CKC 2023: New Futures for Creative Economies
Day 1
You Are What You Buy – Reap What You Sow
Abstract
You Are What You Buy(YAWYB) is a long-term ongoing project which through research and creative practice provokes and reacts to current issues on production, shopping, consumption and consumerism, offering an alternative artistic experience. To date, the project has created two editions and a third edition is ongoing.
The origins go back to the first edition in 2016-2017, entitled YAWYB by Miss K, which included a transdisciplinary collaboration whereby research and an interactive performance art piece were set in a local supermarket in Malta, highlighting our shopping patterns as affected by economic mechanisms. This was followed by a second edition in 2020, entitled YAWYB –A Remote ReVisit, with a focus on researching the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on our production, shopping and consumption habits. This has naturally evolved into a third edition that focuses on alternative local food community economies, earmarked as YAWYB –Reap What You Sow. The latter and current edition is researching, creating and presenting an alternative artistic-educational and socio-economic hands-on experience, by focusing on local food community economies. It includes collaboration with upper primary and middle school students. Inspired by the Arte Útil concept, this edition draws on artistic and design thinking to imagine, create and implement tactics that catalyse social change while acknowledging and acting on the ongoing interdependence of all life forms, human and more-than-human. In doing so, the project does not aim to reinvent the wheel, but to find gaps, support and scale up what already exists locally, and thus help to reframe the system. This links with Gibson-Graham’s vision of building other worlds with what is at hand. The students and their families are introduced to the Farm to Fork Strategy, to collectively create a healthy savoury snack. Through collaborating with a group of farmers, an ethical, green and fair organisation and other creatives, the students are involved in the production stage by sowing and harvesting crops in an organic and regenerative way, in the processing stage by solar dehydrating the veg and the herbs, to eventually move on to the storage and distribution stage, including branding design and creative writing to promote their product.
The paper will focus on the action-research methodology and the process undertaken with the students as the future generations of our society. It will also discuss the positive impact, outcomes and challenges encountered to date.
Biography
Kristina Borg is a full-time freelance visual and socially engaged artist, a spacemaker and a part-time art educator/lecturer. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Art Education from the University of Malta (2009) and a Master’s degree in Visual Arts and Curatorial Studies from the Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, Milan (2015). In her transdisciplinary research-practice she spends time integrating into specific communities and devotes her attention to relationships between people. In dialogue with the community and/or the place, her work focuses on the co-creation of projects that are situation and context-specific, and involves alternative, experiential processes that relate to socio-political and economic issues in urban-collective spaces – spaces that range from the city to the supermarket, from the walkway to the sea or the fields. Kristina has recently led an artistic community project in collaboration with the University of Malta as part of the European project AMASS -Acting on the Margins: Arts as Social Sculpture, funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme. In 2020 her collaborative project Nimxu Mixja (Let’s take a walk) was awarded Arts Council Malta’s Art Award as ‘Best project in the community’. She is also a fellow of the Salzburg Global Forum for Cultural Innovators and a member of the international Community Economies Research Network.
