Exploring the significance of art in our current social situation and its nutritional value – including all of the connotations of this phrase – broached a number of topics dealing mostly with the economic status of art as it relates to its other statuses (personal, social, ideological) or its possible status-less-ness or beyond-status-ness. In a time when the production of food (seeds) is becoming an increasingly privatized business, potentially jeopardizing the food self-sufficiency of individuals and societies, and in a time when art is dismissed by some as a useless appendix to be thrown overboard in a crisis, a group of artists decided to try and find the intersections of the ideas underpinning the two phenomena. In our research certain artistic approaches evolved, based in our specific socio-economic situation in which a twofold undernourishment has surfaced– physical and spiritual (intellectual). Reflection on certain topics (the life of a garden vs. the life of art; a garden as a (lost) paradise; a garden – work or (p)lei(a)sure) eventually led to a public presentation that transferred a garden, i.e. cultivated nature, into a museum, thus naturalizing art, as it were.

 

Eat-art Collective is presenting its action Welcome to Paradise: garden, documentation, dinner at the U3 exhibition. The garden is in front of the +MSUM building. The documentation comprises the documentary footage of the final presentation of the research project in November 2012 at the +MSUM. This based its performative form in the Renaissance anatomy theater. The dinner is the performative part of the action, scheduled for 29 September at 8 p.m. in the museum square in front of the +MSUM.

Eat-art Collective formed during the research carried out by Bara Kolenc, Teja Reba, Loup Abramovici and Rado Jaušovec between May and November 2012; the physical platform of the research was a garden located on the Poljanski nasip embankment in Ljubljana.