Food matters: more-than-human agency in food-based participatory art

This article reconsiders participatory art through the lens of posthumanism and new materialism, arguing that food-based practices can extend social engagement beyond the human. Drawing on Jane Bennett’s concept of ‘thing-power’, it analyses three participatory works of art that centre on acts of food-making: Alison Knowles’s Make a Salad (1962/2000s), Fallen Fruit’s Public Fruit Jam (2006–ongoing) and Mimi Oka and Doug Fitch’s The Orphic Memory Sausage (2008). Through multisensorial encounters with edible and inedible matter, these projects foreground nonhuman agency and unsettle anthropocentric hierarchies that have long structured participatory art. In examining these works, the article proposes an expanded ecological understanding of participation – one in which human and nonhuman actants co-produce aesthetic and ethical experience, prompting a renewed attentiveness to and care for the more-than-human world.