Future Food

Future Food Commissioned by Creative Time. Curated by Anna Harsanyi. CTHQ, New York, 2024.

Future Food was a series of five public programs organized around distinct research areas, using food as a medium and connector to life. Presented at CTHQ, Creative Time's gathering space for art and political engagement, each program built a temporary environment where participants gathered around a shared meal as active collaborators, envisioning resilient ways of being beyond cycles of crisis and collapse.

Each program grew out of long-term research and conversations with people living the questions it raised. In keeping with my consent practices, the individuals who shared their experiences are not named here.

Seed Freedom: Economy of Care Food is the connector of the web of life. Respecting the freedom of the seed to renew and multiply, this program explored the future of food and seeds through a regenerative seed workshop, a film screening, and a dinner. Through participatory gestures, we considered how to frame a new scaffolding for our food system and what seed intelligence can teach us. How can an economy of care modeled on seeds and seed preservation become the foundation of the living economies of the future? The program included a screening of Jumana Manna's Wild Relatives (2018).

NYCHA | Community Gardens | Food Apartheid | Re-imagining
This program centered on healing our relationship with the urban environment, where land is the scene of the crime in the context of colonialism and slavery. Getting back to the land can seem like an obvious path to freedom, yet so many of us lack the education, or even a basis, for where to start. Garden managers from Bronx River Alliance, East New York Farm, Red Hook Farm, and GrowNYC's community gardens with NYCHA came together for a dinner and discussion on food apartheid in our city and our fractured relationship with nature in the urban environment.

Plantations to Prison Farms: Carceral Conditions Reproduced by Our Food Systems
States frame prison agriculture programs as rehabilitative, but a class action lawsuit at Louisiana's Angola prison has brought to light the inherently punitive nature of incarcerated labor. Around a public meal and discussion, this program shared audio recordings of interviews with formerly incarcerated people, woven together with long-term research alongside abolitionist artists, incarcerated farmers and educators, and researchers of prison agriculture. It traced our direct connection to food grown and produced through the prison industrial complex, the expansion of cop cities, and the way industrial farming relies on exploiting migrant labor as a continuation of the global plantation.

Indigenous Food Systems | Landback | Food Futures
This program asserted that the survival of life on earth requires a shift to center Indigenous epistemologies and kincentric relations and design. Drawing on conversations with Indigenous organizers, educators, and water protectors, the dinner gathered around the future of food and resistance under occupation, with archival film footage, audio recordings, and discussion.

Human Migration | Food Stories | How We Feed Each Other
Migration is a natural process of life on earth. This program explored the history of migration for both humans and non-humans; the experiences of immigrants surviving and navigating New York City's shelter system amid a manufactured immigration crisis; how food itself migrates; and how mutual aid groups feed people when the city's social structures fail. A collaborative meal was cooked with those who shared their stories, around one central question: How do we feed each other in the collapse of systems?

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