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RE_NATURE WORKSHOP /

Chimera Gastronomy:
Malleable flesh, amalgamated bodies, and plastic kinship


Venue:
Willem Twee
Boschdijkstraat 100, 's-Hertogenbosch

Workshop Fee:
Adult: € 8
Student / LBGTQ+: € 4


October 24th, 2021 

Noam Youngrak Son
for the Institute of Queer Ecology


The Institute of Queer Ecology is excited to be participating in RE_NATURE, a festival for art and nature in Den Bosch taking place from October 8th-October 31st. Our film series, Metamorphosis, commissioned by DIS, is screening as part of the exhibition program, and we’re thrilled to present a workshop by Noam Youngrak Son.

With the support of the IQECO, Noam Youngrak Son has developed the workshop “Chimera Gastronomy: Malleable flesh, amalgamated bodies, and plastic kinship” as part of the program for RE_NATURE. In the workshop, a group works individually and collectively on a large malleable body consisting of dough. During the kneading, identities, gender and notions surrounding ethics are discussed and reflected. The co-created edible sculpture is thus a translation of our collective and personal struggles, interspecies discoveries and political feelings around bodies in this society. According to Son, this result will be a so-called Chimera: a living being that arises from cell mixing.



During the workshop the participants hybridized eel, dodo, octopus, lichen, whale, nekton, cat into a chimera. The flesh, materialized using edible ingredients, comprehensively represented the following political-cultural-ecological discussions: endocrinological condition shaped by migration, extinction caused by colonialism, fluctuating chromatophores blurring the notion of race, symbiotic cohabitation, the polarization of scales. By using this variety of flesh, we speculatively constructed organs that tell stories: An anus not for defecation but for olfactory communication, a selfish heart that only pumps blood for itself, non-binary genitals, an ear that hears sufferings, an organ that consumes pain and excretes joy. After the completion of the workshop, the body parts were combined into a fictional creature, 3D scanned and digitally animated.

Noam Youngrak Son is a designer based in Ghent and Eindhoven. They inscribe myths for the underrepresented in various mediums, from books to performances to 3D printed sex toys. They are excited about the unexpectedness that a well-designed fiction can open up, and critical political discussions that it may cultivate. They use their capability as a designer to visualize and materialize the setup for the technological & ecological bodies in their fiction to play roles in. Noam’s identity as a queer person of color is one of the axes of their design practices.


RE_NATURE is organized by Future of Work (FOW) , a foundation that seeks the connection between creative imaginations of future innovations and the (professional) practice of the day after tomorrow.

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