What art can teach us about what we eat

It smells like bread in the Bóvedas Room at the Centro Condeduque in Madrid. The table is set for 17 Spanish diners, young people and artistswilling to develop a menu that reflects on food from a multidisciplinary perspective.

An initiation into sustainability and gender reflection with a main course in the impact of diet on our health and our bodiestempered with the manipulation of advertising images in the consumption of ultra-processed foods.

Many open melons to talk about a polyhedral issue, also political. Eating encompasses everything.

Art becomes the perfect device to approach the complex and almost endless connections between food and culture.

Only in the 20th century do we find important examples: of the restaurant-performance food that Gordon Matta-Clark set up in 1970s New York, Judy Chicago's feminist banquet, Sam Taylor-Wood's decaying food videos or chef Ferran Adrià's participation in Documenta 12.

The expressive and relational capacity of the food ritual becomes the guiding thread of Bread and Circusinaugurated in the Amós Salvador de Logroño room and which is now the responsibility of Condeduque in an example of institutional co-production.

The exhibition brings together an excellent selection of pieces curated by Alice Ventura next to the artist Rosalia Banetthat brings together scientific advice, in a project that is the result of a year and a half of work.

It brought together pieces from loans and private collections, with the exception of Correspondence in Marta Fernández Calvo. The Riojan artist was invited to carry out a specific work related to wine, which generated correspondence with her father and the walks he takes daily through the vineyards that surround his house, responding to the flowers and natural elements of the landscape that he collects with ceramic frottages fired underground. Rooting and activism through a poetics of materials.

Greta Alfarowho also presents a magnificent solo exhibition at the Rosa Santos gallery in Madrid, welcomes us in the lobby with her video In Ictu Oculi (2009), a shocking scene in which a flock of vultures devours a feast in minutes.

In another line of work Tanya White show the video UNLID tasting (2017), an excellent project full of sarcasm that subverts the codes of influencers Gastronomic YouTubers analyze ultra-processed products from the UNLID supermarket chain for their harmful properties.

Along with them, Saelia Aparicio, Basurama, Luna Bengoechea, Bene Bergado, Peter Foldes, Manuel Franquelo, Ángel Marcos, Antoni Miralda, Asunción Molinos Gordo, Santiago Morilla, Estibaliz Sádaba, Carles Tarrassó and Winkler + Noah invite us to think about what we eat and what we look at, imagining other possible worlds, other ways of consuming and producing, which begin on our plates.

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