Janet Carter & Elizabeth Pedler, Eat the City (2015-17)
Rosie Halsmith
Artists: Janet Carter & Elizabeth Pedler Work: Eat the City (2015-17) Location: Perth, Western Australia
Imagine a world where urban food supply chains have collapsed. Where and how will we find food in order to survive? Eat the City poses this dystopic hypothesis and explores the possibilities it raises for generating a community-activated artwork based in the Perth CBD.
Eat the City is an ongoing social experiment based on the principles of food and knowledge sharing, theoretically underpinned by ideas around increased global precarity and building resilience. For Know Thy Neighbour, artists Janet Carter and Elizabeth Pedler undertook a research residency, working with a number of collaborators with expert knowledge of urban survival, native and foraged foodstuffs. Learning about food precarity from multiple viewpoints, the artists collected stories and mapped contemporary and historical free food resources in the CBD.
Janet Carter and Elizabeth Pedler are continuing to use this data to build an interactive map and wiki, charting the wild and free food available in Perth. The research residency culminated in three participatory city walks, each tracing, mapping and storytelling food and survival in the city. They were led by guides Brooke ‘Sparkles’ Murphy, Dale Tilbrook, Malcolm Kaui and Len, each with varying specialisation, from indigenous food cultivation to wild and foraged food.