Flavour of Compassion
Basic information
Project Title
Full project title
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Project Description
The artistic research Flavour of Compassion explores compassion through the medium of food. We transform public spaces into sensory playgrounds and literally use food as an icebreaker in order to reconnect citizens to curiosity - both their own and others. Exploring food as a universal language reactivates stories of culture & heritage. We invite you to eat your words and build an archive of acts of compassion with us, where mindful actions are the base of socially sustainable communities.
Project Region
EU Programme or fund
Description of the project
Summary
The Flavour of Compassion
is an interdisciplinary artistic research project that explores the prosocial concept of compassion through the medium of food. The last year has shown us how important social cohesion is, therefore the vision of the artist duo connects to research that places compassion as fundamental value for a sustainable society. Food as a basic human need is used as a tool of communication that connects to our senses, identity, traditions and culture.
The Ice Cream Affect
One of the signature interventions adopts the notion of compassion as something warm, while we express the lack of compassion through coldness. A provided ice cream popsicle serves as a symbol for social distance that we offer you to interact with and melt with tools and heat. Sensory exercises, and mindful guidance, allows the participant to explore this intervention through a personal experience - a process that concludes in a multisensory storytelling. Hosted in a group setting allows playful exchange and the strengthening of a sense of community and making space and time for others, while at the same time reclaiming physical public space.
Why Compassion & Food
When adopting food as a medium we can approach the complex, difficult, and somewhat frightening prosocial concept of compassion from perspectives that are pleasant and safe. Playful multisensory workshops with food encourage individuals to experience and understand compassion on other sensual levels of perception. They connect culturally and creatively and recognize the importance of compassion on both a personal and social level. The project offers designs for food modeling, moderation of creative workshops, introduction of mindful guidance and observation, education of participants on the topic of compassion, creation and expansion of the field of research and qualitative recording of results. Project participants are simultaneously exploring as well as cultivating a compassionate society.
Key objectives for sustainability
Creating Structures of Behaviour
Dieter Rams postulated that he sees the concept of design increasingly as an obligation to create structures of behaviour, rather than material objects “because we have enough things”. Our project follows this principle and focuses on social sustainability as a process for creating successful spaces that promote wellbeing, by understanding what people need from the sensory and emotional surroundings they live and work in. Thereby creating opportunities of sustainability through:
- designing experiences
- opportunities for interaction,
- (virtual) modes of interaction,
- practices suitable for implementation in any environment (school, home, job) and with limited resources that can be found in any household.
Future of food
The connection of food and climate change is evident by now. But often it moves to the forefront as a popular scapegoat when individuals are approached with the responsibility that it is mostly “in our hands how we consume” and that our “wrong” ways are the cause of wasteful food production as it is. We offer hands-on exercises and room for discourse on the future of food.
Ice Cream Affect
Our artistic approach uses the medium of food as a literal “ice breaker”: The concept of “social coldness” (expressed in the use of ice cream) and the offer to manipulate it with social warmth and therefore “melt” (counterintuitively connected to global warming) a lack of compassion. This creative approach to climate change, with it’s evident twist, engaged our participants in sensory exploration and opened a space for critical yet playful discussion. This artistic intervention called “the ice cream affect” allowed for creative meaning-making and identification (i.e. what do people sense, feel and think, without being hesitant to be asked for a “political standpoint” for example). The positive feedback and level of engagement of all participants involved was overwhelming.
Key objectives for aesthetics and quality
Our aim for an aesthetical investigation was to rediscover and explore how society perceives routines and rituals that dictate our daily behaviour. With that in mind we offer various ways of interaction and sensory exploration. It is about creating new rituals that socially serve as a means of creating space and time for cultivating compassionate experiences and communities.
The Aesthetics of Compassion
The project explores the different aesthetic possibilities of experiencing and fostering compassion: From exploring tactility, kinetics, form, taste, smell, touch and other modalities that would encourage, stimulate and further engage the individual in experiencing, questioning and understanding compassion of self and others.
Our aesthetic considerations therefore included following elements:
- designing flavour, aroma & smell of food items;
- designing the texture, form and shape of food items;
- finding relationship between functionality & sensorial experience that could support and stimulate the engagement with compassion as both concept, process and skill.
Radical Multisensory Play
Radical multi-sensory play and exploration are at the core of our experience and participatory design. Since our aim lies in supporting and engaging our participants as best possible, we are able to break down established routines & habits in our approaches. This opens up space for new rituals that cultivate compassionate interactions - with yourself and others.
Experience Design
Our main objective for our artistic research and design is to support the experience of compassion for the participant. We tackled this issue from different perspectives and disciplines and concluded in a symbiosis of mixed media involving food:
- designing objects of consumption while focusing on exploring food as such;
- designing moulds for the performance and method “ice cream affect”;
- set and interaction design of the “tablecloth”;
- static visuals (
Key objectives for inclusion
Inspired by artists like Joseph Beuys we connect to his conception of social sculpture as a total work of art, in which he calls for creative participation in society and politics. Our methodical development therefore focuses on social design and mixed media art, in which our communication and audience concept is vital to enable optimal inclusion of citizens in all stages of our art work.
Eat Your Words
Our language guides how we express ourselves and hear others. As we think of idioms on food, we wonder: Can language reflect our perceiving, feeling and wanting to be more compassionate? Connecting to the realm of language we reach out to each individual in a very personal way, by actively questioning how their (native) language dictates their connection to such daily themes of food and compassion, and thereby to themselves and others. Within this focus we managed to collect data from participants in 16 different native languages.
Culture, Identity & Rituals
We targeted groups of all ages and walks of life. Next to making space for diverging cultures through connecting to their languages, every participant is invited to conclude the artistic intervention with their personal experiences. These stories of identity, rituals and culture represent a perspective of food as cultural heritage and offer an intriguing collection of data inspired by their relevance to the prosocial concept of compassion.
Reclaiming Public Spaces
Our event reclaims public space for creative social interaction. Building safe spaces out in the open, repossessing a sidewalk and setting up a playground for edible interventions, as if it was atop of a picnic blanket. The beauty and excitement of creating community spaces through a sense of sharing and common humanity at our events, rather than through solid build structures, speak for themselves.
Results in relation to category
We were humbled to witness the transformational power of exploring the concept of compassion through the medium of food. As if things were falling into place suddenly, our participants were able to question this seeming counterintuitive coupling and arrive at their individual lives, reflecting mindfully on their own routines and habits.
High Engagement Throughout All Diverse Groups
They shared their stories, opinions, and aha-moments with joy, often while bonding with strangers to continue their exploration together. What would start as a discussion of two seemingly evident concepts, merely combined in an unexpected way, our project consistently offered turning points and insights into common humanity.
Compassion As Core Value To Sustainability
Our project enabled a personal, sensory and playful connection with our participants and their very personal experiences of compassion (or lack thereof). Creating a new knowledge pool and enabling knowledge transfer.
Storytelling & Social Inclusion
Admittedly, we are surprised ourselves sometimes, how consistent the positive acceptance and engagement of our sensory storytelling approach offers a safe playground for sharing experiences of vulnerability. The contentment with their own engagement grew in a fleeting moment and inspired strangers to bond over experiences of food and compassion in a manner filled with excitement and curiosity.
Transforming and Reclaiming Public Spaces
By literally reclaiming a sidewalk on an open street a shared sense of ownership of the space was achieved. As if offering a safe bubble people would share the space, eat ice cream together and exchange about their sensory explorations.
How Citizens benefit
Overcoming the gap between the artist (artistic or design practice) and civil society (participants). Our belief is that everybody can be creative, imaginative, explorative and has the potential to create new meaningful compassionate experiences. Following aspects therefore underline the “total” effect of our efforts.
Take Away Food (Design)
“I’ve never paid attention to the sound of an apple”; “Look at this beautiful pattern in the carrot”; “The melting ice is now like a sea of compassion, calm and beautiful”, are just a few of our participants' reports. A core strength of the cultivation of compassionate interactions through the medium of food is the active invitation and possibility to continue the exploration in your daily life. Take home the lessons learned, observations and exercises from this project. As we encounter food as a mundane ingredient at our meals each day, we open up a playground for inspiration, and without noticing the seed of doing it in a compassionate way is already planted.
Mindfulness
We encourage the participants to choose their own natural path to investigation which fluidly brings them to a non-formal way of practicing mindfulness. Without the attempt to strive for a particular goal, they are invited to a safe space to pay attention to the process of molding a food object, either with just their presence, being in the moment, or deciding to intervene. Openness to the process brings them to question and investigate their habits, routines and making space to create new experiences and rituals. Mindfully engaging in the activity is directed to wholesome experiences and lead to a harmonization of psychological & physical characteristics of individuals. During this playful interaction they are practicing key mindful components and novel pathways of understanding, such as awareness, attention, kindness, non-judgment, curiosity, compassion.
Innovative character
Our strength is the interdisciplinary research approach on the complex prosocial concept of compassion through the medium of food.
Teaching Compassion In A New Way - Through The Medium Of Food
Approaching a complex prosocial concept such as compassion from a playful and engaging angle stems from their personal passions and occupation. As a mindfulness lecturer Urska Golob adds her years of work in this field to design contemplative practices. Food is the medium of choice for Fransisca Tan, she is a Food Experience Designer and Cognitive Scientist with a focus on community arts and social impact. Together they share this exciting journey of finding novel ways of teaching compassion in a new way - namely through the medium of food as a gateway to your senses, identity and culture.
Education & Knowledge Transfer
Our methodology and tools create new knowledge pools, through:
- Radical sense of sensory play and experimentation: enables a creative, playful, tangible, approachable way of engagement, while providing merely a limited structure to allow for optimal experimentation.
- Creating safe and creative settings: to share personal experiences of vulnerability. Sharing stories of identity and culture is a sensitive topic that we successfully embedded in a protected setting through sensory exploration with food. It comes in a way that is interesting, non-afraid and stimulates curiosity.
- Mindfulness: Practicing awareness, attention, kindness, non-judgment, curiosity, compassion. Being present in the moment, with an activity, process, themselves or others.
- Creating pathways to new understanding: Our practices develop processual, instead of goal orientated mindsets and carve new paths for rituals and routines towards compassionate actions. As people are mindful of their experience, they connect to others and themselves, enforcing their creativity and opening space and time for critical discourse.
