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EATING | THINGS

Eating Things Toolkit 02

EATING THINGS has extended out from a family project documenting the journey of two children as they start to learn and eat edible ‘things’ from ‘outside’. Starting in 2010 when the eldest child was a year old, the project became a method to ‘grow’ knowledge as the children grew. Detached and displaced from generational knowledge through structural and one-way food systems, the project seeks to enact a series of methods on food gathering and foraging to grow and deepen knowledge and culture.

EATING THINGS - IRL (in real life)

As time passed, the family’s experience has amplified the mediation of learning by technology and the Internet. Starting afresh, Eating Things calls for intergenerational learning to 'grow' knowledge in IRL (in real life) utilising our current nature, which now in the first instance, seeks information online. IRL performs the internet, the family of foragers lead a ‘search’ to ‘gather’ and ‘process’ the 'results' of edible or medicinal wild, non-cultivated or escapee plants and fungus through walks. Aided by a toolkit, shared memory cards serve as a guide to develop situated data as memory.

Toolkit #01 - Memory cards

Commissioned by Fallowfield Secret Garden, Manchester, the first version of the ‘Memory Cards’ are assembled from a fallen branch gleaned and gifted from a community garden in Whitley Bay, North Tyneside as a symbolic connection of growing knowledge between communities.

Eating Things Toolkit 01

Fallen branch from a beech tree in The Station Masters Community Garden, Whitley Bay, pine toggles made from discarded Christmas trees, cotton fabric ties and nine laser etched birch plywood memory cards, 2022.

Sneha Solanki

Sneha Solanki is interested in the emergent, precarious and the overlooked. She regularly employs horizontal methods of cultural agency and citizen science, and often works in process-based environments; producing events and projects that utilise low-tech, open and collaborative methods to engender knowledge. She has engaged with the invisible signals emitted from military bases, with plants, computer viruses, microorganisms and synthetic life.