Physical Poetics : Program #1
Physical Poetics offers a platform where practices within the arts, science and literature step in resonance towards each other. In 2018-2019, we propose three events / multi-layered experiences, unfolding each time as a particular format. Our goal is to bring together artists, scientists, thinkers, writers, translators and researchers from various fields, who develop for this occasion original propositions. Our interest lies in the creation of a particular place for practice and research in Brussels, where we wish to produce and present working processes with a specific poetic value.
Physical Poetics # 1 will be held on October 4, 2018 at 7 PM at the Auditorium of the erg, rue du Page 87, 1060 Brussels.
For Physical Poetics # 1, we invited Giovanni Frazzetto (doctor and neuroscientist, Ireland), Eva Meyer-Keller (performance artist, Berlin), Rares Craiut and Mana Constantinescu (food artists, Romania/Belgium), and Gabriel Franjou (ergote radio / dj, Belgium).
Anximentara
During the last decade of Romanian socialism most of the population was sharing and contributing to a generalised sense of anxiety. On the one hand there were all the food, heat, electricity etc. shortages, and on the other hand Romania was one of the heaviest policed states, with the secret police giving the impression that they are everywhere and anywhere and any complaint, public or private, could have severe results, from jail time to even worse.
« Alimentara » was the state owned, centralised, food distribution shop system and was very often empty or with the same few products that everyone had grown tired of. A network of semi-empty stores full of jars that everyone had grown sick and tired of but which would eventually provide solace in the absence of anything else. With a lot of time and jars on their hands the shop sellers built elaborate structures and displays. Rows and rows of the same jars, built on top of each other, reminding everyone that time in socialism/communism is the same and forever. A seriality that never announced anything good, to eat or otherwise.
The « Alimentara » window emerges as a food related anxiety display. The maniacal occupation of building up the food display out of jars stands for a kind of occupational therapy replacing anxiety eating or other anxiety coping mechanisms. Socialist pop tomato paste jar totems of food frustrations and anxiety. Anxiety-time-jars.
° Rareş Augustin Crãiuţ is an artistic researcher, performer, chef and civil society representative. He studied theatre in Romania at the Babes-Bolyai University and performance and artistic research at a.pass in Brussels. His work is mostly related to food and performance the possibilities opened up to developing new modes of eating and new ways of perceiving food from a responsible perspective. Since 2013 Rares is working on developing a food and performance artistic research titled ‘’performing food’’ (www.performingfood.com) examining through artistic experimentation and cuisine the consumption of food from both material and conceptual points of view.
More at: 
http://www.erg.be/m/wiki/Actualités/Physical_Poetics.html