Feast & Fast: The Art of Food in Europe, 1500-1800
- Submitting institution
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University of Cambridge
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 12907
- Type
- M - Exhibition
- Venue(s)
- Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
- Open access status
- -
- Month of first exhibition
- -
- Year of first exhibition
- 2019
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
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-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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1
- Research group(s)
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-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- "Feast & Fast: The Art of Food in Europe 1500–1800 is lead output in this multi-component item, which includes the catalogue alongside contextual information enabling the reviewer to visualise the exhibition. Victoria Avery and Melissa Calaresu co-curated the exhibition, co-wrote and co-edited the catalogue. Avery undertook coal-face research, systematically uncovering more than 275 previously un(der)-researched and/or un(der)-catalogued early modern objects from the Fitzwilliam’s collection. These objects were then systematically interrogated from various interdisciplinary perspectives (materiality, manufacture, iconography, ownership, usage) to provide new food-focussed research data for the exhibition’s didactic panels, catalogue, website and public programmes.
Avery’s collections-based research aimed to complement that undertaken by Calaresu, and provoke a timely and object-based debate about traditional understandings of the production, preparation, and consumption of early modern food through contemporary issues like our complex relationship with animals, global versus local foodways, vegetarianism and food denial, and racism through food stereotypes.
Through problematizing overly familiar foodstuffs, such as the pineapple and sugar, Avery investigated understudied tensions between their representational power and the historical and political contexts of their worldwide production and consumption.
Avery then used creative, visual approaches to stimulate exhibition visitors to think about how we consider and engage with food now. For instance, early modern dining artefacts were reanimated by juxtaposing them on table settings with historically-accurate food recreated using traditional equipment and techniques. Avery also built a Creative Zone at the end of the exhibition. The design and installation of this space were themselves research products based on feedback from different groups. The Creative Zone encouraged visitors to reflect and respond through word and image, to engage with interactive multi-sensory and digital displays, and to hear diverse local stakeholder voices in a food film featuring community participants which itself was an important part of this variegated research process."
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -