As Above, So Below

Mariana Sanchez Salvador, Rain Wu

2020, 19’

Empathy begins with acknowledging the position of our body in relation to the world. For “As Above, So Below” we consider the macro and micro scales of our world to exercise empathy not simply towards a different body but also across time and dimensions. In this video piece, we will follow food from past to present and into the future, and from the micro to the macro scale — the meal, the settlement, the landscape, the cosmos, down to the microbial and viral in our guts and in the air — in order to discover a new perspective of our world. Food spans across all aspects of our lives, from the most profane everyday nourishment to the sacrifices which made an anthropological imprint on the collective psyche. When we eat, we deprive the world of something in order to stay alive. Death in exchange of life. Also, not only farms and lands surpass the dimension of a human body and mind, but food rituals are also ways of attempting to communicate with a different dimension only imaginable but could never be uncertain. Food connects science and myth, known and unknown. The film makes use of archive images and microscopic photography of edible substances — fruits, vegetables, grain, fish, vitamins — as a metaphor of the macro, to bring the viewers into an ambiance that is timeless and scaleless.

The programme was compiled by architect and curator Mariana Pestana, a selection of videos originally released as part of the 5th Istanbul Design Biennial, organized by Istanbul Foundation for Culture and Arts (İKSV), under the title of Empathy Revisited: Designs for More Than One.