Sonic Art and the Acoustics of Food: Examining culinary sounds to understand resistance

This research focuses on food sounds that resonate when resistance is exercised as luscious and joyful culinary experiences that contest circumstances of adversity, precarity and territory dislocation. Food, as means of resistance, has been approached by a number of art practitioners including Sabor Clandestino in Bolivia, Fatima Kadumy in Palestine, and María Buenaventura and Elena Villamil in Colombia. Such sounds, which are commonly underheard and ignored in sonic and food art, in my work provide important leads about how resistance operates in contemporary times, considering theories about the politics of sound by Brandon LaBelle and Salomé Voegelin, and theories about the politics of food by Jane Bennett. The artistic examination and theoretical investigation of the culinary acoustics of resistance presented in this research make an original and significant contribution to the knowledge of the practice of sonic and food art in contemporaneity. This project examines its sonic and edible material through Collaborative Culinary Sound Art (CCSA), an original practice that considers the intersubjectivity of sound and listening, the strategic possibility of sound and food, and the multisensory connection between sound, smell, and taste. The thesis will initially outline and critique theories that study relevant philosophical considerations in the emergence of CCSA by LaBelle, Voegelin, Gilles Deleuze, Mark Peter Wright, and Bennett. It will discuss relevant works from a series of artists from diverse fields such as sound art, experimental music, contemporary music, and food and visual arts. Finally, it will examine the circumstances and considerations that led to the development of CCSA and demonstrate how this thinking has informed a portfolio of original pieces and will reflect on the artistic considerations and methodologies developed in this research.