Chimera Gastronomy
Malleable flesh, amalgamated bodies, and plastic kinship
With the support of the Institute of Queer Ecology , Noam Youngrak Son has developed the workshop ‘Chimera Gastronomy: Malleable flesh, amalgamated bodies, and plastic kinship’. In the workshop, a group works individually and collectively on a malleable body consisting of dough, starting with tissues and combining them into organs, and eventually forming an organism. This result is a so-called Chimera: a living being that arises from cell mixing.
For example, during the first edition workshop hosted as part of the program for RE_NATURE festival, the participants hybridized eel, dodo, octopus, lichen, whale, nekton, cat into a chimera. The flesh, materialized using edible ingredients, comprehensively represented the following political-cultural-ecological discussions: endocrinological condition shaped by migration, extinction caused by colonialism, fluctuating chromatophores blurring the notion of race, symbiotic cohabitation, the polarization of scales. By using this variety of flesh, we speculatively constructed organs that tell stories: An anus not for defecation but for olfactory communication, a selfish heart that only pumps blood for itself, non-binary genitals, an ear that hears sufferings, an organ that consumes pain and excretes joy. Eventually, the body parts are combined into a fictional creature, later 3D scanned and digitally animated.
Through multiple iterations, the workshop has been developed into a hybrid format that involves cooking and publishing. It doesn't only result in a hybrid organism but also moves into a collective storytelling and publishing activity starting from the concept of dough as a malleable container. The former hosts of the workshop include the following organizations: RE_NATURE festival, Subbacultcha Amsterdam, Antwerp Queer Art Festival, Extra City, Post Festival, De Koer, Wagningen University.
Check out the article published by Post Festival about the edition of the workshop took place in Podium, Oslo.
Portfolio - Noam Youngrak Son
For a more visual overview, check my Instagram.
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Noam Youngrak Son is a communication designer, design theorist, and cultural worker. Their design work encompasses small-scale publishing projects, speculative worldbuilding, workshops, lectures, writing, net art, and occasional performative interventions. As a cultural worker, they have co-organized the Ghent-based queer publishing collective Bebe Books since 2021. Son has expanded their focus from design to theory in order to critically engage with the ontology of the design industry, media, and broader material culture. This turn is informed by their observations of cultural assemblages that echo the extractive operations of capitalism on racialized and more-than-human populations. They are particularly attentive to the interconnected notions of speculation—both as an open artistic approach and as a process of value increase in capitalism. They research the tendency of the former in design to be subjugated by the latter and explore alternative methods for speculative design practices to realize their transindividual potential through collective organization and workshop facilitation. In this process, Son utilizes queer publishing as a technology for mobilizing attention beyond the financialized “scarce resource” of the attention economy. In this context, publishing extends beyond mere printed matter to encompass the maintenance of communities and the cultivation of interspecies relationships. The term "queer" here is not used as a statement of identity but as a process—small yet collective strategies of publishing that challenge the modern myth of the heroic designer.
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