Cabbage, Curation and the Convivial
Relational Systems Change through Artist Residencies, Sympoietic Rituals, and Liberatory Practices
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.47061/jasc.v5i2.10301Keywords:
arts-based research, artist residency, convivial, curation, fermentation, food ritual, experiential sensemaking, Ubuntu, postqualitative inquiry, sympoiethics, relational sovereigntyAbstract
This article explores an artist-led research residency centred on a participatory cabbage fermentation ritual as a lens for systems change. Drawing on arts-based and postqualitative methodologies, the work engages with food, ritual, and somatic knowing to cultivate relational awareness and collective sense-making. Using fermentation as a material, culinary practice, and metaphor for systemic shifts, the residency created a space for experiential inquiry into questions of ecological restoration, racial justice, and cultural transformation.
Participants engaged with food as sustenance, and as a site of memory, care, and co-creation. Through slicing, salting, storytelling, and stillness, the cabbage becomes co-curator and teacher, activating sympoiethics as a co-creative ethic rooted in interdependence with the more-than-human world. Three sympoethic inter-relationships manifest: curating the convivial as an aesthetic of care, ritual as a liberatory praxis for relational sovereignty, and the artist residency as a vital habitat for emergent and situated transformation. This work affirms that systems change can be enlivened through embodied, intimate, and sensory engagement where thinking, making, and sensing are inseparable. In the fermenting jar, the sharing of food, a listening circle, and the relational gesture, a different future is unfolding.
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