Luiza Prado – The Kitchen Network
The last reality TV food show on the planet
The Kitchen Network delves into the politics of food as entertainment, exploring how it's become detached from the realities of its production and its role in climate collapse. Unfolding as the final reality TV food competition on Earth, this performance piece uses humour to examine the divide between online food cultures and their disconnection to wider issues of class, gender, and geography.
From avocado toast to baked feta pasta, our relationship with food is being shaped more and more by social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok. Hashtags such as #TikTokFood and #Foodtok have gained billions of views, sparking surges of interest in certain ingredients and causing long queues at restaurants. As we consume food content on screens – whether through reality TV shows or viral trends – the realities of food production and its environmental impact have been hidden under digital layers of gold-leaf everything, long, melty strands of cheese, and dramatic reality TV storylines.
With soaring energy and food costs, labour shortages, the cost-of-living crisis and ongoing supply chain issues, we eat with our eyes and ears. Food as entertainment is a geopolitical issue, masked and filtered through phone lenses to perform wealth, virtue, goodness, practicality, ease and skill.
Artist Luiza Prado brings The Kitchen Network to Nottingham in April, working with local cooks to develop the latest episode. The project asks: How does turning the kitchen into a site for performance distract us from concrete fears of extinction in the context of climate disaster?
T.L. Cowan, Luiza Prado, Helen Pritchard, Jas Rault, The Kitchen Network: Anti-Fascism and Plants
Transmediale 2024 Reunion, Haus der Kulturen der Welt. Photo by Laura Fiorio CC BY-NC-SA
Luiza Prado De O. Martins is an artist, activist and researcher. Her work moves between installation and food, using performance and ritual as a way of invitation and activation for audiences. Her practice explores relations and knowledge between food, infrastructures and technology, and questions what structures and process are needed for collective concerns of care. She holds a PhD from the University of the Arts Berlin, and an MA from the University of the Arts Bremen.
Her ongoing artistic research project, “Un/Earthings and Moon Landings” narrates, through a series of artworks, the extinction and later reappearance of an ancient contraceptive, aphrodisiac and spice called silphium. She has exhibited and performed work at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, the National Museum of the Democratic Republic of Congo, Savvy Contemporary, Akademie Schloss Solitude, and Kampnagel, among others.