Thanksgiving Hangover is an unsettling breakfast conversation about socially-engaged food art. Arriving together in a particular time and place, participants and facilitators comprise an imagined community. Sommelier David McIntosh will offer a selection of mimosas and other boozy beverages. This gesture invites the group to taste settler colonialism’s lies, aspirations, and desires in relation to agricultural histories. Artist Farrah Miranda’s mobile roadside fruit-stand and design studio will provide a visual backdrop to this workshop. From it, she will serve an assortment of fruits and vegetables grown and harvested by migrant workers on Indigenous lands. The project invites audiences to consider the possibilities of socially-engaged art in sharing strategies and building alliances across decolonization, racial justice, food justice, and labour justice movements.
Sarah Hart will facilitate a dialogical performance among those at the table (the people and the products we consume). Through a playful framework that calls attention to the power dynamics of communication, we will exchange perspectives on how we situate ourselves within the global ecology of tastes. We will digest the unpalatable story of colonization, the (un)marking of bodies through the discordant narrative of the nation state. We will call into question notions of community and belonging, asking who “we” are and how we converge here. We will acknowledge the things we will never know about one another’s (and the produce’s) trajectories to reach this place, especially those who are absent. We will reflect on the production and consumption of food and identities as our point of interaction.