Chimera Gastronomy: Malleable flesh, amalgamated bodies, and plastic kinship

Chimera Gastronomy Malleable flesh, amalgamated bodies, and plastic kinship

With the support of the Institute of Queer Ecology Developed by Noam Youngrak Son

© 2021 Noam Youngrak Son

Chimera Gastronomy: Malleable flesh, amalgamated bodies, and plastic kinship With the support of the Institute of Queer Ecology, developed by Noam Youngrak Son.

This workshop is a platform for speculative co-creation, in which a group works individually and collectively on a large malleable body consisting of dough.

During the kneading, identities, gender, and notions surrounding race are discussed and reflected. The co-created edible sculpture is thus a translation of our collective and personal struggles, interspecies discoveries, and political feelings around bodies in this society.

After the first edition of the workshop, its outcome was added as a sculptural form to the RE_MEMBER exhibition in the Willem Twee. According to Son, this result will be a so-called Chimera: a living being that arises from cell mixing.

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The workshop is derived from the project ‘Yummy Body Truck’, a fictional food truck that sells ‘edible human body parts’.

The stall collects samples of organisms found nearby, grinds their flesh into a moldable paste, and reshapes it into forms of human bodies. Different types of flesh can be characterized by factors such as pigmentation, endocrinological condition, and toxin accumulation. As the paste is shaped into body parts, those aspects gain more political significance: The pigmentation of brown meat turns into ‘race’, and estrogen residue determines ‘gender’. The truck serves the body parts in a lunchbox, and an instruction video guides visitors on how to see, smell and taste them. The flavors of pigments, hormones, and toxins make them more aware of the nuances of the bodies that they eat.

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Design Academy Eindhoven, BA Communication 2021, Cum laude You can watch an introduction video by scanning the QR code.

The project is about the concept of sculpting the ‘chimera dough’ into ‘edible human body parts’, however, this workshop will push the potential of this material to the furthest extent by challenging the imagination of the group. At the end of the workshop, there will be an organism consisting of various types of speculative organs and tissues created by all of you.

The workshop will roughly consist of three phases: Research, Dough-making, Dough-connecting.

In the research chapter, you will find a specific ecological agent that you want to represent during this workshop, and learn more about them by yourself. In the doughmaking phase, you will materially construct the flesh of the agent that you chose using edible ingredients. Finally, in the dough-connecting phase, we will shape speculative organs using the doughs created in the previous stage and eventually connect those into a chimera.

Research: 6Dough-making: 12Dough-connecting: 16-

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Research

The first step is to choose an ecological agent that you want to represent. This can be a certain substance, organism, species, system that plays a role in the ecosphere: a certain species of plant, animal, fungus, bacteria, archaea, algae, single-celled eukaryotes, and also inanimate agents such as carbon dioxide, microplastics, groundwater. It can be anything as long as you resonate with it, but please keep in mind that you have to be able to imagine its ‘flesh’ later.

It is crucial to learn about the others in order to represent them appropriately. After choosing your agent, study comprehensively about them for 30 mins. You can use various methods, but using the internet is highly recommended for the sake of efficiency. Look for diverse inputs, not only scientific articles but also audiovisuals, recipes, mythologies, pornographies, etc. Discover their physiological, ecological, cultural, political significance.

Example:

I want to represent a freshwater eel throughout the workshop.

An eel is an elongated fish traveling back and forth between the ocean and freshwater. I chose this fish since my lifelong process of queering as a transgender immigrant has also been a process of gaining resemblance with the lifecycle of an eel.

Born in the Sargasso Sea, the heart of the Atlantic, eels migrate to Europe and the Americas and travel back to where they were born to procreate and die. Their travels change their perspectives. As they travel deeper into the sea, the eels’ eyes get enlarged to receive more light and the color that their monochrome vision is most sensitive to shifts from green to blue. Eels undergo several steps of metamorphosis throughout their life. Young eels have transparent bodies, and as they mature, they turn darker. The human-made social construct of race, oftentimes arbitrarily assigned based on pigment concentration, can not function as a rigid category for eels considering they are born “white” and die “black.”

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It is common for eels to have undifferentiated or intersex gonads. Eels’ genitals become apparent only at the very last stage of life for one-time use. Humans’ obsession with identifying every creature’s genitals into the binary frame had been unsuccessful for a long time in the case of eels.

Aristotle concluded that eels lack sex, and they emerged from earthworms. Freud dissected more than 400 eels to find their genitals. It’s quite a recent discovery that their sexual maturation can be artificially induced. The first artificial maturation of a male eel was by an injection of urine extract from pregnant women. It was discovered later that what induced the maturation was the same hormone that a pregnancy test strip detects from urine.

Also, eels have sex in such an obscure way that no human has ever witnessed their spawning behaviors in nature.

It is theorized that eels from all over Europe gather in the Sargasso Sea to have sex as a massive group.

Monogamous norms do not restrict their sexual intercourse, nor are they dependent on physical contact as they use the open water as a medium for spreading gametes. Even though there’s no phallus involved in the sexual intercourse of eels, humans associate their elongated shape with phallus. Eels are perceived as an aphrodisiac in east Asia. In some films and porns, eels are treated as extra-large-sized, animate dildos.

There was a drastic decline of the eel population in the late 80s due to a reason that is still unknown but very likely to be created by humans. Young eels swimming upstream were perceived as an abundant food ingredient in Basque, but after the crisis, their price increased tremendously. As an alternative, a company named Angulas Aguinaga invented imitated eels in 1991. The imitated eels, looking almost identical to the glass eels, are made of various cheaper species of fish ground into a moldable paste. And it is now consumed nationwide. Like humans reacting to the crisis of eels, eels might feel the catastrophes of humans too. Their range of sonic and electromagnetic sensitivity coincides with the signals of human disasters. Eels can hear infrasound, typically emitted from sources with enormous energy, such as sonic booms, nuclear and chemical explosions. Likewise, eels can perceive the electromagnetic frequency of military submarine communication and emergency radio.

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Your research doesn’t have to be as thorough as this example. You can also choose a specific aspect and focus on it. After 30mins, there will be a round of presentations in the group about everyone’s findings.

Write down what you found here:

Write down the finding of the group that you find interesting:

Dough-making The next step is to materialize what you learned about your agent into palpable flesh using the edible ingredients.

The process is almost like making play-dough. Most of the ingredients required for this stage can be found at the regular grocery store: flour, salt, vegetable oil, various sauces, various fruits and vegetables crushed or blended, dried mushrooms, various grains and nuts, dried mealworms, and any other edible forms of organisms you can find. In addition to these, you can find a few extra ingredients that are a bit more difficult to find, it will make your speculative construction much more enjoyable: cream of tartar, glycerine, food colorings.

The basic formula is to put 2 cups of flour, 2 tablespoons of vegetable oil, 1/2 cup of salt, 2 tablespoons of cream of tartar, a few drops of glycerine into a mixing bowl and add 1 to 1.5 cups of boiling water, stirring until every ingredient dissolves. After this process, you’ll get a light beige dough that is just malleable enough to be sculpted into any shape.

However, what we’re looking for in this workshop transcends its whiteness and plain flavor. Add various colors, smells, flavors to represent the flesh by using the ingredients available. This is hands-on world-building. There’s no right or wrong here, and it can be very personal too. Your role as a storyteller matters the most here.

Example:

An eel travels between freshwater and saltwater. So I’m going to make the dough unevenly salted. So I’ll use thick grains of salt so that it doesn’t get entirely dissolved into the dough.

Eels are culturally perceived as an aphrodisiac. So I’ll add various aphrodisiacs, such as oysters, pomegranates, and chocolate powder.

I’m from the background where they eat eels with sweet soy sauce and ginger. So I would add those already to the dough.

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Everything’s possible in this process if it tells stories. Please don’t be confined by the ingredients that you can access.

Example:

Eels are predators and they have a high accumulation of environmental toxins. But I don’t want to poison anyone by adding toxins to my dough, so I’ll just say that this green food dye is toxic and make my dough green.

You can add any ingredient that you can’t use in real life in speculative ways. Use your imagination and add whatever you envisage, and fake it till you make it.

Please don’t limit your creativity in any way, but considering the goal of this workshop, it’s more desirable if the dough can be sculpted easily: malleable enough to be shaped, solid enough to stay in shape. Please reference the basic recipe that I provided to find the sweet spot of plasticity.

You can also intentionally control the texture of the dough by the following tricks to represent your ecological agent better.

More water (More wet ingredient): softer Less water (More dry ingredient): firmer More oil: stickier Less oil: sticking everywhere More salt: easier to sculpt Less salt: more appropriate to be eaten

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You have 30mins to make your dough. Please document your recipe with words and images here so that it can be shared with the rest of the group.

When you’re done, put your flesh on the table with a tag indicating what it is. Once everyone’s ready, we’ll have another round of presentations.

Doughconnecting

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Once every dough is on the table, it becomes the shared resource. Nobody owns flesh yet only can temporarily claim it. We’re going to turn it into a chimera as the final part of the workshop. We will individually start by making an organ, then merge those into an organism.

An organ consists of tissues and forms an organ system, eventually an organism with other organs. It can have a certain function or more than one function, or sometimes doesn’t have to serve an apparent function as long as it communicates a meaningful narrative. Evolution is not linear, and far from the modern notion of progress, far from utilitarian outcomes. Human tailbone implies where we originated from, and stag horns tell how irrational our bodies sometimes are.

Please use your findings in the research phase as a source of inspiration for the chimera organ that you’ll create.

The organs that you’ll land on should be identified through the process of your research. Use more than one kind of flesh from different sources with different properties to sculpt an organ.

You can take a free-hand approach when you sculpt, but also feel free to use the 3D printed molds of various body parts. Please don’t use the casted shape as it is, but chop it into the most specific fragment that you can think of.

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Use this space to sketch the organ that you’re going to make.

As the final ritual of the workshop, we’ll have a round of presentations, explaining what the organ is, and what it consists of. After your talk, please attach your organ to the organ of the person who presented right before you. At the end of this process, there’s going to be our final chimera.

Once we have the organism that we created, it opens up the possibility of speculation about its ecology.

What does this creature eat?

Where does it live? Does it migrate?

How does this mate? How’s their gender system?

Does it live in a group?

How long does it live?

What kind of ecosystem and landscape does it form?

How can we coexist with this creature?

(It doesn’t have to be a utopian scenario) After this conversation, I will 3D scan the chimera, so that I can digitally animate it. The outcome will be shared with everyone registered on the contact list.

Please help each other cleaning up the mess that we created during the workshop like we must be responsible for our ecological footprints. This can be an opportunity to share feedback.

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Document the collective chimera here:

Publication created by Noam Youngrak Son Produced by Cathair press Find more information at www.d-act.org IG: @noam_yr

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