The Expelled
2018
Company
Collaboration with Universal Solvent Studios
Exhibitions/Presentations
The Family Collective Share Night, August 2019.
Eyeo Festival Lunch Share, June 2019.
MIT Media Lab Beyond The Cradle Conference, March 2018.
Team
Yvette King and Ayodamola Okunseinde.
Food in outer space part of ceremonial rituals. Three different sauces.
About
The Expelled is a performative interactive installation about a socio-political environment in which immigrants to the United States are asked to leave the planet. These different communities unify by exploring new religious experiences based on especially packaged foods taken with them from Earth.
Rice and beans cracker.
Beef stir-fry.
Concept
Insidious immigration laws were tightened and applied to all the oppressed, and the government let us leave planet Earth. Among the most important things for a sustainable life in space was food. So we, the disenfranchised, decided to take our indigenous foods from the Andes, Amazonia, West and Central Africa, Persia and Southeast Asia.
We created a repository of ingredients and recipes. Our foods had to be specially prepared and shipped in novel packaging while some had to be genetically modified to enable their reproduction in space.
Food was what unified us regardless of status, educational background, religion, and politics. Our new communities kept receiving people from Earth, and we taught them our new ceremonies, our mixed space-based cultural practices.
These new dining ceremonies in space helped us remember our backgrounds, our culture, our history. From ancient gods and practices to new technologies, we all used foods brought from earth to create and grow stronger bonds in our communities.
Role
I worked with my art collaborators on conceptualizing, researching and building a series of small prototypes that led to show The Expelled as a performative interactive installation. The concept of the project started by questioning my personal immigration process to the United States and how it evolved during and after the 2016 presidential elections.
The research work included immigration law, past social precedents in the Afro-Punk and Afro-Futurism cultures and accessing NASA’s open source data about food preparation methodologies and packaging during the Apollo era among other documentation. The early iterative worked independently as an artist allowed me to collaborate further on this project with Ayodamola Okunseinde and artist fabricator Yvette King.
Three sauces on ceremonial dish-ware.
Immigrant priest preparing for ritual.
Each Expelled in the community receives a set of food for ritual.