Community Think Tank

THE UNDERGROUND

 

“Individually, we can recycle until we’re green in the face, but until the corporations, the government, and the ruling class get the message, not much is going to change. For all the talk about the healing power of the arts, of feminism, of the nineties- powers I too would love to believe in wholeheartedly- I see no evidence that these crucial changes are imminent. Art can never be more than a Band-Aid or a shot in the arm until it is part of the broader grass-roots movement that goes beyond private responses (individuals account for only about one-third of the world’s pollutants) to fundamental social reconstruction.”[1]

 

Thirty three meters and 180 steps below the ground and one kilometer long, Clapham Tunnels in Clapham, London were opened to public in July 1944. Accommodating up to 8000 people during World War 2, the tunnels were conceived as shelters for German air-raids.

 

Walking around the dark and perplexing tunnels of Clapham, one may also spot a stream of pink light at the end of the seemingly eternal blackness and men dressed in white lab coats walking around. Resembling a scene from a futuristic dystopian movie, taking a look inside the laboratories of Growing Underground both fascinates and daunts one. Growing Underground is an attempt by two entrepreneurs, Steven Dring and Richard Ballard, to turn the forgotten tunnels into an underground urban farm where they grow micro leaves and salad leaves using hydroponics and LED technology.

 

… The level of control they hold over the climate, the light and the overall environment inside is extreme and necessary for producing such sensitive plants. This notion of sustaining perfect control inside the tunnels is fascinating yet equally ironic when considering Growing Underground as trying to operate and survive in a market that is not controllable or predictable at all. The precarity of the market contrasted with the level of control they have in their isolated ‘organism’ culminates in intricate questions around control, contamination, and the fantasy of complete purity.

 

It is truly fascinating how an underground space created as a refuge from the brutal impacts of man-made quarrels changes functionality to be utilised as yet again a refuge from humanity’s impact on the environmental and cultural ecology. The underground, in both moments, presents itself as a space for escaping from the consequences of human action, yet, now exists as an artificial and closed man-made environment operating within the capitalist circuit. Is it even possible, then, to withdraw oneself from this closed circuit?

 

Hidden Spaces:

Lack of space in urban centers leads both individuals and corporations to constantly seek for alternative spaces, methodologies for using the space more effectively and strategies of compactability in order to expand the capabilities and capacity of these urban city centers.

 

A certain new culture and urban mindset that has been adopted with the flow of creatives into urban centers, enables these places to flourish and take on new meanings.

 

Trends around food consumption, ingestion and discourses on the ethics of food are highly influenced by cultural phenomena and social movements… With an emphasis on its origin and aesthetic qualities, food becomes part of one’s projected self-image as well as attesting to his/her position within a certain group. Both affirming the desired self-image and generating bonds with fellow members of the given branded community, food becomes an accessory, a tool, a symbol or a sign for something other than itself.

 

 

Contamination and Purity:

Contaminated land is usually defined as “land that contains substances which, when present in sufficient quantities or concentrations, are likely to cause harm, directly or indirectly, to people, to the environment, or, on occasion, to other targets” and soil contamination is always a risk in urban spaces.[2]

 

… Micro leaves and greens that have been protected from all kinds of unwanted interaction and interference, are contaminated with market values and are far from being detached from the larger organism they operate within. Then, one asks, whether remaining uncontaminated and wholly pure is only a fantasy and an unattainable dream as it is most of the time impossible to withdraw oneself from the entire system.

 

Sustainable Cities?

Even though the reasons and motivations constantly change -from increasing efficiency during war times to contemporary ecological concerns, new cultural trends and collective sensitivities as identity traits and indicators - we are always looking for alternative ways of responding to the impact humans have on food cultures and industries.

 

One of the earliest attempts of increasing sustainable productivity in urban areas through urban farming dates back to 4,000 years ago to the semi-desert towns of Persia. Urban waste was reused and mountain water was transported to feed urban farming.[3] In addition, there is a long history of supplemental food production in urban areas during food shortages and wars for ensuring food independence. Similarly, with the urban transformation models, since cities are struggling to accommodate the demands of their new inhabitants, the possibilities of producing more food using less space through urban agriculture are being thoroughly explored.

 

… “There are three primary environmental benefits from organic urban agriculture – preserving biodiversity, tackling waste and reducing the amount of energy used to produce and distribute food.”[4] Furthermore, urban food growing projects and practices, similar to art practices centered around food and eating, can “act as a focus for the community to come together, generate a sense of ‘can-do’, and also help create a sense of local distinctiveness – a sense that each particular place, however ordinary, is unique and has value.”[5]

 

THE KITCHEN

 

Food and culinary practices have long been explored by artists as an artistic medium or material.

However, practices around food were also explored as a political means of contesting the status quo. Black Cat Café in the urban landscape of Seattle is an example of how alternative models of exchange can “counter, complicate, or parody the dominant market- and profit-based system of exchange.”[6] Black Cat Café was a place where punks would get together, read, eat, drink and smoke. It was a space where food marked an ideological moment and a space where the domination of mainstream discourses of the system was resisted.[7]

 

The collective truly experimented with food and restrained themselves from appealing to conventional tastes, recipes and ideas about cooking and consumption. Hygiene was not a central concern at Black Cat Café as they believed accepting the dominant idea of cleanliness also meant accepting the system’s economic domination of our lives.[8]  Therefore, they chose to cook with rotten, smelly, raw, wasted and aesthetically unpleasant products as a way to challenge mainstream tastes and ideologies of food. They were feverishly against industrialized food because in such food products there was no trace of origin, no sign of the labor processes that produced them which is in fact a precursor for the contemporary fetishization of locally produced organic products.

 

The obsession with purity is also highly predominant in the collective mentality of Black Cat as, by avoiding mainstream cooking and consumption norms, they “declared that their bodies and minds were healthier for it, unpolluted by toxic chemicals and capitalist culture”[9]

In such, creating a physical space to get together and eat, they created a site of critique and resistance that challenged the status quo, the structures of power and the culturally-shaped conventional ideas around food, bodies and consumption.

 

Bonnington Cafe

Bonnington Cafe, located at Vauxhall, London has started in the early 80s as a squat cafe that provided cheap meal for the community. It initially was the squat’s kitchen. It is now a cooperatively run vegan cafe that is maintained by an active collective of member cooks as well as any volunteers who sign up for a waiting list in order to cook at Bonnington.

Their website also reads: “Our commitment is to provide affordable resources for local people while remaining open and welcoming to the London-wide and extended community.”[10] It is rather a struggle for them to maintain a position that carries the welcoming and democratic spirit of the squat Bonington used to be while also turning into an attraction for the young creative urbanites that are constantly seeking alternative gentrified sites that represent a certain identity.

 

However, even though commercial spaces always have a certain tendency to become highly conventional and simply profit-oriented in such ways, expanding art practices to alternative contexts holds crucial importance. Art practices happening outside the art world and its designated male-dominated spaces, challenge “the structures of looking” and make “the limitations of traditional art institutions visible—physically, historically, and conceptually.”[11] Perhaps, forms of art that are both analytical and experiential at the same time, have the capacity to question and eventually change the status quo and the existing set of rules. These practices not only raise questions about conditions of how food is produced and accessed but also by engaging the audience, invite people to experience and observe these conditions on a personal level. Putting emphasis on the experiential aspect of cooking and eating, the entire process becomes integral to the questions arising through the experience. The politicised kitchen, then, becomes a site for knowledge production and political change and resistance rather than a domestic, safe space that is often associated with feminine qualities.

 

Therefore, art through non-art means stretches art’s reach and provides “an essential domain of experimentation and research because art still makes room for unpopular views, freedom of expression and non-instrumental research.”[12] Popularization, though, often signals the beginning of commodification and therefore most of these interventions and gestures only last for a certain period of time before they turn into commodified and hyped experiences.

 

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THE MOUTH

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Company (n.) Latin.

com “with, together” + panis “bread”

 

Sociologist Claude Levi-Strauss has strongly emphasized the significance of food and cooking in the sociological and cultural formation of a society. The cooking of a society, he suggested, “is a language in which it unconsciously translates its structure - or else resigns itself, still unconsciously, to revealing its contradictions.”[13] 

 

Through the act of sharing bread, the group eating together enters an altered social state. The collective experience results in a unique type of bond that depends on many aspects such as the setting and the context, the members and the dynamics within the group. “However simple, however informal or intimate, the act of commensality is transformative of social relations. It is one of the ways that humans make meaningful connections with each other. Just as it conforms to the pattern of a ritual, it is in its own way a sacred act.”[14]

 

Cesar Martinez, in his performance I Eat Then I Exist; I Exist Then I Eat that took place in Barcelona in 2002, served the guests feces-shaped sculptures made with chocolate, marzipan, nougat candy and tequila essence.[15] Looking at how the food is metabolized and at the human feces as the final moment of that process, he commented on our bodily processes and how we think of food. The documented performance shows how without using utensils, people are struggling to eat the sculptures and photos from the performance propose new thoughts and questions around how food is ‘digested’ on a collective level.

 

The performance requires the audience to be present and to participate in order to be realized. For that reason, the work itself “functions as an invitation or a challenge provoking the audience into active participatory roles.”[16] This notion of art as an invitation or action then becomes “a strategic subversion of the commercialization of art and the commodification of the art object.”[17]

 

… Thinking of bodies as sites of knowledge and meaning production, we might realize that bodies come with a lot of potentiality as well. Decisions of what to incorporate inside one’s body or how to connotate bodies are also political and may impact our intellectual and ideological thinking processes.

 

 

THE GUT

 

How did we get from the prokaryote to the eukaryote? In other words, where did the nucleus and the organelles come from? Of several contending answers to this question, I am fondest of one proposed by biologist Lynn Margulis: one bacterium ingested another but for whatever reason was not able to digest it. The ingested bacteria continued to live inside the host and from there performed functions of cycling nutrients, metabolizing sugars, and absorbing and converting waste.[18]

 

“How to be hospitable?” both within the body and within the city? Derrida, refers to the notion of hospitality, when clarifying his idea of ‘eating well’. “The question is not whether one should ingest the other but how this should be done, since all feeding involves humans in economies of hospitality of a sort, of giving to and receiving from the other, of the interiorization of the other as well as a submission to incorporation by the other; that is what “eating well” is.”[19]

 

How, then, can we eat well? And eat well together?

 

The gut is one of the main parts of body that functions as a site of hospitality to everything incorporated. Considered a second brain, human microbiome hosts a unique variety of bacteria in every human body and by doing so creates a hospitable environment these bacteria to live as companions. Similarly, “attuned to the outside world, it is a vital organ in the maintenance of relations to others.”[20]

 

It is important to ponder around the processes that follow food consumption since food studies can be critical in terms of thinking about these entanglements while resisting the clear-cut separations between biological and cultural, individual and collective, and local and global.[21] In the tunnels of our gut and through digestion, we open up and reconsider boundaries between the inside and outside of the body. The gut operates between inside and outside. Therefore, thinking about the gut is challenging in comparison to the isolated structure of the Clapham tunnels. The tunnels, unlike the gut, does not have an exterior. However, both the Clapham tunnels and the human gut are operating on the verge of visible and invisible.

 

 

THE UNDERGROUND

 

“If it had been the purpose of human activity on earth to bring the planet to the edge of ruin, no more efficient mechanism could have been invented than the market economy”

Jeremy Seabrook

 

Like all other kinds of consumption, food brings about a whole other highly problematic issue; its waste. Waste is a major contemporary problem even though, these further cultural food movements (i.e. local production, organic food, veganism) have brought about a certain consciousness around recycling. It is expected to have a 50% recycling rate for Waste from Household by 2020 in the UK.[22] However, though individuals share a rising responsibility and concern around how they handle their and others’ waste; on industrial level, these improvements are much below the desired rates.

 

The notions of constant reuse, taking waste and turning it into something else, decomposing have been widely explored in art practices.

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“In the late sixties, Conceptual artists raised the problem of the surfeit of objects in the world, including “precious” or art objects. Various “dematerialized” forms were developed that aimed to make art part of the solution rather than part of the problem. Because of the overwhelming power of the market-oriented art world, and the failure to create a new context and new audience for a third-stream art, that particular impetus faded; the dematerialization concept was eventually reembodied into commodities.”[23]

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The move towards dematerialization has eventually led to the fetishization of ‘the experience’.

 

In food art practices, using waste food has been a tool to address the aesthetic normativity of food and has been significant in challenging the generic rules of the market economy. In other formerly marginalized spheres, “eating garbage (food deemed rotten) is a forceful condemnation of social injustices.”[24] Yet, now with cultural trends pioneered by the urban creatives, we can observe how these underground/avantgarde approaches and practices are ironically becoming mainstream with various contemporary intentions and concerns.

 

The Post-City?

 

“Picture a specific plant that you know and love, a brilliant red maple tree, a blooming lilac, a row of irises. Did you picture the part that extends below the ground, the rhizosphere where plants and microorganisms communicate and exchange services? Aboveground the plant gets carbon dioxide and sunlight; everything else it needs comes from the soil. All soil is not the same.”[25]

 

 

Martha Rosler addresses how the dominance of the creative class in cities and a “wave of renewed preference for the city” require a new urban theory.[26] “The SoHo urban transformation model” is the transformation of the warehouses and decaying spaces into valuable real estate occupied by artists in New York’s SoHo and East Village in the late 1970s.[27] As the early example of urban gentrification, this movement that has emerged in New York pointed to the rise of lifestyle politics. Post-industrial cities now dominated by the creative class went through rapid phases of transformation and redefinition.

 

Not necessarily staying within the frames of institutionalized spaces, artists and creatives increasingly ignited the transformation of the city through “not only a training in design and branding, and often a knowledge of historical agitprop and street performance, but also the ability to work with technological tools in researching, strategizing, and implementing actions in virtual as well as physical spaces.”[28] Constantly seeking solutions “in new and unexpected ways” and building a “new set of social relations of production”, artists contributed to the transformation of the city into its most efficient version imaginable through strategies of prosthetics.[29] By digging through underground and excavating the underground, and turning and shaping and decorating and appropriating the overground, the creative class built a post-city that has to be thought of in a new set of definitions and social constructions. The lifestyle the creative class is fond of leading required the city to change and adapt itself according to the needs and demands of its new habitants. Struggling to do so, the city became a post-city, something other than itself, a readjusted assemblage, a cyborg. The nostalgic obsession with the natural and with purity might as well be due to this conflict with constant progress and readjustment of bodies and cities in order to maximize efficiency and output.

 

The notion of ‘natural’ has shifted immensely through time. Food has become the interface. Bodies have become uncritical. Cities increasingly resemble public laboratories. The farms are relocated to underground so that we have more free land to build skyscrapers on. There is a constant distortion, appropriation, transformation and refashioning. Refashioning of the city is becoming naturalized as the transformation of bodies is becoming naturalized. The contemporary city that is failing to remain hospitable to its inhabitants, with its constant refashioning, is presented to us as natural. With its underground tunnels decorated with pink neon lights and its hidden cafes with green facades and edgy typography, the city fakes an embrace. Shelter tunnels and squats, formerly invisibles, left-outs, become niche and mainstream. Underground is floating up to the top. Underground is being reappropriated to become a new sort of ground.

 

The city.

The city that is cutting its own limbs to get robot arms. Futuristic looks washed-up with nostalgia.

The human.

 

Not necessarily literal cyborgs but “a historically specific construction called human is giving way to a different construction called the posthuman.”[30]

 

How do we, as the new subjectivities of the post-human, live together in the city- or rather in the post-city? All these entangled processes that seem to continue harmoniously with constant adaptations and alterations in order to meet the newly emerging criteria for efficiency or the novel demands of the inhabitants of the post-city are in fact leading to new conflicts, new problems. New subjectivities emerging. Survival gaining a new meaning. Spaces changing functionality.

 

Seeing beyond what is unfamiliar- this language that is adopted and commercialized or the overall niche and mainstream image of both Bonington and Growing Underground- transforms the obscurity into readable signs of the contemporary moment. Therefore underground is constantly exploited, turned inside out. Its remnants before our eyes. Is there, then one wonders, still an underground? If yes, can one remain underground?

 

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