What´s for dinner?

(2022)

(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.

Location

Balcony Gallery, Lisbon

Dates

2022

Materials

Mixed fabric, acrylic resin, wool, wood

Shown during PARALLEL VIENNA in 2019 with



There Is An Elephant In This Room (2019) is formed by 5 textile panels that, when joined together to form a single larger panel, measures 2.40 x 4.5 m – the same measurements of an average sized male adult Asian Elephant. This work was based on the English language expression, “the elephant in the room”, which refers to a highly obvious problem that no one is willing to address. It was executed following the simple premise of hiding the outline of the animal in plain sight, in a room that has the exact same height as the average Asian Elephant – 2.40m. Different abstract patterns are seen on the back of each panel in order to mislead the viewer into overlooking the elephant. The Asian elephant has been listed as endangered  on the IUCN Red List since 1986.