Luiza Prado is a resident in the transmediale 2023 Digital Art Residency programme in collaboration with Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia. In her research, Empty Calories, she focused on the increasing disconnection between the realities of food production and climate collapse and its widespread consumption as content on screens.
Questioning how online platforms create desires for ingredients and food trends, Empty Calories brings attention to the unusable politics of food, its new networked condition, and disassociation from environmental and sociopolitical realities. Unfolding as a reality tv show, Luiza Prado researches the history of the luxury spice and medical cure-all – silphium – a once highly desired ingredient and delicacy in the ancient world. Tracing through the plant’s economic significance and eventual extinction, Empty Calories raises questions about the links between the anthropogenic extinction of species and plants and politics of distraction.
jury
Doreen A. Ríos, Simone C. Niquille, Sandra Küpper, and Nóra Ó Murchú
credits
The Digital Art Residency is a cooperation between transmediale and Pro Helvetia. transmediale has been funded as a cultural institution of excellence by the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Cultural Foundation) since 2004. with additional funding by the Berlin Senate Department for Culture and Europe, Department Culture.