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Short abstract:

Interactive installation incorporating audio-visual storytelling devices, field equipment, background videos playing on loop, posters, booklets, food tasting. 4 media players will be used for 4 different containers with 4 earphones attached.

Abstract:

How can we understand concerns for sustainable development, food security and sovereignty beyond longstanding mainstream agricultural production schemes? When we focus too much on yield and feasibility, we ignore the mutual meanings of landscapes that were (or are becoming) plantations and the species that live (or used to live) within them. To foreground these relations, our interactive installation complicates olives by revealing more-than-human, infrastructural, and sociopolitical relations through the method of interactive storytelling. Employing a plethora of sounds, images and materials, we invite the participants to lose their sure footing in an oily world, where olives stop becoming just food and are called to appear and become significant in their other forms; as seed, fruit, tree, wood, symbol, landscape, companion and tool. We invite you to taste, touch, smell, listen and walk through the olive stories of our representation (do not mistake it for a concrete reality!). We complicate the matter of knowing and producing olive oil, as well as of knowing sustainability and development through comparing, contrasting and reflecting on stories of olive entangled lives and landscapes in Turkey, Palestine, Italy and Spain. As we invite olives to become agents in their own stories, we also make noticeable the agency of other non-humans. Instead of mastery over them, or a letting be that falls within the old dreams of a pristine nature, we propose an uneasy companionship and mutual affection within the smelly, messy and oily relations of future olive landscapes.