Food: Emerging communities - A conversation with Orestis Athanasopoulos

Welcome to the Onassis AiR conversations. My name is Myrto Katsimicha. I am a curator and cultural worker based in Athens and your host in this series of recorded encounters with the participants of Onassis AiR. Founded on the principles of learning and doing with others Onassis AiR is an international research residency program in Athens initiated by the Onassis Foundation in 2019. They say that what happens in one place stays in that place. I cannot find a better way to describe all the things that have been happening inside the Onassis AiR house since I first entered as a participant of The Critical Practices Program in fall 2019. The truth is, it is not easy to transmit an open ended process of relationing which is very personal and relevant to a specific place and moment in time. How can I then give you a glimpse into that process? Everything starts with a conversation. Throughout this series, I'll be speaking with the Onassis AiR participants, to shed light on their artistic practices and needs, as well as to reflect on ways of being and working together.

Today, I am very happy to welcome Orestis Athanasopoulos, an artist and filmmaker based in Paris. Orestis works on long-term and participatory projects that look into informal cultural connections and the mechanisms of identity construction, often in relation to food production and consumption. Orestis is a participant of The School of Infinite Rehearsals Movement VII with a collective research focus on the notion of community economies. In this conversation, we take food as a starting point to discuss his filmic practice and research interest into the emergence of communities.

Orestis welcome to Pali-Room!

Hi Myrto. I am really excited to be here today.

Thank you for joining me. It is a great pleasure to be in conversation with you. From the little that I know you, I have noticed how food and cooking is an integral aspect of your everyday life, but also an ongoing thread in your practice, and especially its role in the formation of both individual and collective identities. So I would like to start this conversation by asking you, how did you start engaging with these questions in your practice?

Like you mentioned, it is part of my everyday life. I really like cooking. I have always enjoyed cooking and I have always been interested in exploring the world through taste. Also, on a random side note, one of my favorite activities when I go to some place is to see the way the food system is organized in local supermarkets. So this has always been a sort of personal passion of mine and I also work with films. So preserving and manipulating images is the main component of my practice. I feel that food has a sort of sensorial memory quality for individuals and societies. Everyone has some kind of personal memory of food they were eating while growing up related to family or friends or specific situations. But at the same time, each society has their own special foods for special occasions. It is going to be Easter Sunday next week, and everyone is going to play the red egg game that people do in Greece. That is a collective memory activated through food.

And also, I am fascinated by the stories that come through food. I don't know. I think I mentioned that at some point, this story about the Christmas cakes that my family or families from Asia Minor used to bake called Isli —my family calls them 'kettedes'. You decorate them with a specific kind of tongs —the housewife that used to bake them decorated them with a specific kind of tongs— and the more pinches that were on the cake, the more sorrows the housewife had. So it was a way for her to communicate her sorrows to the husband or the family in a way that she couldn't do otherwise. That's my interpretation, but I think that this speaks loads about gender hierarchies within a society and I feel that food is a very relatable way to approach these things because of our own empirical connection to food. I don't know. Taste feels like a very important way to recall this sort of memories that are very deeply ingrained. But beyond the interest in the social and historical aspects of food, I also see humor as part of my practice and I really enjoy laughing and making people laugh. So at some point after a workshop, Climavore Workshop by Cooking Sessions at Pistoletto Foundation, I accidentally ended up looking at a virus that infects greenhouse tomatoes. So I ended up looking at more of the structural issues of global food production through the form of a cooking tutorial and the figure of the tomato man, a character that kind of represents the savior of infected crops. I don't know. That is how I sort of progressively got involved with food in different ways.

Thank you for sharing this personal memory with your grandma. I think that everyone has this sort of memory in relation to food. And for me, it is quite interesting how one flavor, one taste can solicit memories from the past that are really, really hidden or forgotten of course. I think that no other sense in our body can solicit so many memories and so many feelings. What I find rather interesting is that you take food as a starting point to not only reflect on the ways that it is produced and consumed, but also to trace ways through which we construct relationships. This was quite apparent in your recent film The Itinerary, which premiered recently in the Thessaloniki Documentary Film Festival, that we had the chance to watch together, where you look closely into the formation of an alternative food network and how this relates to questions of belonging, but also into how food becomes the basis for the emergence of an informal community.

Yes, that is true. Perhaps I should say a few words about the film. The film basically follows a bus that delivers parcels to Greek people living abroad all over Europe. So initially I was very much fascinated by this peculiar mode of transportation and the system that the bus had put in place and the sort of haphazard way that it operates in. At the same time, when I started the project, I was asking myself questions about my own position in relation to Greece or Athens, where I had grown up. I was still adapting to a living situation in a country where I didn't speak the language really, but I quickly realized that there was much more under the surface, this sort of informal network and notion of belonging that you speak of. I think that food was the glue that made the recipients parts of different concentric networks, be that family or groups of friends or different countries, and that informed the perceptions of themselves as migrants abroad through their own personal memories and understanding of, let's say, national symbols like the spanakopita. At the same time, both senders and recipients were made part of the bus's network regardless of their own identity and how they related to Greece or abroad. And that helped them create this. The bus's movement helped them create an orbital relationship with this imaginary elsewhere homeland or the respective countries of the recipients for the senders. They kind of existed suspended in between two places.

Where did you first encounter this bus?

The first time was in Paris. It was very random. I was hanging out with a friend one night and she asked for some help because she was waiting for an olive oil delivery. And I said, "okay, fine, yeah, I'll come with you to the post office". So she told me that actually it wasn't the post office and we had to go in the middle of nowhere, at the edge of the city and wait for a bus. So we went there in the middle of the night —I think it was 11 pm—, and there were so many people waiting for stuff. And then the bus stopped on the roundabout in front of a church and started taking out lots of olive oil tins and coolers with feta and frozen meat in them and even like baked goods. He took out drugs (medication). He took out washing machines. And I thought that this was insane initially. It was amazing. On the spot, I asked Yannis, the main person who runs the bus service, to do a film with me, and he agreed. There was no hesitation from his part, and two weeks later I did my first trip.

Where was this trip? Where did you start from and where did you end up going?

I went from Paris to Athens and then I think during that trip I started understanding that it was something else going on because I met people who had been traveling on the bus for —I don't know—, a year or two years. So they had been sort of like regular passengers. I found also very fascinating the fact that we crossed Switzerland, the entire country, while listening to "Psyxedeleia" by Anna Vissi on repeat and just the scenery outside of the bus. The mountains and the lakes and the perfect highways were so out of sync with the music and what was happening inside the bus that I felt like there is a bigger story than just food delivery there.

When we watched the film, it was striking to actually observe this intimacy that the bus drivers were developing, not only with the senders and the recipient, but also with the passengers. I remember this moment in the film when there is a girl who is very late in getting her food parcel. So they have to divert the route and go and find her in another place to give her the parcel that has been sent to her. There is this moment when the drivers are sort of into an argument about this whole thing that they spend hours on the way and they have to divert and go and find her. And then there is this very personal moment when the main driver says, "Yeah, but do you have kids? What am I supposed to do? She is waiting for the parcel." And I think this encapsulates this sort of relationship —invisible perhaps, because they don't know personally the people that send stuff, but this connection that they're trying to make with the things that they are delivering. It was very moving for me.

Thank you.

I would like to move to the next question and from your experience and from your interests in food infrastructures ask you how can food lead the way for a new kind of economy?

Perhaps I should use your example as a starting point because I was interested in the way migrant identities were informed by this back and forth of the bus. But I also quickly realized that the reasons that the people kept sending parcels didn't make any sense financially. So even if people produce their own olive oil, the process of packaging, shipping and the labor behind it, behind sending and receiving the olive oil on the recipient's end made everything way more expensive than a simple trip to the supermarket or to the deli or whatever.

So I think that these affective links that you mentioned, the emotional ties that are also the operational basis for the bus's economy inspired me to think about alternative economic paradigms that could move away or perhaps exist in parallel with the prevalent exchange models. At the same time, I had noticed that there was a lack of free, accessible spaces for the queer community in Paris, where I live and I started to combine these thoughts into this idea about a queer community garden where people who are part of the community could gather to plant flowers and vegetables, watch them grow, and basically just chill there without having to give anything in return. So I started thinking about food as a way to help people think about these different modes of exchange based on different values in a way. I think food in general is very powerful because it is one of people's basic needs. So it is a very powerful tool to address these things not only locally, but also on a wider scale. I mean, for example, Marcela here brought our attention to the MST, the Landless Workers Movement in Brazil, which operates on a country wide scale, if I am not mistaken, and fights for land reforms and sustainable agriculture. So, you know, it works into that way, but on a way bigger scale than just a simple local operation. I think that experiencing this sort of food system outside of monetary exchanges could potentially help shift mentalities towards a more equitable way of relating to others.

According to Gibson and Graham, that actually inspired us for this Movement of The School of Infinite Rehearsals the term 'community' described this never ending process of being together, which is neither static nor fixed. This also somehow describes the way that you, as individuals, were asked to come together and conduct collective research on the topic of community economies, as we just mentioned and I am curious to hear how did this process of exchange and sharing took place during these seven weeks?

We all had very different approaches to community economies, but there were thematic overlaps. So it took some time in the beginning until we could put these ideas together and come up with some sort of common principles about our collective research. I don't know. Scale was mentioned by someone, the negotiation of principles, affective debt. There were lots of things that seemed semi-coherent, but then they ended up coming together when we came up with a structure during our COVID week, when we all got COVID.

So we decided to split our time initially between theoretical and practice sessions, which would mean that on the one hand we would try to explore these concepts that we are interested in theoretically, and then we would try to implement these concepts into some sort of practical way if we could agree on something. For example, we read a text by David Graeber on gift economy, which led to an interesting discussion on how communities are constituted and around what brings people together. I remember there was a very interesting quote in the text about how sharing is one of life's bigger pleasures and also, it was related to food. That somehow really stuck with me. So we had this discussion about pleasure being one of the main principles that constitute a community the way we envision it. This also led us to think about this idea of pleasure activism that was mentioned at some point in our earlier discussions, this concept, which was elaborated by an activist called adrienne maree brown.

The way I understand it is that it basically says that social justice projects should essentially be pleasurable, otherwise they are not sustainable. I think I was trying to find more information about it and I read an interview by her where she mentions that she gives the example of food at parties and how people are more naturally inclined to come back to projects or situations where the food is good and organic and local and what not. So I think it is something that might be important for me to explore further.

What was an anchor point that brought all of your individual interests together? Was there one?

I am not sure if there was only one thing that I could point to and say, this was it. I think there were different overlapping things. I think autonomy and scale were a big part of our discussions, but again not everyone was interested in that. Then affective relationships was also, I think, a common interest for some of the people in the group, again, not everyone was interested in everything. But actually I think it wasn't an anchor point as such, but then we were thinking also that we were as a group part of a community economy ourselves, and we were trying to explore the way our little community economy operated. So what we decided was that we would add a third kind of sessions in which we would share our skills in addition to the theoretical and practical sessions. So each member of the group got to ask the group for help with whatever they needed. I, for example, asked for a brainstorming session about my queer community garden, which I found very valuable in the end.

I am glad that you mentioned the group as being a form of a community economy itself. I was thinking exactly the same because you had certain kind of resources that you had to share. You had to collectively negotiate on the space and time that you spend together. Thank you for also bringing up the notion of pleasure, which I think should be part of any community, and we shouldn't leave it out. Before we close I had one more question in relation to what you mentioned before as this invisible labor that was happening, for example, in the bus situation. I think that this invisible time of labor also brought you together as a group. Could you elaborate on that?

Yeah, I guess we realized that most of us were involved in the art world in one capacity or another. So when we started thinking about how we could apply our theoretical discussions, we kind of naturally —I feel— drifted towards the local art communities. Felipe brought up this idea about the dead time that artists spend on applying to things, which is very much part of the art world economy and how this sort of invisible labor is never remunerated. So we initially had this idea to invite people to bring a rejected application to the closing party for which they would get money in return. But, let's say, time and institutional constraints led us to a sort of pared down version of this artistic gesture in which people got goodies that we had laid out on the table in exchange for a rejected application. We had also discussed ideas about a resource sharing platform between the members of the artistic communities on a local and on a wider scale. We had also thought about creating a different system outside of just an artistic gesture for remunerating this sort of dead application time and I still think that these are valuable ideas, that I would like to explore further. It was just I guess that we didn't have enough time to move forward with that.

Yeah, time is always an issue, but it is interesting to hear from you how you both looked inside the group and outside within the artistic community, of course, inward and outward.

One of the main moments that I remember from our very early discussion —I think it was also part of the Gibson-Graham's notion of community economies— is this idea of concentric circles, that we are all part of different communities that expand outward, in an outward fashion. So I think that, at least for me, that kind of influenced my perception of the reverberations of different groups that we belong to.

And how perhaps they relate, they interrelate. Well, before we close this discussion today, I am curious to know what's next for you. You mentioned the community garden, of course, but I would like to hear now that you're going back to Paris what are you embarking on?

So I will be going back to Paris later today and apart from thecommunity garden, I have been thinking about a film project that I wanted to start for a while. It is also in a community, but a community of cats and the women who feed them at Parc de Belleville, which is really close to where I live. There is something really interesting that I find about reciprocal, interspecies relationships. I read in a book by an author called Vinciane Despret that cats mark their territory in a spatio-temporal way, meaning that they leave an odour that fades over time so other cats can notice when the previous cat was there. I find this way of relating to space and time very cinematic and it had a very strong cinematic potential. So I want to embark on that. And then also next year I will be in Athens again for a project on the history of the Greek pita and the flatbreads in the Eastern Mediterranean in general as a symbol, let's say, of transnational identities.

Orestis thank you so much for being here today. It was a pleasure to talk with you and I wish you all best.

Thank you, Myrto. I really enjoyed it.

Thank you for listening. If you want to listen to more conversations, please subscribe to our channel. You can find more about the Onassis AiR residency program and each participant at www.onassis.org. This series is produced by Onassis AiR. Thanks to Nikos Kollias, the sound designer of this series, and to Nikos Lymperis for providing the original music intro theme.