Side dish with Rain Wu

Dinner Event on June 28th 19.00–22.30
Tickets are including dinner and talk: € 20,80

Side Dish dives into the world of food investigations. Through artistic installations we think of a broader reconsideration of the products and matters we eat, by addressing the experience, habits and buying behaviours around our food.

We are proud to announce that artist and architect Rain Wu will be our third guest at Side Dish. Developing her work on edible materials in sculpture and ceremonial performance, the show Simultaneous Melodies draws inspiration from the inter-species, symbiotic system of nutrients sharing that takes place underground before mushrooms come to light.

Simultaneous Melodies explores the formal and material beauty of mycelium (the vegetative part of a fungus), which Rain Wu employs to cast a series of sculptures based on classical moulds loaned from the Maastricht Fine Art Academy. Unlike materials like plaster or steel, mycelium doesn’t freeze in one shape, but it persists in a state of sustained instability. As it decomposes, mycelium progressively morphs into a fertile substratum out of which mushrooms can fruit, thus collapsing together the opposite processes of dying and living, of fading and growing.

In her recent volume Mushroom at the End of the World, anthropologist Anna Tsing describes the ‘patchy’ network of fungi as a model for communal structures, that runs contrary to the system of contemporary late-capitalism. Against the infinite growth of capitalist abstractions, fungal networks offer the vision of a collective body that remains always uncontrollable, unpredictable and irreducible to any brutal attempt at simplification. Simultaneous Melodies offers a timely reminder that alternative paths to our present way of life lie not only in the future ahead of us, but also in an invisible world already existing all around, and often beneath, our feet.

Rain Wu would like to thank oyster mushroom farmer Rob Hermans of Zwamburg, whose expertise in mycelium growing and generous willingness to embark on this journey have been a crucial part of Simultaneous Melodies.

Axe & Porridge (Sander Uitdehaag and Veniamin Kazachenko) will prepare the vernissage dinner. Food will be scattered amongst the sculptural works and will be shared rather than served, in the spirit of fungi’s symbiosis. The spontaneously combusted duo Axe & Porridge operates both as artists and chefs. The ability to appropriate both artistic and culinary domains ‘en flux’ by cooking in a guerrilla style, improvising and meeting new people, characterizes the duo. Exploring the interstice, Axe & Porridge will be providing the menu for the four upcoming events of Side Dish.

Within Side Dish, we have invited artists who approach food in a different way in order to share their preoccupations with a larger audience and extend their explorations through public discussions. Food can be used in their work as a theme, material or consider the food chain as subject of their practice. In the 5 Side Dish events throughout the year, each artist will collaborate with an expert – a professional involved in the local food production – and a chef. During these evenings we will share food with the audience (in the form of a dinner or a more experimental structure) alongside talks.

Corridor Project Space is an independent and interdisciplinary contemporary art initiative in Amsterdam with indoor and outdoor exhibition spaces. They believe in the importance of experimental art practices that focuses on the creation of new content that is off the grid from the institutional and commercial circles. Corridor Project Space is run by Suzan Kalle, Suat Öğut and our lovely colleagues and volunteers! Special thanks to Nolwenn Salaün.