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Paper short abstract

I examine how artistic practices construct imagined ecosystems in which taste becomes a tool of the politics of care, and how performance can transform eating into an act of responsibility, creating a space for negotiating ameliorative strategies in a time of climate crisis.

Paper long abstract

The paper examines the potential of art to create new relations and spaces of encounter in a world marked by polarization and the climate crisis. Drawing on the concept of “haptic taste as a task” (Perullo 2018), I show how art practices that engage the senses can become both a research method and a tool for repairing relations between people and the environment. Hence, taste is not a firm and permanent predisposition but as a processual phenomenon—a task that all consumers must face and to which they must flexibly respond. Our culinary choices come with moral obligations toward the environment and other beings with which we share living space. The idea of actively tuning in with the environment corresponds to Ingold’s recommendation of an improvisation-based life (2011).

I devote particular attention to the Cooking Sections (Climavore) project, which, through installations, performances, and communal meals, redefines eating as an ethical and ecological gesture. These activities not only visualize the connections between diet and climate but also initiate processes of co-creating knowledge and community.

Analyzing these practices, I argue that art can function as an “infrastructure of care,” opening spaces for dialogue and collaboration where divisions typically prevail. Shared aesthetic and culinary experiences become laboratories of relationality, where alternative models of life emerge—resistant to the logic of exploitation and isolation. The paper contributes to the debate on how art, intertwined in research-creative practices, can not only describe but also transform the conditions of life in the Anthropocene.