Sow Winds Harvest Storms

There is a pine table and within it, attached, there is a grill. Under the grill there is a fire. The fire needs to be kept alive by the table, the fire cooks the food, the food is eaten on the table. It’s a self consuming table - autocannibalism at its best, sweet snacks in the realm of Capital. The starting of the fire resembles the starting of an agrilogistic system. Agrilogistics maximize existence over any quality of existing, establishes boundaries between the human and the non-human and eliminates anomalies. Production, efficiency, capital. A system which demands to be fed. A system which provides food, comfort, warmth at the price of its own destruction. We are stuck in a turning machine whose stopping point we can’t discern. A wicked problem that moves in a vicious cycle.

The table acts as a representation of the law of non contradiction. The law states that contradictory propositions cannot both be true in the same sense at the same time. You can pluck a blade of grass from a meadow and it will still be a meadow. This logic applies to the Capitalocene and the plucking of its resources. We state that the table can both be table and fuel simultaneously. However at the same time we aim to violate this logic by demonstrating that, at some point, it all burns. We welcome contradictions.

The whole thing is a pine scab, a twisted exquisite pine corpse held together by its own abducted honey blood. Resin is extracted from the pine tree by making an angled surface cut on its bark. It responds by creating resin to seal this wound. We are using this material to bind the sawned planks together, making a wooden puddle that pours out the window.

The foods that will inhabit the grill are of two types that have resisted us. On one hand we chose foods that somehow rebelled against mass production and grow wild or are only foraged. Quelites have had little economic impact, being considered "food for the poor," although their role in the pre-Hispanic diet was fundamental. Many indigenous desert cultures have survived droughts thanks to the consumption of quelites. Other examples are hoja santa and verdolagas.

On the other hand, foods that are poisonous, that expel venom as a defence mechanism but that, after being cooked, are defeated and become docile and gentle to the stomach. Chaya is a Mexican shrub’s leaf. It has a similar taste and nutritional value as spinach, but it’s very dangerous to consume raw. Uncooked cassava has compounds that turn into hydrogen cyanide inside your body. Frighteningly, this interferes with your body’s ability to use oxygen and can cause you to literally drown on dry land, but you can eat the root and leaves of the cassava so long as you cook them properly.

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