MAKE/SENSE: Culinary Return (2021–ongoing)
This article is an interweaving of situated dialogues, critical reflections, and expanded knowledges through the lenses of «not knowing in the presence of» (as per Marisol de la Cadena’s essay of 2021) gardens and chacras, and kitchens of steel and earth in Cusco, Peru and Basel, Switzerland. Centring four seasons of exchanges with Isaac Riquelme Mamani (mi querido maestro/my beloved teacher), we look at a recipe, ritual, and seasonal gathering rooted in Peruvian Andean food culture through the Pachamanca (a traditional dish which means comida y ritual bajo la tierra or «pot/meal underneath the earth» in the language of Quechua Runa Simi). In the middle of writing my PhD (which feels more like indigestion) and enacting consent processes, I began to make sense of how Pachamanca and the values and technologies of collective food practices could hold the space to rehearse situated and regenerative relationships with land. So, how and why to cook with land(-scape)? I don’t know, but I can rehearse it…
Ever feel like you are being consumed by the AI data munching overloads of big tech? Ever feel guilty, or at least ambivalent, about test-driving the contours of ChatGPT? This essay, featuring emoji’s superficial chatbot outputs and questions about the in-betweens of speculative and tangible, otherwise of how to side-step the technological tentacle, leaves even the authors wanting more depth.
Mona Hedayati’s experimental visual essay combines strands of technical critique, poetic reflection, and embodied experience to challenge how biometric data is captured, integrated, and interpreted. Drawing on her ongoing artistic research with biosensor wearables—devices that record physiological data such as pulse rate, skin perspiration, and temperature—the artist resists the reductive narratives of «affective computing»: a field that seeks to translate bodily signals into legible emotional states like fear, joy, or sadness.Rather than using data to identify or decode emotions, Mona Hedayati unsettles the presumed objectivity and universality embedded in technical systems, yet follows the technical steps of capturing bodily data to a certain extent. She uses the processed data to generate an acoustic environment as a way of subverting the technical logic while also creating a possibility to feel these signals as sonic intensities. Responding to the physiological signals as entangled and messy acoustic accounts, the artist combines digital images with experimental writing to reveal where this transformation fails from the complexity of bodily processes informed by lived experience to universal emotions. Underscoring the contradiction between these two perceptions, her essay juxtaposes technical descriptions of biometric data processing with autobiographical accounts of her experience as a migrant. In contrast to fixed categories of universalised emotions, the fragmented vignettes allow for a multiplicity of affective states to surface, showcasing how the artist’s body responded to displacement in strange ways long before she could cognitively process these sensations as emotions. Concentrating on the gap between what is rendered technically legible and what is felt but illegible, Mona Hedayati’s essay mobilises Hortense Spillers’ concept of the «flesh.» Spillers discusses the flesh as a construct that is distinct from the socio-cultural constitution of the body, particularly in the juxtaposition of white body against Black flesh subjected to racialised violence, as flesh bears the marks and gives evidence of what it has gone through. Flesh, in this sense, refers to a pre-subjective, pre-coded body that registers the world not through cognition but through sensation. In Mona Hedayati’s textual fragments, flesh operates as a conceptual device that underscores the embodied residue of political and personal histories. As a state prior to a socially and ideologically legible body, flesh resists the reduction into fixed categories and stereotypes. In mobilizing the concept in relation to the main character of the essay, it shifts the protagonist’s pronoun from «she» to «it»—«she» referring to a gendered culturally-stable, politically-positioned subject who is intelligible within social frames; «it» marks a return to the biological sensorium as a reactive system driven by what it has somatically registered, long before those sensations are rendered intelligible or sayable.The fragmentary vignettes are hence rupture points, sites where the flesh interrupts the technical workflow. The flesh does not fit in the logic of computation. It glitches the system to reclaim the right to remain undetectable, a refusal to be parsed emotionally.
