Stained Forever

𝚋𝚢 𝙸𝚊𝚠𝚗𝚊

My practice explores food as a tool of personal reconnection and emancipation from dominant narratives. By creating new relationships to food, one can discover radical intellectual freedom and mental autonomy, through the understanding of our routinal cultural barriers. I use metaphors of internalization (ingestion), meaning (words) and logic (common sense) to break the conventions of regular physical and psychological settings of eating (consuming).

The idea that processes of eating and looking are similar and can coincide, are central pillars of my current research on eating practices that have nothing to do with the necessity of food. Media is saturated with discourses and images concerning food and its cultural by-products and new-found industries, e.g. ｎｕｔｒｉｔｉｏｎ, 𝖜𝖊𝖑𝖑𝖓𝖊𝖘𝖘, food porn, 𝕣𝕖𝕔𝕚𝕡𝕖𝕤, gastronomy etc. I propose alternative modes of food consumption, be it visual or literal, by showing instances in which food has agency; roles and gazes reversed. One important aspect through which food gains agency and makes way for rethinking the possibilities of relating to it, is to visually not provoke hunger. This distancing allows a cultural unchaining to occur and encourages a moment of contemplation.

My practice consists of an exhaustive editing and layering process in which images circulate through multiple mediums and communicate with each other. I approach the process of creation in an ecological vein, recyclying and reproducing my own images. I reframe and translate results from material to digital form (and vice versa), utilizing a varied scope of digital and material resources, generally from my camera roll or everyday objects.

My aim is to create a social commentary that de-glamorizes and questions digital foodscapes by using vessels, tissues and other elements, relating the conceptual universe of the kitchen to the one of the bathroom

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food has agency; roles and gazes ᖇEᐯEᖇᔕEᗪ

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✿ Iawna is a Bucharest-based artist that investigates forms of aggression in digital foodscapes