Friday 28. September

Thursday 27. September

Wednesday 26. September

Tuesday 25. September

Today we defined our leading sentence for the intervention. First we did some brainstorming, than discussed, decided about the topic and split up in two groups. My group will work for this week with the following leading sentence:

«How might we influence the disposal behaviour of consumers through visualization of damage to environment in order to create awareness of impact of food waste.»

Inspired by the today’s lecture of Victor Berglind from Foodlink foundation, we thought about an intervention. He told us, that Hongkongs landfills are quite full yet and so the waste is shipped to Taiwan to be landfilled. This made us think about an intervention, where participants get a piece of food (for example half a tomato, as an example of food from yesterday) and they get two options:

The can eat it or pay 1 HKD and throw it to a person, which is part of the installation, representing Taiwan. We want the participant to take an active decision and think about his doing.

quotes:

«I said no, but I know you do it anyhow.»

«Sandro has pants today.»

Monday 24. September

Morning:

Short introduction in topics like climate change, global warming, food waste, circular food system by Susan

Although there was no really new information for me, it was good to get this short update of this huge topics and see the facts once again clearly in black and white.

Afternoon:

Visiting the Vegetable Marketing Organization

– non-profit organization, wholesale vegetable market

– support of local farmers

– production of hydroponic lettuce

Friday 21. September

Videos

Today was a really tough day. It was up do think about an intervention and carry it out. Coming from the performance of the corn of yesterday I thought about how to show the relation between the energy we use for our daily life and the energy we get through food. I wanted do feel the people participating in my intervention how much energy is stored in food, using the example of corn and how much exercise they can do to spend it. So the intervention I designed is about rope skipping, while you have corn in your mouth which is to spit in a nearby pot. The rope counts the number of jumps. According to this number it is possible to calculate an approximate number of kilo calories needed for each jump. Like this it is possible to tell the people after jumping, how many corns they just used to to so.

I did the following calculation:

780 jumps = 1 corncob (about 400 corn)

2 jumps = 1 corn (approx.)

We installed our interventions at the Baptiste University to do a reality test with the students. It was hard to encourage the students to participate. They pretended not to speak English (or really did’n’t) or they said the had no time. Anyway I found some students to try the installation. It seemed that they had quite a lot of fun, jumping and spitting the corn. They understood quite well what they had to do, but I think they didn’t fully understand the context and the reason why the had to do this. In a future installation about my topic I would try to show the relation between the exercise or movement you do and the consumed energy better and more directly. For example, when you do rope skipping, there would be a screen, where you can see immediately, how much energy you are consuming at the moment, presented in number of maize kernel. And there would be a second installation with a driving simulator, where you can see, how much fuel made out of corn you are consuming. The goal ist to get awareness about using the energy in different ways.

quotes:

«oh, an installation about food – I don’t like food.»

Thursday 20. September

Safety instructions video:

After the safety instructions for using the workshops it got serious and we had to show our solo performance in the group.

I chose the corn as the main character of my performance. I wanted to show the contrast between the slowly growing from the corncob to the high energetically powerful popcorn when grown up and influenced by heat. I liked to experience this contrast in my body and I felt the power. Previously I was quite scared to do this performance as I’m a person who hates to be the central point and having all the eyes looking at you. Retrospectively it wasn’t that bad even though I still can’t enjoy this situations.

The corn has quite a few interesting aspects. One is the even mentioned contrast between the slowness of growing and the fast, nearly explosion of the popcorn. Another aspect is, that the corn somehow changes his interior outside when converting in popcorn and vice versa. A third very interesting aspect is the energy. The corn is a big storage of energy. While in Europe the corn is mainly used as animal feed, in other countries, especially of the third world, it’s a substantial part of the nutrition, beside rice.

«oh no, I thought it was with curry.»

«we went to KFC, we can’t eat Chinese food only.»

«why do they always mix eat and fish?»

Wednesday 19. September

Visiting Wet Market in Kowloon City

It was a nice experience to see where local people buy their food. I was impressed about the colours and amplitude of the sold food and surprised that it didn’t really smell bad in this market although there was a lot of fish and meat. I didn’t always feel very comfortable with seeing all the entrails and body parts hanging, just as hearts and livers. But on the other hand you could see that people here really sell every part of the animal, which is very positive.

The task of finding the ingredients of the recipe was nice to get more into the market stands. It was funny to notice that the local people were amused of us looking for the ingredients. Some of them tried to tell us something, but as they only spoke Cantonese, we couldn’t communicate, which is a pitty.

quotes:

«Catherine (surgeon), you can do surgeries on livers, right? – Yes, but there is nothing to do anymore!»

«Oh my god, it’s still living!»