Translating the Port of Amsterdam into a resonant body, this performance engages the audience through auditory, olfactory, and gustatory interventions. The piece utilises elements from the artwork installation of the same title – a dinner table that mirrors the 'banketje' style, a genre of still life painting. For this performance Brackish will be accompanied by ghenwa noiré.

Credits

Performance: Toni Brell and ghenwa noiré

Tastes: Lila Bullen-Smith

Scenography: Megan Hadfield

Curated by: Margarita Osipian, Angeliki Tzortzakaki

Cmmissioned by: Sonic Acts Biennial

For this performance Brackish Collective is joined by ghenwa noiré. 

Still Life of a Laid Table with Lecithin and Voice

110cm x 50cm x 180cm, 2024

Still Life of a Laid Table with Lecithin and Voice presents the dinner table as a site of commodity, production and trade. Tar marshmallows slowly decay, mounds of lecithin spoil, and rapeseed oil seeps from Brackish Collective’s interpretation of a ‘Banketje’ – a style of still life painting popular amongst Dutch middle class merchants. During the birth of market capitalism goods and ornaments accumulated through colonial enterprise entered the domestic sphere. 

Today, the Port of Amsterdam remains in many ways the ‘storehouse of Europe’. Global food conglomerates continue to operate through the port, concealing and whitewashing their operations. Drawing lines between iconographies of commercial excess and the globalised food production of today, Still Life of a Laid Table with Lecithin and Voice presents a panoply of industrialised foodstuffs that circulate through the port.

Performance

30 minutes

Translating the Port of Amsterdam into a resonant body, the performance engages the audience through auditory, olfactory and gustatory interventions. Utilising elements of the still life to create  sound and taste, it invites the audience to experience the unfolding narratives from an unfamiliar perspective.

The project is co-funded by AFK, Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst

Workshop commissioned by the Research Group Art & Spatial Praxis (LASP)

Working with halophytes and other salt-resistant plants - all which grow in the dunes and coastal areas of The Netherlands - this workshop will be an experimental tasting and attempt at collaborative sensorial mapping involving ten plants, ranging from sea asparagus and dune roses to sea purslane, sea buckthorn and red clover.

Sipping Dunes is an immersive installation and performance commissioned by Into The Great Wide Open, offering an invitation for audiences to immerse themselves in the landscape of Vlieland. The work explores hosting, tasting and rituals around eating as alternative tools for accessing socio-political knowledge embedded in our environment. The performers circulate a carved dining table, offering tastes and spoken narratives to passers by. These fictional presentations of real tastes have been gleaned from a period of site-specific research by the collective. The installation explores the terrain’s oscillating existence, the erosion and rebuilding of dunes that unfold between the seashore and the forest, where plants absorb the brackish water that permeates their surroundings, an artificial flood defense. Through participatory tasting sessions and performative interactions, Brackish Collective seeks to forge a connection to the natural terrain of Vlieland.

A Mouthful of Whispers is an installation and performance developed by Brackish Collective that invites its audience to immerse themselves in the history and ambiance of NDSM, Amsterdam Noord, and the surrounding harbour. Through tasting sessions and performative interventions, Brackish aims to unravel the intricate tapestry woven through historical and socio-political narratives that surround NDSM. 

The event will be held in English.

28.7.23, Treehouse NDSM, performance starting 6PM, drinks and music from 8PM

A Mouthful of Whispers is supported by AFK (Amsterdams Fonds voor de Kunst).

Any donations are welcome. 5 EUR suggested donation 

During their somatic cooking workshop, Radical Roots (MayIs Rukel, Lina Bravo Mora) and Brackish invited non-EU students of Sandberg Institute & Rietveld Academy to take some time off to nourish and synch with their bodies while sharing space, and possibly connect with fellow migrant students. 

We offered somatic exercises to bring awareness to the multiple sensations that preparing food, eating and cleaning, provoke in our bodies. 

Using the ingredient tarhana as our guide, we took a closer look at the ingredients and methods of preparation involved in preparing this soup that is often present in the ifthar tables of Ramadan.

Performance and Installation – as part of the Water issue by Simulacrum Magazine at Zone2Source in Amsterdam.

For the launch of Daisyworld Magazine, to which we also contributed with writing, we made special brackish cocktails.

At Zine Camp Rotterdam we reflected on the possibility of water as a metaphor for publishing.  Both language and water consist of fragments, of repetitions and pattern formations. We invited our guests, to extend the landscape of the tablecloth with their own drawings and texts, using algae-ink provided by us. The tablecloth-as-zine became a form of impromptu-publishing.

At KunstHub Bink in Elburg we realized a quasi-performative and site-specific dinner that reimagined the city’s past through a speculative, apocryphal narrative that traversed between brine and brack, from salt to sweet. Guests came together to observe, taste, and overhear moments from a fictional exploration of the Dutch land reclamation project.