A food issue

Food is directly related to power, which is largely embedded in food systems. The global food system can be seen as the interplay of food production, distribution, consumption and representation.
In the era of privatization of everything, fundamental human needs get colonized through corporate strategies and the food system becomes a machine, which excludes people to maximize profit.
Our consumption and eating habits support a toxic food culture, and the media, together with marketing-based communication practices, institutionalize power relations fundamental to the predatory food system. The food system is reproduced by a culture of appearance driven by advertising, branding and packaging that create a superficially designed world of designed food. It is common practice that more than 30 per cent of fruit and vegetables are thrown away at harvest because what has grown does not match imposed standardized aesthetic visual preferences.
Through the globalization and de-localization of diet, the industrialization of food has managed to cut the direct link between man and the self-sufficient production of food. To a large extent, people have become consumers of food, which is no longer understood as something of nature, but as a commodified consumable good that ‘grows’ and is available on store shelves with food.

The indigenous antidote

To tackle such a complex problem from a design point of view, we used the indigenous antidote. With this expression, we mean the juxtaposition that we have brought between the contemporary culture of food porn and the ancestral one, linked to ceramics in an indissoluble way, the indigenous culture of the Awajun. This operation aims to create a short circuit that puts in a new light, by contrast and difference, the contradictions of a society that devours all kinds of diversity. It is precisely the uniqueness of the Awajun that allows us to reflect in an in-depth and completely new way on how globalized humanity today has lost that link with food and the earth. A bond that the Awajun, with their culture rich in myths, ceremonies and knowledge of the territory, have instead contributed to the ceramic material.
[The Awajún people, also known as Aguaruna, represent the second largest indigenous or native Amazonian people in Peru, after the Ashaninka (Ministry of Culture, 2015). The Awajún are characterized by their commitment to the defense of their ancestral territory. Awajún pottery is one of the most particular cultural artifacts of the Amazonian peoples. Physically they look like simple vessels used for domestic purposes: for cooking, for fermenting mazato, for serving food, among others. However, this artifact did not perform an exclusively utilitarian function. First, clay pots are made with dúwe, a very ductile moist clay considered a fat clay. Therefore, being a product of the earth, it was closely linked to the Núgkui spirit, the production of which was exclusively up to the Awajún women. In this context, they have developed and experimented with various materials from the Amazon rainforest, a very refined ceramic production, the result of knowledge and practices that condense their vision of the world and identity of ancestral origin (Ministry of Culture, 2015). In this sense, the Peruvian state declared through the deputy ministerial resolution no.
009-2017-VMPCIC-MC the knowledge, knowledge and practices of the Awajún people related to the production of ceramics. Such is the importance of Awajún pottery, present in the most important myths about Núgkui.]

Critical project

Bite me is the critical design project that emerged from this preliminary analysis on critical ceramics, the food-system, food porn and the indigenous Awajun culture.
The project unfolds in different outputs, therefore different forms of language, all congenial to reinforce the message we want to bring out. What we are talking about are therefore speculative products, visual essay, digital product and exhibition.
“Bite me” is the summary of an externally induced and uncontrolled desire to voraciously bite food that has a sexy face, a body that clouds the senses, but an ephemeral and inconsistent substance. It is excessive salivation, it is the dilated pupils. But what is in front of us is a totally aseptic and flat screen that emits blue light. Bite me is an indigenous interference in the contemporary world, a flash that first blinds us and then shows us what’s under the earth. Bite me is the reinterpretation of the myth, it is the production of a new sense, formal and conceptual.
As Ayaymama’s greed led her to burst and from that burst to create new life through ceramics, Bite
me takes the modern neurosis of food porn to extremes. Bite me is a path characterized by looped images and videos of food, which lead the individual to first feel hunger and desire, then to feel a certain sense of satiety, until this becomes a nauseating fullness that culminates in vomiting. From this catharsis, more food is generated, closing the loop in a vicious circle of visual inputs.

Critical ceramics

The project is based on the formalization of two ceramic products, focal points during the
video performance. The models of the Awajun ceramic tradition and the graphic decorations have been analyzed and redesigned: every single artifact made by Awajun women is representative of the personality who creates it and of the close bond and attention to nature in which the population is immersed.
The two newly designed vessels incorporate the shape of a mouth within them. The first has a closed mouth, intent on clamping the smartphone inside the performance with its lips. The second, on the other hand, has its mouth wide open, ready to receive and return something. The vessels then become a metaphor for the bulimic bite to which society is becoming increasingly accustomed.

Performance

The performance springs from the need to create a digital content, paradigm of contemporaneity, that highlights the extremisms that social media, internet and the dematerialisation of the sensible world make customary. The metaphorical narration overturns the physical rules and destabilises the spectator, bringing him face to face with an awareness: the modern fairytale we are watching is nothing but a mirror on reality. It has no moralistic intentions; on the contrary, it expresses how much one is impregnated by it and how much this phenomenon is belittled even in its most subtle expressions.
The video performance is thus a perfect vehicle for contemporary communication and an even more appropriate instrument for the oxymoron it wants to represent.

Exhibition

The space for the exhibition of the two vases was also designed, where the visitor is welcomed by the video performance and can then visit the two vases and learn more about the theme through information panels

Digital product

The last artefact produced as a result of this project is a digital product that aims to narrate the project from its genesis to its final results.
It's a way of showing the results obtained from a deep study of the Awajun culture, their material heritage and the transposition of their values within the new concept of Bite me.