Jorge Menna Barreto

I love Jorge’s work and practice so much literally so much of what he was discussing relates to my practice, the lecture even related to my essay right now.

Throughout the lecture and the Q + A Jorge explained how his practice heavily involves site-specific projects as he lets the site decide what he will build/create and even what he is going to eat. He showed this quote to the right in the lecture when explaining his inspirations and thought of investigating the relationship between agroecology and site-specificity in his practice.

Many of Jorge’s works are environmental sculptural installations that explore the complexities of food and its relationship with society and nature. For instance, in the Bienal de Sao Paulo 2016, Jorge showed ‘Restauro’, which began with Jorge exploring this forest, working with farmers, investigating the foods provided by the forest whilst also recording the sounds of the forest. Using this research Jorge created ‘Restauro’ which is an environmental sculpture that operates as a restaurant as he brought food from that forest to create a menu, for the audience to eat. Jorge explained the use of audience interaction in his work as having the audience engage through eating it allows us to consider the human digestive system as a sculptural tool, becoming part of the sculpture. This raises questions around the environmental issues related to eating habits and their effect in the climate, encouraging awareness of food politics and climate change emergency.

When making work that raises these questions of climate change the art can often be seen as ‘pushy’ which is something I have been considering in my own work, as I have experience negative feedback with some works in development that had a clear political message. Jorge addressed this issue in a way that allowed the work to be what I feel would have been more effective, as he explained how his work has no text or explanations around ‘Restauro’ explaining it was an artwork, which did mean a lot of the audience didn’t actually realise ‘Restauro’ was even an artwork, however he had a system in place where if someone was to ask about the work or what this was to one of the workers at the project (who wore orange shirts as a uniform) then they would be able to discuss the piece and the artists ideas and inspirations with the audience member. Having this access to knowledge of the piece only being given when prompted by an audience member seems to be an effective means of having those specific members of the audience engage with the work.

This is definitely a useful point for me to think about and when I had my tutorial with Jorge, we discussed these topics further, mentioning how the audience need the “ability to respond” in order to encourage engagement and interaction with the art work.