About the Visualizing Foodways Field School

The Visualizing Foodways Field School (VFFS), curated and directed by Zoë Heyn-Jones and presented by Hemispheric Encounters, gathered a group of 40 artists, activists, researchers, students, farmers, and cooks in Mexico City from February 17 to 22, 2023 to engage in embodied experiences and conversations at the nexus of food and art in Mesoamerica and across the hemisphere to mobilize meaningful collaborations around sustainable food systems.

One of the central goals of Hemispheric Encounters is to train graduate students and emerging researchers in practice-based, transborder methods for political engagement. In this training—taking place in research clusters, public gatherings, and field schools co-organized in diverse hemispheric contexts—we transfer, and test the site-specific applicability of, research-creation approaches through innovative performance pedagogy. Our goal is to provide students from across the Americas with high-quality learning experiences and professional skills development germane to future work in academic and non-academic sectors and to help establish transnational and cross-sector networks.

During the VFFS in Mexico City we shared in embodied learning activities in key zones of the city that have unique and significant agricultural and culinary traditions including Milpa Alta, Xochimilco, and the historic Centre. We engaged in site visits, meals, lectures, performances, artist talks, transformative workshops and presentations by local artivists on Indigenous agricultural practices, feminist food sovereignty, and bread and revolution (among other exciting events).

Throughout our time together, we invited participants to reflect on sensory approaches to documenting the experience. For many, the field school took place in an unfamiliar land, and with smartphones and other recording devices at hand, we wanted to approach documentation intentionally, critically, and creatively. We introduced a methodology of noticing—an invitation to be curious about what we perceive and how we record it. We asked: How do you record what you notice? Through photos, sketches, scribbles, gestures, voice notes, text messages, songs, ephemeral sculptures, or other forms? This question was especially relevant as we engaged with food, taste, memory, community, and seeds as living archives. We also framed archiving as a collective activity, inviting participants to share their recordings throughout the program (and afterwards) via shared digital repositories. Each day we asked a few willing participants to pay special attention and respond to their experiences through a documentation style of their choice.

This website is a creative distillation of the VFFS archive. HEN’s Knowledge Mobilization team—some of whom attended the field school and some who didn’t—engaged in our own noticing of the noticings to build this publication, which we now offer for your own noticing.

We have gathered and rearranged our records into different thematic clusters we’ve called Seeds. Each of these seeds is an invitation to shelter, to be curious, and to spend time with them, retracing and reimagining the experience of the field school in your own way. Just as a seed contains a blueprint of what is to come, this collection of noticings holds the potential to germinate other ways of seeing and hearing our records, other stories, and other communities. Fire, Quelites, Dough, Vessels, Webs, Milpa, Water/Waterways, Tables, Hands, and Ferments are the seeds we offer to you, knowing they will make their way into your memory, imaginings, and stories.

For further reflection on the purpose of the VFFS, see the Curator’s Statement, Desgranar juntxs by Zoë Heyn-Jones.

We thank our supporting partners, Food Art Research Network, Centre for Sustainable Curating at University of Western Ontario, and Creative Food Research Collaboratory.