Slow Boil

What can the sharing of kai do to transform how we conceive of knowledge, resilience and mana motuhake?

Artspace Aotearoa is proud to present Slow Boil (29 May – 7 August) an unfolding exhibition and public creative research project. Slow Boil is co-created by kaupapa Māori community group and kai security advocates Boil Up Crew and a group of contributing practitioners spanning architecture, community advocacy, design, food sovereignty, software and the visual arts. During a series of wānanga, works will be collectively produced and installed in the exhibition space alongside existing investigative works by Forensic Architecture.

Slow Boil is convened by Architectural Researcher Karamia Müller (University of Auckland) and Software Researcher Lachlan Kermode (Forensic Architecture), who worked together on the research project Violent Legalities, which was on show at Adam Art Gallery, Pōneke Wellington, 2020. Through co-design, and co-curation with Grayson Goffe of Boil Up Crew, the project aims to explore the relationship between the mahi ngā-kai/kai rituals, and tā wahi/notions of space, mana motuhake/sovereignty, and mapping.

The exhibition opens with the idea that recipes and kai are vessels of intergenerational knowledge transfer, the means to an embodied life force that resists colonisation, and nourishing of community in the Karangahape Road, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland and Aotearoa New Zealand context. By both sharing and mapping kai ecologies in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland, the exhibition aims to bring greater visibility to kai insecurity facing urban communities. Following Maramataka, the Māori lunar calendar, concepts will be unearthed over the course of the exhibition towards a shared vision of kai security in the Karangahape community.

New research from Slow Boil Collective links these local concerns to global food systems by addressing Aotearoa’s continued dependency on phosphate rock sourced from the occupied territory of Western Sahara, conceptualising phosphate as whenua: a life force transported away from its place of origin, without the consent of the Sahrawi people who whakapapa to there.

As a context and conversation partner for the unfolding Slow Boil project, the exhibition will also screen investigations from the 2018 Turner Prize nominees Forensic Architecture relating to land dispossession and forms of environmental violence in other parts of the globe. Forensic Architecture’s work contextualises food insecurity and environmental violence as just one form of injustice faced by Indigenous people.

Throughout the course of the exhibition, Slow Boil organises free and open to all screenings and seminars from July onwards, these events will be announced upon the opening of the exhibition, all reading through the concept of ‘slow violence’ and its potential for resistance in both Aotearoa New Zealand and the world.