LIGHT
OF FOOD
Table of Transformation
LIGHT OF FOOD: Table of Transformation Video art proposal by Miche Fabre Lewin’s for Spier Light Art 2026
apples and plums only come into being through the energy of one celestial body,
the light of the sun
IWAMA & MAURER
Artist Biography
Art offers me a space for re-membering my relational sovereignty as a human being – an entangled experience of becoming with the living sentience of Planet Earth. My body of work is wideranging and encompasses earth-centred rituals with food which engage us in a search for truth and cultivate integrity for belonging authentically within our nature-cultural habitats. It is world-making with myself and others through enlivening embodied knowing of the intuitive, the ethical, the social, the emotional, the ancestral and the archetypal realms of being human. With the matter, energy and metaphor of living processes, I am in a continuous enquiry: ‘What is a human being?’ ‘How can art serve to highlight recognition of our radical interdependence and be a medium for cultivating a politics of consciousness?’Being an artist guides me in how to be dwelling in presence and honouring the sacred in the everyday through gratitude, respect and courage.
Commissions | Residencies: Arnolfini | Arts Council England |Abergavenny Food Festival |Aldeburgh Food Festival | Bag Factory Johannesburg | Centre for Contemporary Art and the Natural World | Hawkwood Centre for Future Thinking | Ecovention Europe | FutureCity | GUS Gallery | Hauser & Wirth |Thames Festival | NIROX Foundation | Lookout Tower Aldeburgh| Life Collection - Maboneng | Home Live Art | Platform London | Royal Geographic Society | Spier Farm | Sustainability Institute | Stellenbosch University Museum |Venice Biennale Collateral
Conceptual interest
Our most powerful and natural form of light is the Sun.
Light is life.
Food is life.
Food is light.
To be human is to be in continuous exchange with each other, sentient matter, the animate geographies of our biodiverse habitats and the rhythms of the Sun and Moon. Growing, cooking and eating are expressions of these extensive, naturecultural relationships.
My food practice is a gastrosophy which encompasses knowledge-making through the experiences of living food cycle. The convivial provocation for Spier Light Art will be virtual and share through a video installation the sensuous nature of an ecological gastronomy which makes visible the subtle and luminous connections between flourishing our humanness within the ecosystems in which we dwell.
Through food we can understand the miracle and power of the Sun’s energy. The light of the Sun becomes life-sustaining once it has been transformed into edible substances which give us energy.
I am interested in re-membering how through ecological food and wholesome eating we are attending to natural rhythms and seasonal cycles which are life giving.
Where we source our food, how and what we eat can be re-enlivening and a respecting of the essential relationship between ourselves and the other-than-human realms.
For Spier Light Art, through a video showing the living food cycle through culinary and agricultural imagery of soil, plants, food harvesting, processing, cooking and eating, this essential, sacred and synergistic relationship between ourselves, the Earth and the Sun will be conveyed through a Table of Transformation.
This is a digital, visual poetic evocation of food in its varied dimensions, highlighting how the light of Sun is the origin of energy for all species growth and development and is essential as the source for all life.
Description & use of light
Video Art Projection - Table Installation
LIGHT OF FOOD: Table of Transformation is a 15 minute film projected horizontally onto a round wooden dining table at which 9 people are seated at 3 separate curved benches fitting around the table.
The video projection is a continuous looping of a visual collage of food poetics. The content is a multi-layered interweaving of moving and still, macro and micro imagery drawn from selected documentation of my food interventions commissioned and performed between Europe and South Africa over the past 2 decades. These include: Deep Soup Ceremony; Sacred Mayonnaise; Coming to our senses; Eat from the Earth Pavement Banquet; Pulse; Slow Taste of Earth and Sky; Field Table; Tasting Ubuntu; First Know Food; An Intimate Taste of Life.
The visual poetic shows imagery which expresses kitchen culture meeting agriculture. These share a diversity of hands-on interactions from growing, harvesting, preparing and cooking and eating - resonances of our naturecultural interdependence and our reliance on the Sun’s light and energy.
For the siting of this work I envisage the round table under a tree/ grove of trees near the Lake and granite rocks. This is on two counts:
1) the overhead projector is hidden and invisible and people can experience the Table of Transformation by looking down onto it from standing, and having their own human hands and arms interwoven with the visual imagery as it lands on their bodies. We are all co-producers in the food chain and, as eaters we are participating in an agricultural act. This video intervention is to enliven our connection with naturebased farming and reminds us of the lifegiving light source of the Sun which offers us sustaining and nourishing food.
2) giving people who choose to sit at the table an experience of being in a tangible relationship within a natureculture habitat where the digital and virtual meet the physical and sensorial habitat. As food citizens, active in determining food and farming cultures which are small scale and naturebased, we have the capacity to be agents of change and cultivate equitable, ecological and integrated relationships.
Sketch of (i) overhead projection from tree onto round table with three curved benches and (ii) people’s bodies forming silhouettes and they capture light on their bodies.
Use of Light
The subject of the film is the substance of food as matter created from light, and the processes of cooking and eating – a relational co-existence which arises through the presence and power of the light of the sun.
Through a video of electric light projecting visual content about food and farming practices onto a table two light sources of energy entwine – that of an electronic radiance entangling with the less visible light of the Sun’s energies as manifest in the edible energy of food.
Visitor interaction
People are invited to be sitting down to a digital and visual feast at the table. This encourages interacting with each other around the table sharing conversations about food, farming and eating. The casting of light and shadow is part of the interaction as the overhead projection of a food poetics encourages human bodies to interact as they sit and move their hands and arms across the table. In this way the imagery of food lights ups on bodies conveying how we are composed of the energy of food and light.
Examples of previous work
Links to relevant projects on this website: Presence of Food | Sacred Mayonnaise | FieldTable
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Cooking, Culture and Conversations TEDX talk presented in Soweto as part to convey how we can reconnect with the Earth by re-membering and salvaging the rituals, practices and wisdoms that come with preparing and enjoying vital, seasonal food grown locally and organically.
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Cooking with the Ancestors | Short film made in collaboration with singer, writer and award-winning actor Anna Mudeka for Cooking with Ancestors performance, Black History Month, Norwich UK.
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Curated by Bronwyn Lace and the Centre for the Less Good Idea, this one minute film Tending emerges from our durational project For the Love of a Field, which honours the power of convivial ritual in restoring our nature-culture relationships.
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Art of Sympoiethics in the Ecological Citizen explores our collaborative arts practice as rooted in an ecocentric worldview, in which existence is a continuum of relational and embodied exchanges between ourselves, each other, and the matter and habitats of the animate Earth.
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We are honoured to be contributing our book chapter to this visionary book Subtle Agroecologies: farming with the hidden half of nature edited by Julia Wright.