Side Dish with The Soft Protest, Digest
Dinner Event on October 4, 19.00–22.30
Exhibition open on 5, 10,11,12 October, between 14.00–18.00
Tickets are including dinner and talk: € 20,80
Reserve your seat here
Side Dish #4 : Re-chewing
with The Soft Protest, Digest, Corneel van Rijn and Axe & Porridge
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.
For our fourth Side Dish, we have invited the The Soft Protest, Digest, a research collective involving Danish farmer and artist Nickie Sigurdsson and French design duo Adel Cersaque. Their work is centered around food history, agriculture and the social and political ties which constitute a food culture. Through their explorations, the collective aims to design environmentally resilient diets.
On the night of October 4th, The Soft Protest, Digest invites you to a dinner centered around the collaboration between the cow and the grass, working as agents for recycling and storing carbondioxide in the soil ecosystem. The re-distribution of carbondioxide from the atmosphere into the soil, mediated by the cow and the grass as part of the carbon cycle, can play a part in reversing climatic issues, while also showing the two controversial and often appraised subjects (the cow and the CO2) from a different angle, one where they would each fulfill a function beneficial to the ecosystem.
Today, the cow is mainly valued for her milk, but what if she would be valued for the work she is doing while grazing, adding benefits to grasslands? Biomass removal that fosters regrowth and stores carbon, prevention of wild fires, regulation of hydrology and water quality by producing diverse landscapes, conservation of rich grasslands biodiversity and pollinators, dispersal of seeds through ingestion and release in dung, but also of organic matter and nutrients, etc. Nickie and Adel would like to speculate and partake in the future of the cow, an essential actor of the Dutch food culture.
The dinner will bind grass, cow and carbon, and convey narratives concerning the potential of grasslands, the carbon sequestration, tales connected to the Dutch food culture and address the critical situation of current cattle systems. The collective will share their research cultivated together with the farmer Corneel van Rijn, part of the small-scale and organic farm Boerderij Buitenverwachting in Hoogmade, and involved in the Agricultural European Innovation Partnership.
The dinner will be prepared in collaboration with Axe & Porridge (Sander Uitdehaag and Veniamin Kazachenko). 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 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 Öğüt and our lovely colleagues and volunteers! Special thanks to Nolwenn Salaün.
Side Dish is supported by Amsterdam Fund for the Arts and the Municipality of Amsterdam.