In my master's thesis Grandma’s feast (mechanisms of care, or how NOT to become a machine), I explore the intersection of relational aesthetics, feminist artistic practice, and cultural heritage through the lens of personal history and food as a medium.
The starting point of my research is the personal experience of losing my grandmother and memories of our shared meals, from which I developed a project that uses food as a tool to build community, encourage active participation of visitors, and create spaces of non-commercialized human closeness.
In the theoretical framework, I draw on Bourriaud’s relational aesthetics, Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of devenir-machine (becoming-machine), and Debord’s critique of the society of the spectacle. Through this, I emphasize the potential of art to transcend standardized social patterns and to resist the capitalist instrumentalization of relationships.
In the project Grandma’s feast, I transformed the gallery space into a communal dinner where visitors were invited to co-create and exchange, thereby blurring the boundaries between artist, artwork, and audience. In the thesis, I analyse the meaning of food as an affective and culturally marked medium that connects my personal memory with the social space, situating it within the broader context of contemporary political art and care-based practices grounded in solidarity and interpersonal connections.
An important guiding principle of my project is care — understood as something born from everyday actions, from attention to others, and from a willingness to share space and time. I understand care as a way of building relationships, nurturing vulnerability, and creating community.
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