Workshop
Chimera Gastronomy

With the support of the Institute of Queer Ecology , Noam Youngrak Son has developed the workshop ‘Chimera Gastronomy: Malleable flesh, amalgamated bodies, and plastic kinship’. In the workshop, a group works individually and collectively on a malleable body consisting of dough, starting with tissues and combining them into organs, and eventually forming an organism. This result is a so-called Chimera: a living being that arises from cell mixing.

For example, during the first edition workshop hosted as part of the program for RE_NATURE festival, the participants hybridized eel, dodo, octopus, lichen, whale, nekton, cat into a chimera. The flesh, materialized using edible ingredients, comprehensively represented the following political-cultural-ecological discussions: endocrinological condition shaped by migration, extinction caused by colonialism, fluctuating chromatophores blurring the notion of race, symbiotic cohabitation, the polarization of scales. By using this variety of flesh, we speculatively constructed organs that tell stories: An anus not for defecation but for olfactory communication, a selfish heart that only pumps blood for itself, non-binary genitals, an ear that hears sufferings, an organ that consumes pain and excretes joy. Eventually, the body parts are combined into a fictional creature, later 3D scanned and digitally animated.

Through multiple iterations, the workshop has been developed into a hybrid format that involves cooking and publishing. It doesn't only result in a hybrid organism but also moves into a collective storytelling and publishing activity starting from the concept of dough as a malleable container. The former hosts of the workshop include the following organizations: RE_NATURE festival, Subbacultcha Amsterdam, Antwerp Queer Art Festival, Extra City, Post Festival, De Koer.

Check out the article published by Post Festival about the edition of the workshop took place in Podium, Oslo.