Start Date
26-5-2026 3:00 PM
End Date
26-5-2026 3:15 PM
Description
GospodinA is an artistic research project exploring the domestic politics of food, care, and survival during the last decade of socialist Romania. Between 1980 and 1989, a period marked by chronic shortages and state-controlled food policies, daily cooking became an act of crisis management. The project investigates how gestures of cooking, queuing, preserving, and urban foraging constituted both invisible labour and quiet resistance within a system that sought to regulate bodies and appetites. Drawing on archival materials (state food propaganda, cookbooks, magazines) and oral histories collected from those who lived through this period, GospodinA re-enacts incomplete or improvised meals—“meals that never fully happened”—as performative reconstructions. By working with food as a collaborator rather than a prop, the performances re-activate the sensorial memory of constraint and inventiveness: peeling, reusing, and fermenting become forms of embodied knowledge. Urban foraging—collecting berries, nettles, or wild greens in city peripheries—appears as both a survival gesture and an ecological practice before its time. The paper situates GospodinA within artistic research that treats crisis not as catastrophe but as a method of thinking and making. By reconstructing socialist food gestures, sometimes understood as "gestures" in a wider sense, through live performance and shared meals, it asks how embodied gestures can turn scarcity into solidarity, and crosstemporal solidarity, and how the repetitive acts of the food universe might can offer kowledge in the new overlapping social and ecological crises.
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Included in
GospodinA: Performing State Motherhood and Alimentary Survival Gestures of the 1980s Socialist Romania
GospodinA is an artistic research project exploring the domestic politics of food, care, and survival during the last decade of socialist Romania. Between 1980 and 1989, a period marked by chronic shortages and state-controlled food policies, daily cooking became an act of crisis management. The project investigates how gestures of cooking, queuing, preserving, and urban foraging constituted both invisible labour and quiet resistance within a system that sought to regulate bodies and appetites. Drawing on archival materials (state food propaganda, cookbooks, magazines) and oral histories collected from those who lived through this period, GospodinA re-enacts incomplete or improvised meals—“meals that never fully happened”—as performative reconstructions. By working with food as a collaborator rather than a prop, the performances re-activate the sensorial memory of constraint and inventiveness: peeling, reusing, and fermenting become forms of embodied knowledge. Urban foraging—collecting berries, nettles, or wild greens in city peripheries—appears as both a survival gesture and an ecological practice before its time. The paper situates GospodinA within artistic research that treats crisis not as catastrophe but as a method of thinking and making. By reconstructing socialist food gestures, sometimes understood as "gestures" in a wider sense, through live performance and shared meals, it asks how embodied gestures can turn scarcity into solidarity, and crosstemporal solidarity, and how the repetitive acts of the food universe might can offer kowledge in the new overlapping social and ecological crises.