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Grain

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Image courtesy of Gaia Foundation, Seed Sovereignty Programme

Each year Feast works with Hospitalfield to develop a programme of talks and workshops as part of their summer festival. For the summer of 2024 we explored the urgent theme of GRAIN.

Located in Angus, where the vast majority, if not all of the cereal crops grown go to large malting companies, the programme sought to explore a range of alternative modes of grain production and usage; looking comparatively at global, industrial structures alongside local networks of growing, harvesting and milling grain, in conjunction with its different uses in everyday bread making and local retailing. 

Considering the role of smaller scale growing in fostering community focused food pathways, we heard from Scotland the Bread and Granton Garden Bakery. Beyond a bakery, Granton are growing grain in collaboration with Edinburgh Agroecology Coop and have plans to set up a community stone mill, developing a hyper-local bread system that connects local people with their food networks, as well as creating jobs and building community level resilience and food security. 

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Ruth Levene, Sheffield Wheat Experiment.
Image courtesy Gemma Thorpe

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Scotland The Bread, Soil to Slice wheat harvest

Small-scale and hyper-local growing initiatives further provide opportunities for knowledge exchange with initiatives such as the UK Grain Lab and The Seed Sovereignty Programme, fostering peer learning. Prior to the festival Hospitalfield have been growing heritage varieties of grain in their walled garden as part of Scotland The Bread’s ‘Soil to Slice’ project, a programme that encourages communities throughout Scotland to get involved in growing, harvesting, threshing, milling and baking with more nutritious grains in their local area. Contributing to the conversation on community growing and the development of local food systems artist Ruth Levene introduced her projects A Field of Wheat and The Sheffield Wheat Experiment, both of which explore community interdependencies and broken relationship with the land.

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Film Still Supernatural Bread, Diana Khalilova 2024

Learning from Hospitalfield’s current collaboration with Kultura Medialna in Dnipro (Ukraine), and artists and curators Katya Rusetska and Diana Khalilova, we have considered the effect of the war in Ukraine on the global grain industry. Ukraine has long been known as the breadbasket of Europe, given its place at the agricultural heart of European cereal production. Ukrainian bread production has always held a strong resonance with national pride and identity, which finds itself at the same time disrupted and reaffirmed by the invasion. In response to the reduction in free movement of grain exports, as well as lacking accessible agricultural land, a number of alternative, communal and collaborative approaches to growing have taken on a heightened political resonance throughout Ukraine. As part of the Summer Festival programme Katya and Diana hosted a screening and artists talk around Diana's film work Supernatural Bread, edited during her residency at Hospitalfield in August. Following the screening the pair hosted a collective discussion taking the format of their regular Community Kitchen events at Dnipro Center for Contemporary Culture. The Community Kitchen programme combines collective cooking activities with conversations about food as an integral part of Ukrainian culture.

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Alongside offering much food for thought on our past, present and future place in local and global networks of agriculture, this year’s festival included bread making workshop by baker Mahala Le May, offering hands-on knowledge in bread-making using hyper-locally grown grain. The loaves were baked in a clay bread oven that had been made in a communal workshop facilitated by the artist Katherine Fay Allan.

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Salt dough sculptures made throughout the festival day with artist Kirsty Baxter.

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Granton Garden Bakery sough dough loaves.

Film

Complimenting the talks and workshops this year's festival included a screening programme exploring the act of growing and sourcing food crops as a means of political resistance. The programme included:

Grain City: A film about The Sheffield Wheat Experiment
Re-imagining alternative grain economies through hand growing, harvesting and processing a population wheat for and of Sheffield. Through understanding the impacts of industrialisation on our daily bread, this artwork and community heritage project reconnects people to the land and the seed. The experiment explores alternative systems that embody new values that make our food more than just a commodity.

https://www.thesheffieldwheatexperiment.co.uk/

Foragers, Jumana Manna
Foragers depicts the dramas around the practice of foraging for wild edible plants in Palestine/Israel with wry humor and a meditative pace. Shot in the Golan Heights, the Galilee and Jerusalem, it employs fiction, documentary and archival footage to portray the impact of Israeli nature protection laws on these customs. The restrictions prohibit the collection of the artichoke-like ’akkoub and za’atar (thyme), and have resulted in fines and trials for hundreds caught collecting these native plants. For Palestinians, these laws constitute an ecological veil for legislation that further alienates them from their land while Israeli state representatives insist on their scientific expertise and duty to protect. Following the plants from the wild to the kitchen, from the chases between the foragers and the nature patrol, to courtroom defenses, Foragers captures the joy and knowledge embodied in these traditions alongside their resilience to the prohibitive law. By reframing the terms and constraints of preservation, the film raises questions around the politics of extinction, namely who determines what is made extinct and what gets to live on.

https://www.jumanamanna.com/Foragers

The Seeds of Vandana Shiva
How did the willful daughter of a Himalayan forest conservator become Monsanto’s worst nightmare? The Seeds of Vandana Shiva tells the remarkable life story of Gandhian eco-activist Dr. Vandana Shiva, how she stood up to the corporate Goliaths of industrial agriculture, rose to prominence in the organic food movement, and inspired an international crusade for change.

Vandana Shiva is a modern-day revolutionary, and for forty years has been fighting a heroic battle on behalf of humanity and the ecologically besieged natural systems that support us. But she is opposed by powerful multinational corporations invested in continuing their degenerative but lucrative agricultural practices. By profiling one of the greatest activists of modern times, the film looks at the epic struggle over who controls the world’s food systems, and asks the question, who will prevail?

https://vandanashivamovie.com/

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Film Still, Foragers Jumana Manna 2022

Music

Throughout the festival an expanded music programme was organised by  SHHE.

SHHE is the alias of Scottish-Portuguese sound artist, musician and producer, Su Shaw. Based in Dundee, Scotland, her work explores themes of identity and connection at the intersection between sound and space, environment and ecology, and research and performance.

Inspired by this year’s festival theme of Grain, SHHE invited artists with a unique approach to making and sharing, exploring themes of connection, ritual, growth, process and identity through sound – and across different forms and genres including; Hannan Jones and Shamica Ruddock, Harry Górski-Brown, Naafi and Makeness.

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Hannan Jones & Shamica Ruddock
Image courtesy Andrea Vollmer