What´s for dinner?
(2022)
What’s for dinner? looks at dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin and endorphins beyond the human body, tracing how these chemicals shape behaviour across species — from optimism in starlings and social bonding in orcas to aggression in honeybees and hibernation in brown bears. Drawing on scientific diagrams and behavioural studies, the exhibition gives visual form to these microscopic processes, unsettling the idea that emotions such as hope, attachment or anticipation belong exclusively to us.
Against a culture increasingly invested in managing mood, productivity and ‘wellness’, these biological mechanisms become a way of questioning how much control we actually exercise over how we feel. Moving between scientific research, humour and speculation, What’s for dinner? approaches the pursuit of feeling better as a recurring biological loop: anticipation, reward, satisfaction, decline — and the inevitable desire for whatever comes next.
Produced during the Arnis Art Residency in Arnis, Germany, Island Shoals responds to the particular geography of Germany’s smallest city, situated on a narrow peninsula extending into the Schlei inlet. Formerly an island, Arnis was connected to the mainland in the 18th century, leaving a landscape where the distinction between island and mainland remains geographically and historically present.
Drawing on nautical charts and navigation markers, the work takes the form of an abstracted shoal buoy — a device normally used to signal shallow waters, submerged obstacles and navigational hazards. Positioned on the isthmus that now connects Arnis to the mainland, the marker offers neither a clear warning nor a route towards safe water. Instead, Island Shoals uses this ambiguous geography to consider the island as both refuge and enclosure: a place defined as much by the possibility of retreat as by separation from what lies beyond it.
Location
Balcony Gallery, Lisbon
Dates
2022
Materials
Mixed fabric, acrylic resin, wool, wood
