Earth Tastings - masharu

EARTH TASTINGS

Text by Alain Chaney and Irene Kobalchuk

Installation presented during the Artificial Nature Exhibition at PopinnPark in Amsterdam,
29-06-2017, photo by Jester van Schuylenburch

The EARTH TASTINGS are organized in order to share the practice of geophagy - the act of eating earth and soil-like substances. The earth tastings are rituals based on having an earth snack together and sharing our feedbacks on the symbolism of it, the taste of these soils and all subjects linked to geophagy.

Eating earth as a snack is a quite common practice in some countries like Ghana, Indonesia or Suriname. In these countries, the tradition of cooking earth still exists, earth can be bought on the cultural markets to be eaten as a snack. In the neighbourhood of Château Rouge in Paris, France, one can easily buy a plastic bag of kaolin (white clay). Especially, women from the Western African community buy and eat it on the street or in the public transport like chips – even though their eating action remains quite discreet as it hasn’t the same meaning in France as in their origin country. Therefore, organizing soil tastings with a geophagy non-aware public is a way to facilitate the discovery of an old habit still practiced today, even though it is seen as a mental disease in the Western world.

EARTH TASTINGS have been proposed and discussed in different locations. For example, an installation was recently presented during the Designkwartier Festival Den Haag in The Hague, between the 19/05/2017 and the 21/05/17, at the invitation of the Satellietgroep for their exhibition Tijd Maken - Making Time, in De Tempel. The common topic of the exhibition was the passion of the participants for raw materials, shards, constructions and reconstructions of time and place. Within this exhibition, the installation invited the visitors to discover a fascination for investigating and collecting traces in the landscape and to find out where does this passion come from. The installation was a tasting display constituted of a collection of edible soil samples from various countries, and a selection of edible ceramics. During the three days of the festival, we invited the audience to taste the different soils and collected their feedback.