Text written in collaboration with Alexis Milonopoulos, Erin Manning e Ricardo Rodrigues Teixeira

Food production and food consumption concentrate on themselves a series of questions that feed our contemporaneity, nourishing even what became known as the Anthropocene, an informal geologic chronological term that, in its multiple iterations as a concept, marks the evidence and the extent of human activities that have had a significant global impact on the Earth’s ecosystems.

Not by chance, agribusiness, monoculture and livestock farming are some of the human activities that most affect and transform the planet, and their implications can be seen all around the globe, being deforestation, biodiversity decrease, water pollution, and soil exhaustion the most common ones, especially in Brazil, where we can also see the rising violence against indigenous peoples and traditional communities in the last years.

In strict relation to those questions emerged Restauro – or Restoration –, a proposition from the Brazilian artist Jorge Menna Barreto for the 32nd São Paulo Art Biennial – Live Uncertainty, 2016 – that, for the first time, integrated the restaurant of the Biennial Pavillion in Ibirapuera Park to the curatorial frame of the exhibition, which made Restoration to born as a hybrid project: artwork-restaurant, restaurant-artwork.

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