Mud, Turf and Steel,

collective ending, Sep 2021

'Mud, Turf + Steel’ was a conceptual dinner that played on Jared Diamond’s book title ‘Gun, Germs + Steel’. The menu was crafted considering a juxtaposition of the mechanical and organic, both languages used to communicate the seeping of the political into the ‘natural’. This separation of nature from culture is rooted in a colonialist logic yet has morphed into a contemporary fallacy.  Considering the industrial backdrop, the meal touched on notions of the built environment - from intensive mono-crop farming - to phallic architecture - we invited the audience to position themselves within these extractive, capitalist + patriarchal contexts while consuming their dinner. There were edible rock-like structures, stacks of cement-like crackers -  apples served on long rods of steel - and mounds of rice served to look like farming monocultures from an aerial perspective.