A New Gourmet, Moving Heaven and Earth

April 11, 15–16:30
Skogen, Göteborg

This event is open to all and free to attend, please reserve your place by via the Skogen website here 

A reading by artist, interdisciplinary designer, and researcher Johnny Chang, presented within the context of the PARSE Practitioners Programme.

 

A New Gourmet, Moving Heaven and Earth is an in-progress lecture performance that traces how everyday foods—fruit, sugarcane, sweet potatoes, wild weeds, sticky rice dumplings, noodles—carry the entangled histories of survival, extraction, and everyday resilience across Taiwan and its diasporas.

 

Dwelling in archival gaps, in fractured languages shaped by shifting state policies and diasporic dislocation, and in the silences that structure intergenerational memory, this work follows ingredients and dishes across overlapping, unresolved colonial and imperial formations. Here, food is not simply cultural heritage, but a material witness to histories and lives shaped through the entanglement of settler colonialism, plantation economies, and their afterlives in displacement and exile.

 

Weaving personal, collective, and speculative fragments, the lecture performance moves through fragmented and reconstituted memory, reflecting on the tensions that haunt the ongoing negotiation of collective belonging, plurality, and solidarities in and beyond Taiwan. In attending to histories of both militant and everyday resistance, this work explores how different forms of struggle and unsettled histories are unevenly remembered and transmitted across generations, and carried through everyday food practices that both sustain and transform them.