In the second part Zu Community basierter Kunst we focus on food policy, degrowthing and community. How can we act together and organize ourselves in uncertain times? In her lecture performance Marisa Benjamim discusses food strategies while preparing a simple dish. Starting from the recipes, the artist will confront us with our everyday practices and habits. Marisa Benjamim focuses on knowledge sharing and communities that develop the idea of a fair and local food distribution.

In the ensuing discussion with artists Marisa Benjamim, Marta Sala and the theoreticians Lea Loretta Zentgraf and Mariana Calcagni we are going to inquire following issues: What role does artistic practice play in locating food policy, ecology and economy in our daily lives? Is sustainable cooking just a vision for the rich? How can global issues be taken into account from a local perspective? What does Food Justice mean today?

Marisa Benjamim lives and works in Berlin. Studied Kunst im Kontext, Master in Universität der Künste Berlin, Sculpture and Visual Arts Master in ESAD Caldas da Rainha in Portugal.
Using flowers and food as a raw material and as a starting point, Marisa Benjamim creates multisensory installations where she explores culinary archeology, flavour, social interaction and the expansion of art into public and unconventional spaces. Selected exhibitions include: Yūgen APP, Porto Biennale (2021); Amuse-bouche.The Taste of Art, Tinguely Museum, Bassel (2020); Plant cure, Humanity Gallery at LIU, New York; Licht Luft Scheiße, Portuguese Embassy in Berlin (2019); Floristaurant, Riga Biennale of contemporary art (2018).

Marta Stanisława Sala holds a degree in painting from the Jan-Matejko Academy of Fine Arts in Krakow and in art in context from Universität der Künste Berlin. Her focus is on issues such as intersectionality, precariousness, the right to the city, ecology, commons and commoning, creative anarchism and solidarity in diversity. Sala explores the problem of waste, exclusion and marginalization and creates works from different material remains. In 2021 she organized together with Johanna Reichhart, Marcos García Pérez, Costanza Rossi, Katarzyna Sala, Cheong Kin Man, Francis Kamprath “Arbeitspause at the Görli – Artistic Relationship Systems in Public Space.” The “Arbeitspause” works in collective structures in an association of artists and cultural workers. From autumn 2022 onwards, five more community activities are planned in Görlitzer Park, which deal with food and community, such as Careful Listening – Common Tea Time.

Lea Loretta Zentgraf. Feminist, translator, sociologist, and currently a PhD candidate in the BMBF Junior Research Group "Food for Justice: Power, Politics and Food Inequalities in a Bioeconomy" at the Institute for Latin American Studies of Freie Universität Berlin. Her PhD project focuses on women's social mobilization against structural and intersectional inequalities in the food system. Special focus is on the resulting feminist and political innovations. Her case studies are the German Rural Women’s Association (DLV) and the Berlin Food Council.

Mariana Calcagni is an environmental sociologist and doctoral researcher at the Institute for Latin American Studies of the Freie Universität Berlin. Her doctoral research studies social movements and their struggle for an agrarian transition, with case studies in Chile and Germany. She is interested in understanding collective actions toward a more democratic, just and sustainable food system, from the perspective of the political ecology, ecofeminism and social movement studies. She is currently studying the case of the National Association of Rural and Peasant Women (ANAMURI) in Chile. She is also an environmental activist and co-founder of the Center for Socio-Environmental Analysis (CASA), a group of scholars and activists working to think critically about how to navigate the socio-environmental crisis and how to develop just and democratic transitions.

The event is part of the “institutions extended” program (2019-2022). The “institutions extended” program is financed by Netzwerkfonds –Zukunftsinitiative Stadtteil II (ZI II), Programm Sozialer Zusammenhalt“.