are just as
much a part of man as his mouth, his teeth or his stomach... The
whole globe in splendid flight around the sun is a part, an organ,
of every individual human» (Silvio Gesell)
As ecologically related and embodied beings, we also exist as
food for other beings, even as «the human supremacist culture
of the West makes a strong effort to deny [...] that we humans can
be positioned in the food chain in the same way as other animals.»
(Val Plumwood) Thinking and connecting anew with our own eco-
logical intimacy couples the «gut-level intimacy» human beings
have with deep-time planetary processes and with the globally
systematized, mediated, infrastructural existence. These are
imaginaries with potentials, as Huiying Ng writes, to «metabolize
hope».
Keywords
food, Anthropocene, ecology
Subject (DDC)
700 - Künste und Unterhaltung
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CoCreate 2022
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English
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Yes
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ALLEN, Jamie, 2022. Being Eaten. CoCreate 2022. Basel. 2022. Verfügbar unter: https://irf.fhnw.ch/handle/11654/34448