In my art history lectures at university, I spent hours staring at paintings of long-dead people, painted by long-dead people who had long-dead worldviews.

And with that, I have probably already provoked some of the readers. I just know it. But hear me out.

I am not suggesting that there was anything inherently wrong with studying these paintings or discussing them in class. I had some wonderful art historians teaching us, and we engaged in thoughtful discussions about the representation of women and Black people throughout (art) history. Yet, I often felt that, after spending so much time looking at their naked, objectified bodies, we eventually moved on. Of course, these discussions were valuable. They taught us to question the perspectives behind such representations and to understand how they are critically examined and negotiated in contemporary art and art history. But somehow, I was left wondering what happened to the people in the paintings once the discussion was over. The women in these paintings remained what they had been reduced to in the first place: dead matter. Nameless, without a story of their own. And if we continue to treat them as symbols of a particular time, fixed on a canvas, they remain exactly that: dead matter. We are not necessarily showing them more respect or revising our way of looking at them. They remain bodies in a painting, objects in a historical narrative. Still naked, still nameless. We have not really changed our relationship to them.




Meat Blob/ Dough Blob, Stéphanie Binet, 2022 

So I kept wondering: Who were these people? How can I find out more about them? What they loved? Hated? The things that made them laugh? Their favourite meals?

One supposed way to get closer to answering these question might be entering the archives and search for their names, their biographies and the stories of their lives. But even there, we run the risk of reproducing the very roles through which we have come to perceive them: as enslaved people, as victims of violence, as people to whom terrible things were done. These are realities that need to be told and heard. I am not suggesting that we should look away from them. But what if there were other ways of approaching these people, too? Ways that do not reproduce the distance between us and them, the othering that turns them into figures fundamentally different from ourselves. Is there a way to genuinely relate to the person in the picture?

What if there were another way of keeping them alive? Another way of telling history, of living and producing culture, that moves beyond the dead matter filling our museums?

What if, for example, we asked what that person might have eaten? What was available to them at the time and place they lived? What did they eat to survive? Through which tastes, smells or ingredients could this person become tangible to us again? What if they lived on through a recipe they once wrote down, prepared or passed on to someone else?

When you consider that by how we live we also pass on things— both materially and spiritually —can anything ever be completely dead?

Don't we live on through the things we do, the stories we tell, the things we cook and eat? Doesn't an animal that dies in the forest decay, become part of the soil and eventually nourish a plant growing in that very place years later, which I might then collect and eat? Doesn't matter constantly change, circulate and become something else?

W hat would change for us if we began to understand that death does not necessarily mean disappearance? That the past is not simply something that lies behind us, sealed off in archives, paintings and museum collections, but something that continues to move through the present? Through matter, through practices, through the things we inherit, consume, transform and pass on.

The world, then, with its history, present and future(s) becomes something alive. It becomes something that moves and transforms, something that can be preserved without being killed. It becomes something wet, warm, beating, fizzy. A ferment of everything that was put in the jar. That can change its form without losing its purpose.

Perhaps finding out who these people in the paintings were, then does not only mean collecting dry facts about them, but also asking what of them is still here. What has been carried forward, transformed or absorbed of them into the world we inhabit today. And perhaps food offers one way of following these traces.

Through cooking, preserving, fermenting, sharing and eating, we actively engage with these histories. These practices allow us to encounter inherited knowledge, reconsider established habits and create new forms of relating to what has come before us. In this sense, working with food offers a way of understanding history not as something distant and finished, but as something that continues to take shape through our everyday practices. Working with food though, becomes an alternative method to relate to the world and to each other.

So if we go back to the people in the paintings in my art history classes, I can say that to want justice for them is not merely to want them remembered. It is to resist the ways in which history has rendered them absent, fixed them in the past, or reduced them to objects of remembrance. It is to insist on their continued presence, making space for their stories to continue, to unfold and to matter beyond the moment in which they were painted. Not just as traces of a past, but as part of a living present. We want them alive!