SCHOOL is organized by Jonathan Adjemain and Xenia Benivolski and co presented with No Reading After the Internet.

SCHOOL is a series of informal school-type seminars for people of any and all educational backgrounds.

Two of the four-week sessions will take place at MOCCA, and will be led by cheyanne turions and Leila Timmins (July 19th and August 2nd at 8/11, 233 Spadina Ave.). It will revolve, in all sorts of ways, around food, and will involve special guests and gustatory treats in solid and liquid form.

If you want to take part, please email quoteschool@gmail.com to register. The first set of readings will be sent out shortly. We strongly encourage attending all four sessions if possible, but drop-ins are welcome too. PWYC donations will be taken after each session, all of which go to thank the facilitators for their time.

Eating Bodies: Towards a Consummate Consumption
“School” program facilitated by Leila Timmins and cheyanne turions

What else is food, beyond nourishment? This summer session of SCHOOL will focus on the social and aesthetic aspects of food, where eating is considered as act with repercussions beyond the fulfillment of a basic need. Drawing on texts that operate outside of the sentimentality and machismo pervasive in much food writing, taste will be explored as something conditioned by class, gender, culture and history. Born of a desire to indulge and critically interrogate our tastes, especially as they resonate outward from our own plates, we hope to use food as symbol for human relations, exploring patterns of interaction between and within societies.

Over the course of four weeks, we will read a variety of texts—theoretical and comedic, historical and contemporary, fiction and not. Approaching SCHOOL as an experiment in informal education, please note that we are not experts in these texts, though our curiosity is voracious. Understandings of the texts will be performed collectively, and in addition to generally discussing each week’s theme, participants will be asked to share selections from the texts they find incendiary or spot-on. These observations will be used to guide our conversations.

Facilitators:

Leila Timmins is a writer and curator based in Toronto. She is the Head of Exhibitions at Gallery 44 and currently sits on the Board of C Magazine and the Education Programming Committee at the Art Gallery of Ontario,

cheyanne turions is an independent, Toronto-based curator and writer. Her work approaches the space of exhibition as alive—the gallery is a space of dialogue where artists, curators and publics can reflect on and experiment with ways of seeing (and being). She sits on the Board of Directors for Kunstverein Toronto, the Editorial Advisory Committee for C Magazine and the Advisory Board for the newly federated institution comprising the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery and University of Toronto Art Centre. She is the director of No Reading After the Internet (Toronto).

12 July: Colonial Foodstuffs
• Jonah Campbell’s “Notes Preliminary to Actually Thinking About an Anti-Colonial Food Writing” from Still Crapulent
• Kyla Wazana Tompkins’s “‘She Made the Table a Snare to Them’: Sylvester Graham’s Imperial Dietics” from Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the 19th Century

26 July: Cannibalistic Feminisms
• Jonah Campbell’s “On Nigella Lawson, Impossible Witnessing, and the Reification of Analysis” from Still Crapulent
• Excerpts from F.T. Marinetti/Fillia’s The Futurist Cookbook
• Candice Lin’s Tales from the Kitchen: Beggar’s Revenge Chicken
• Excerpts from Three Banquets for a Queen, edited by Charlotte Birnbaum