LIGHT
OF FOOD
Table of Transformation
LIGHT OF FOOD: Table of Transformation Video installation proposal by Miche Fabre Lewin for Spier Light Art 2026
a poetic evocation of the power of the light of the Sun and how it manifests in the food we eat every day. The Sun’s energy is the source of all life, the origin of the energy for food to grow, to sustain and nurture all species.
Artist Biography
My practice as an artist and curator is wide-ranging and manifests as a multivalent body of work – including ritual, multimedia, material assemblages, video, photoworks and convivial installations. My food practice enlivens a philosophy of food, a gastrosophy where knowledge-making is enhanced through the senses, and our bodily intelligences are activated through being in embodied experiences with food itself.
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. 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. My earth-centred rituals are ecological food interventions which make visible the living food cycle. These offer people experiences of belonging and becoming-with our nature- nature-cultural habitats through everyday habits of eating.
With the matter, energy and metaphor of living processes, I am in a continuous enquiry: ‘What is a human being?’ How can art be a medium for cultivating a politics of consciousness?’ ‘How can art serve to highlight recognition of our radical interdependence with each other and within the ecosystems of Gaia?’
Recent 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
Light is life.
Food is life.
Food is light
The Sun is our most powerful, natural energy and form of light. Through food we ingesting the miracle and power of the Sun’s energy. 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 water bodies, and energies of the Sun and Moon. Growing, cooking and eating are expressions of these extensive, naturecultural relationships. The light of the Sun is life-sustaining and nourishing to us once it’s energy and light are transformed by the multifold interactions of plants with soil, water and air to become the edible substances which feed and nurture mortal existence.
The convivial provocation for Spier Light Art will be a short film sequence displaying moving imagery of the living food cycle. Through a video installation projected onto and illuminating a wooden table this sensuous visual incantation makes visible the subtle and invisible natural processes which contribute to the flourishing our humanness within the ecosystems in which we dwell.
For Spier Light Art, through a video installation I am interested in sharing a sacred re-membering with visitors of our essential, sacred and synergistic relationship between ourselves, the Earth and the Sun. Through ecological food and whole health diets we are in relation to the natural rhythms and seasonal cycles of life-giving habitats and natural processes. In eating food we are re-enlivening and respecting the vital relationship between ourselves and the other-than-human realms and our interdependence of healthy ecosystems.
This experience will be of the living food cycle through multilayerijng sequences of agricultural, culinary and gastronomical imagery themed around of soil, seed, plant, harvesting, food preparation, artisan production, cooking traditions and the presenting of food for eating (see 30 second sketch film https://www.studiofabrehardy.earth/light-of-food).
Description & use of light
This video installation enlivens our connection with naturebased farming and reminds us of the life-giving light source of the Sun which offers us sustaining and nourishing food.
Light of Food: Table of Transformation is a 500-seconds long film - the time it takes for a ray of sun to reach the Earth. It is projected from above for viewing on the surface of a round wooden dining table. Up to 9 people can be seated at 3 curved benches fitting around the table. This allows for communing with the piece, conversation and absorption.
The video projection is a continuous looping of a poetic, multi-layered collage of food imagery. This interweaves moving and still, macro and micro imagery drawn from documentation of my food interventions performed between Europe and South Africa over the past 2 decades, including: Deep Soup Ceremony; Sacred Mayonnaise; Coming to our senses; Eat from the Earth Pavement Banquet; Slow Taste of Earth and Sky; Field Table; Tasting Ubuntu; First Know Food; An Intimate Taste of Life.
This video collage is an expression of kitchen culture meeting agriculture. We are all co-producers in the food chain and, as eaters we are participating in an agricultural act. The imagery shares 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 or grove of trees near the Lake and granite rocks. This allows for the overhead projector to be hidden, and allows people to 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.
Sketch of (i) overhead projection from tree onto round table with three curved benches and (ii) people forming silhouettes as they capture light on their bodies.
Use of Light
Food is light. Through the presence and power of the light of the sun the food images share our extensive and relational co-existence created from energy and light of the Sun.
Onto the wooden table visible and invisible light energy entwines – that of an electronic radiance entangling with the invisible light and energy of the Sun manifest in the edible substance of food.
The material substance of wood from which the table is constructed is also created from the sun. The table will be made of recycled cable reels, another association with the source of light as electricity as these reels transport electric cables for light-giving.
The time it takes for a ray of sun to reach the Earth is on average 500 seconds. The timing of the film is 500 seconds thus giving resonance between time, light and space.
Visitor interaction
As food citizens, active in determining food and farming cultures, we have the capacity to be agents of change and cultivate equitable, ecological and integrated food systems.
The siting offers a natureculture habitat where the digital and virtual meet the physical and sensorial.
The familiar design of the table invites people to stand and engage with the work, or sit down to a convivial and visual feast at the table.
The round form and informal seating encourage interaction between people of all ages, with the potential for spontaneous conversations about food, farming and eating.
The choice of imagery will reflect different and recognisable stages of the growing and cooking cycle, whilst also offering more poetic imagery for people to resonate and imagine-with.
The casting of light and shadow and the projection design encourages human bodies to interact as they sit and move their hands and arms across the table. The imagery of food upon bodies conveys 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.