Three Fields: Episode 2

Transcript

Anna 00:25
Welcome to the Three Fields Podcast, an exploration of artists and cultural workers' perspectives on food justice and digital practices across India, the UK and South Africa. Over two episodes, we delve into conversations, field recordings and stories emerging from the Three Fields Project, an international collaboration and co-commission mobilising ancestral and embodied ways of knowing and understanding food systems and environmentally conscious creative digital practices.

Throughout 2025, the project brought together artists Deepa Reddy, Kaajal Modi and Samukelisiwe Dube to create a new collaborative immersive work from across the three territories. The artists spent time with each other weekly, predominantly in a digital space, sharing food knowledges and practices while also learning about XR and its potential to be sustainable and accessible. The outcomes include binaural sound works following movements and journeys of three spices, salt, pepper and cinnamon. The ingredients invite us to examine global food cultures through the botanical histories, colonial pasts and presents and migration routes. I'm Anna Santomauro, I'm Head of Programme at Arts Catalyst and my voice will be with you over the two episodes.

Three Fields, episode two. Can you hear a spice talk? What does it say? This episode explores food justice through the lens of movement, migration and distribution. The artists will discuss the practices at the intersection of art-and-food politics and the resonance across the three territories.

Anna 02:32
I'm here with artists Deepa Reddy, Kaajal Modi, and Samukelisiwe Dube. Thank you all for joining us.

Deepa is based in India. She's a cultural anthropologist, college professor, writer, and blogger. Her work explores food from cultivation to consumption, combining personal narratives, recipes, cultural analysis, and research. Kaajal is based in the UK. They're an artist researcher who has a strong material engagement with food, land, water, and the politics of how humans relate to and through this.

Samu is based in South Africa. She's a black, queer, multidisciplinary artist, and she's deeply influenced by her late grandmother. Her work explores nature, grief, and identity.

So perhaps let's begin with a reflection on your relationship with food justice. Why is it important to think about food justice through the lens of migration and movement?

Kaajal, would you be happy to go first and maybe followed by Deepa and then Samu?

Kaajal 03:53
I'm always thinking about food justice in my context, through the lens of migration and movement, because I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for this fact, this fact of migration and movement. I remember my mum telling me a story about my grandfather's peanut farm, where they used to have an oil press. They used to make peanut oil. And how in the off season, they would grow cotton. And the cotton at the time that my grandparents had a farm would have been brought to the UK in order to be milled and turned into textiles and clothing. And it's kind of shaped the places that I've lived in here. Every single city I've lived in has been shaped by industry. And many of those have been the textile industry. And so for me, when I'm here, I always think about that. And then because what is UK food, if not migrant food?

And there's many reasons for this. There's still some regional specificity about usually bread. When you move around the UK, people are very attached to their specific arrangement and baking method for bread and the words that they use to call specific arrangements of bread. However, a lot of the knowledge to do with regional food production has been lost due to industrialisation and people moving into cities. And so these stories are deeply interconnected. And also because so much of our food in the UK is imported from other parts of the world. So to me, often the thing that gets left out of that story of where our food comes from is the people who have bought their foods, their food traditions, their recipes with them, and also the people who grow and tend and cultivate the food that we eat here, as well as their stories and the stories that underpin this. And so for me, thinking about food justice is intrinsically a story of migration and movement.

Deepa 06:31
I mean I think I’ll tack straight on to what Kajal was talking about here. I think we're all products of this history of movement. See, I mean the thing about food is that it is all movement, right? There's no food without movement. A seed sprouts its movement, the seed grows into a plant, its movement, the air blows around it or the bees come and the pollinators come, that's movement. And you know fruit is produced as a result of the plant's internal, you know, its own movement. And then it gets taken from there and you know brought into our homes, brought into processing centers, brought into kitchens and it's all movement, right? So every bit of it is movement.

I think I'm always very conscious of this fact and the fact that we talk these days about farm to table, that's about movement, right? I mean we want to reduce the distance of that movement. We want to make that movement more responsive to the needs of the people who are producing the food. We want to make that movement not longer than it needs to be, you know, etc. But we're very, very conscious, I think, of the fact that all food is movement. The gestures that we've often talked about in our artist meetings together, they're all different kinds of very culturally encoded forms of movement. Even though we've phrased our sort of overarching theme for this particular project as migration, I think we're all just really interested in movement of different kinds. And migration, I think, on some level refers to a specific set of movements which Kajal was highlighting. In India particularly where there's a very strong, you know, there are many strong Native traditions like Kaajal was talking about, bread with regard to regional food and so on, there's a lot of conversation about how a certain type of food or identity revolving around food is tied to a place. And yet we're very well aware also that, you know, tomatoes aren't native to India, chilies are not native to India, potatoes came from elsewhere, cabbage came from elsewhere. We remember a time almost when those, you know, vegetables like cabbage and cauliflower weren't here, were new vegetables that people were sort of inventing and integrating into older food systems. Tapioca is not native, was introduced as recently as the 1800s, to the point where I think when we go through the list of things that we commonly eat, we often step back and go, hey, wait a second, what was it exactly we were eating before the Portuguese? Right? Did we have anything at all? Of course we did, we had lots, right? We had plenty of different ways of thinking about food, but my point really is that what we think of as traditional food now has been entirely changed by all of these different types of movement, right? And some of those movements are things that we've brought ourselves, we've willingly and willfully gone about, you know, moving ourselves from place to place. Some of that movement has been brought on us. And I think the difference between the one and the other is often where, you know, things grate against each other, where we sort of want to then reckon with the history of, you know, the Portuguese in India or the British in India, which brought about a certain kind of movement and a certain sort of exchange, which, you know, on some level has produced how things are at the moment, both good and bad. And I think we're at an interesting co-colonial moment. If I had to say it that way, we're really sort of reckoning with the impact of that, of all of that, both good and bad, and trying to reconcile what we feel has been useful and helpful and, you know, with everything else that went along alongside. But I think the point I wanted to make really was that what we eat is a product of all of these different types of movement. But that was part of the reason why we, I think, honed in on this as an overarching theme and saw so many of our other interests kind of coming into this large rubric. It's almost a way to be able to talk about everything. It's almost a theory of everything, right?

Samu 10:59
I think what Deepa said about food being all movement really stuck with me in terms of this question specifically, because food is one of the most powerful carriers of history. And I feel like the movements that Deepa was speaking about is often quite invisible. We do recognize that food is traveling all the time from one place to another. Food is being grown, and food is growing from the ground. And all of that is movement, which often does go very much unnoticed or unspoken of as much as it probably should.

And so with this project, I think thinking about food through the lens of migration allows us to see food not just as something that we eat. You know, it's something that survives, that travels from one place to another, that adapts in whatever situation that it ends up. It adapts and it carries the memories of where it comes from across all the different borders and through just conversation, through the actual bringing in of different spices from different places and seeing how all of that impacts the spaces in which it inhabits, you know? During this project, we were speaking about the making of atchaar at some point, which is this, I don't know what to necessarily call it, because it's called different things in different parts of the world. But it's basically preserved mangoes that are made with spices and different oils or vinegars to get this specific taste. And it is made quite differently in different countries. And we were speaking about how it is made in our individual spaces and how that affects how it tastes. I think just having this idea of this one specific dish or thing that has traveled, but in a form of ingredients more so than the physical thing, and how the ingredient has changed depending on the location of the space. And I think that really, it's very powerful because then it changes how that food is experienced in that specific space, as well as how it's treated and how it's paired with other dishes. And also, this project has made me sort of interrogate how maybe ignorant I have been about food in general, like where the different foods that I eat come from, what their histories are, and all of the memory it carries, and how different things that have happened in the world politically or spiritually or whatever case it may be have affected the food that we eat, how it's grown, how it's treated, and just how it affects our bodies as well. And I think in many ways, learning that it can expand into such a thing that we cannot escape is very helpful in knowing that we can sort of learn more about the things that we eat and we consume and how they can also become a form of artwork that we can further interrogate where it comes from, how it is being consumed, and how we can bring about these conversations through the artwork. I also wanted to mention the fact that migration also happens within our bodies through memory.

Anna 15:51
So, could you speak a little bit about the protagonists of your research? Are they ingredients, are they people, are they places? I'd love to know what story do these protagonists tell and what have you learned from them.

Kaajal 16:10
It's been a really interesting and I think quite unique collaboration in that we're each in our own context. So I'm in Leeds in the UK and Deepa I spent most of the time in Pondicherry in India and Samu has been in Johannesburg in South Africa and we've been meeting and getting together to do activities and workshops. Initially it was every two weeks and then towards the end of summer and autumn it became weekly and then it's moved back to every two weeks. So it feels like we've kind of experienced three seasons together and because Samu is in the southern hemisphere they've been kind of like different seasons.

So the collaboration kind of emerged through the realisation that we were coming from a very similar place in terms of how we thought about food as intergenerational knowledge sharing, as a way of connecting to place, as a way of thinking through or maybe working through complex ideas to do with politics and justice and placemaking, water rights and we had these wide-ranging conversations every time we met up. So every other week we'd meet with Dan and Rachel from Fast Familiar and then every other week we'd meet just the three of us and we'd have conversations where we had homework. There's something about like being part of each other's lives through this seasonality that I think has in a way kind of created a real really interesting glimpse into each other's lives and we've had these moments of synchronicity where we've had big life events and illnesses and even bereavement happening at similar times in ways that have felt really powerful and I think it's it's been an incredible experience kind of living in this way alongside these other two artists who have been generous in sharing parts of their lives with me and through the project. Through these conversations we very quickly realized that there is a resonance between each of our practices but they are they're distinct, they're unique, the work that we make is very specific to the context that we are in because we're each thinking about food and food justice in our own context because it's the only way we can think about it. Movement and migration as a result of the fact that you know due to empire industrialization, the colonial imaginary of land, a lot of our food in fact 40 percent of our food is imported and much of it is imported from India and South Africa and so I just wanted to draw attention to that.

In terms of who the protagonists have been in this practice, in this work, well for me it's definitely been Deepa and Samu, I mean they are two of the main protagonists. It's also been the ingredients that we've been working with and the way that we've kind of framed the stories of these ingredients has been through in a way tuning into listening to working with them and a strong reason for the spices to emerge is because we realized that almost all spices are also seeds and they're also plants and then I said salt though and then we were like but that's a landscape so actually I did a residency at Kirkgate Market because to me that felt like a really important place where all of the different food cultures that make up UK food and food in Leeds emerged because you have all these traders from all over the world including from different parts of the UK and they're selling food whether that's ingredients or pre-prepared food so I decided to ask if I could have a space in the market to interact with some of these traders and Leeds Kirkgate Market very generously gave me a space where I could do that and the residency that I had there which was four weeks, it was called Three Fields but the subheading was listening to spices as seeds plants and landscapes.

It was almost a pretext to kind of be in the market because I wanted to speak to people there. Initially, if I'd just go up to them and say, hi, I'm doing this thing, they'd be like, okay, great, come back later, I'm very busy. And then I, because I was there for four weeks, I managed, I could go back later and catch them when they weren't busy and have conversations with these traders. And initially this would just start out as, I'm buying this spice, what can I do with it? What do you do with this salt? What do you do with this ingredients? Ah, salted fish, how do I prepare that? And it led to so many really interesting conversations. And one of the reasons I wanted to work with salt is because it's so ubiquitous, it's everywhere, it's so mundane, yet somehow it has this really rich, deep and complex history.

And I was reading about how, well, actually so many cultures around the world have this ritual of working with salt as a way of creating protection, of purification, of, you know, like almost like spitting in the devil's eyes, click some salt in the devil's eyes and he can't see you. I was reading about how this is likely because those of us who are from pastoral traditions added salt to our vegetables and to our grains in order to stop them from spoiling. And so salt became, it became associated with this idea of preservation. And that led to it being associated with these rituals. Now, that's one explanation, but I love the idea that there is, you know, salt maintains our blood pressure levels, we need salt in our bodies. We all know we need to eat a certain amount of salt in order to stay well, but if we eat too much, then it, you know, becomes toxic for us. And so there's something about this being another landscape alongside which we co-evolved and learned to live with in this way that has become disrupted that to me felt very resonant with the themes of the project, which is, you know, we were asked to think about food sustainability and we decided collectively that the reason that we couldn't just talk about food sustainability as like, you know, maximize your resources, eat more biodiverse vegetables, shorten your supply chains.

Instead, what we decided was it was about the relationship to the foods, that that's what was missing for a lot of us and that's why we would maybe, I don't want to say over-consume and, you know, maybe there's a imbalance in the way that we eat, but of course this has to do with not just what we choose to do. This has to do with structural inequality and access and access to land and access to waterways and the specific political context to which each of us were speaking to and in which we were operating. And so we thought by starting with this ingredient, we could, you know, starting with an ingredient, we could each maybe open up these conversations in different ways. So I've had conversations in Kirkgate Market that have been about pepper, which Deepa has been working with in her context and cinnamon, which Samu has been working with in her context.

Deepa 24:12
I mean, I actually really like the way that this particular question is articulated because it gives a certain agency to, you know, things that don't always have the kind of agency that I think that we have tried to produce, in fact, you know, to highlight in our artwork, you know, can you hear a spice talk? What does it say? Can you listen to the plants? How do they wish to grow, right? I mean, if you prune them and train them and taught them to grow in a particular way, would they? Or are they the kinds of things that would just prefer to grow wild, a little bit like, you know, bougainvillea or something like that? I think that the way the question is asked has a nice harmony with what we've tried to do with this. It's also a kind of way of getting into the methodology, right, of how we thought about spices and plants and seeds as being inherent to a certain landscape. I think it was fairly early on when, you know, Kajal had spoken about how the paper we write on is a plant as well. The chair, the wooden chair we sit on is a plant as well. And so there are elements of plant life and the plant world that are all around us and that we must now, in the course of this work, we all felt I think the need to become more attuned to their presence and to create the sense of attunement in the work that we do ourselves. So just giving voice, making things that we generally tend to think of as being inert and inactive as active protagonists in this storytelling has been very much part of the way in which we thought about the project, conceptualized it and went about it methodologically.

That said, I want to say that I think we've all gone about exactly what we're doing in each of our locations a little bit differently. And that's part of what I find rich about this kind of an undertaking because we've not attempted at any point to say that we must do the same thing in all of these three different places, nor that, you know, we will end up producing the same kind of story for, you know, three different audiences. No, I mean, we've been quite happy embracing the fact that we will need to engage with location in an entirely different way. What voice gets given to an ingredient or, you know, a place or how we engage with the community or how we decide to tell or to bring all of these different stories together has been quite different in each location. And I'm hoping that that's something that really becomes very clear in the binaural sound mixes that we will wind up having and kind of placing side by side when they eventually get produced and placed side by side. You know, for me, it's at Eyemyth in February in Delhi and for others at different moments.

The protagonist, if I was to answer that question very simply and straightforwardly, is all of the above, right? I mean, and the stories they've told have been the ones that we know on some level. The stories of the Spice Road and so on are very well known. So on some level, it's easy, it's accessible, familiar. But I think we've also tried to go beyond those. We've tried to show that it's not just about the spice itself, which is only one tiny part of that whole plant. It's not just about that spice itself in one particular location, which is just one little part of the whole story that we would like to explore. And I don't know that in the scope of any artwork, we're going to be able to explore all of the different dimensions of everything, but we certainly wanted to gesture towards them.

We wanted to show that there are all of these different threads and all of these different directions in which one could go. And to open those imaginative possibilities out, I mean, I almost want to say that if I want to synthesise it in one phrase, it would be that, right? To be able to open out these different imaginative possibilities of engaging with the thing we think we know. Then, therefore, allow the spice or the ingredient, because we're not all talking about spices, right? Kajal's working on salt, I'm working on pepper, Samu's working on cinnamon, and to help them to express themselves, if you like, and to be able to point in these different directions of what all of their different histories are, all of the different communities that are linked together because of them, all of the different food waste and food practices that are connected because of them, and so on. It's a funny rewriting of an existing map, if I can put it that way. If I were to go and just reflect on pepper, it actually synchronises very well with what Kajal was saying, that we're each talking about a landscape. It's not a spice, it's not a spice root, which I think has been a little bit overdone. Everybody knows about it, and it's almost a cliche part of our knowledge about spices, is that they traveled on the spice road, et cetera, et cetera. But for us, we were trying to open up this landscape. in which the single ingredient becomes a focal point but also a method by which to reach into the entirety of this landscape and talk about the people who used this ingredient in different ways, who named it a certain way, and who thought about this ingredient in a certain way. How those ideas moved as well as the people, as well as the spices, and then therefore when they moved what became of them, what became of the whole story of that particular spice. And so then you realize then that your landscape is not just a local thing, it's not just in a single place, it's in a whole bunch of different places which are now connected by this kind of migratory movement. And again when I say migratory movement I don't just mean people, I mean ideas, I mean language, I mean translation, I mean adaptations of one kind or another. I mean in the whole conversation about atchaar which on some level is a kind of unifying thread for us all, but I think Kaajal is absolutely right, it is a sort of brined pickle basically, a way of preserving and saving things that are seasonal, abundant in a particular season and keeping them for later, instead of you know many people actually when they move outside of India will take an atchaar with them because they don't get the mangoes that they like to pickle with elsewhere. So it becomes a way of preserving stuff from home, of maintaining that thread and that link. And so you know talking about these particular ingredients was a way of being able to access all of these different dimensions of what we do when we move, how we adapt, how we take things, how we leave certain things behind, how it's okay for an atchaar actually to grow, and I mean that in some literal sense because it is a souring, as we say in Tamil, a Pulithaling souring process, it's a fermentation process. We can't take the microbes with us but we certainly can take the mangoes with us or find some equivalent in our new locations, and then they produce a pickle which is not exactly the same thing but is very close to what we would like it to be and it certainly keeps that thread on home, right, alive and intact and makes that adaptation possible.

When Kaajal picked salt, it's not a plant yes, but it grows, and that was the first thing that came to my mind is that you know these crystals are growing beneath our feet, so to speak, they come from the seawater and they grow. And so there's a way in which these landscapes, even though they may have inert objects, are alive and again they're moving and they're growing also. And can we become ourselves more attuned to these? Can we become alive to all of these different possibilities?

Can we start to see them? And I think ultimately what I would like in a takeaway, you know, if somebody was to listen to the soundscapes that we produce will obviously be different in different locations, but in mind for someone to listen and say, okay, well now I get the possibilities. And not everyone has to be followed through to its logical conclusion or whatever, but at least I sense that there is a lot more about the story that needs to be told.

And so Kaajal has done this a bit different methodologically than I have. For me it was, I think, the space of my work was more the creation of the soundscape itself. And it will also be in the creation of something we've not spoken about so far is actually the making of the seed paper and the making of, you know, the book that we envision being made out of the paper that's made from the seeds and the ingredients that we've been talking about, which then hold up the sound, right? So there's the seeds. There are these ingredients. Potentially there's plant matter in it as well. It produces a paper. The paper then becomes the thing, the receptacle, in which the sound, it gets housed. And so you're reading a book, but you're entering the landscape. I think ultimately that's the hope for this particular project.

So, you know, the way in which we gather people's voices or put them together, in Kaajal's case it's Kirkgate Market. In Samu's case it might be in a garden. In my case it's also been local markets, but approaching them in a slightly different way. But ultimately I think it's all just these landscapes that we want to open up.

Anna 34:12
Before we wrap up, I was wondering if any of you had any thoughts about the relationship between soil and food politics and how it can help us think about digital practices in more critical and sustainable ways.

Samu 34:38
It's been such a beautiful journey firstly, like being able to tackle, well not tackle, but like to investigate soil and food practices through digital and in a sustainable way, I guess. Because yeah, I think food systems and food migration in general, the topic is so sensitive and should be handled with care.

And so thinking about investigating that through the digital, it's also us trying to figure out how to create a space where the soil can exist in a much respected and sustainable way and manner. I think soil on its own teaches us slowness. It teaches us about different cycles and how extraction has consequences. And so when we think of digital futures, we, I feel like we should also think as people who are working with the land and so like gardeners with that in mind, like having to see or sort of think about digital practices being designed with more care and more long-term thinking rather than speed or profit or consumption, all of those things, like just to think about it in more of a regenerative way.

Deepa 36:33
There's one thing that I've been thinking about in the course of this project which might be relevant just to highlight and that is that you know what exactly do digital practices do to our soil. And I think it's important to ask that question because I don't think we've reckoned with these levels of reality right and or these, these levels of impact.

I think there was a slide deck that Dan shared in the beginning and then we shared it just before our conversation. I was too big for them and I was, you know, nodding to myself at several points because it's very easy for us to understand the impact of air travel let's say on climate change, or you know how we travel too much or use too much fuel or you know burn too much fossil fuel etc etc we get those connections, we get the implications of those kinds of practices and consumer practices on climate change. But we see digital practices as being a solution for them without understanding the impact the digital practices can also have on the very things that we're all concerned about. And so closing that loop, or this project as an opportunity to sort of close that conceptual loop to understand that even this has its own footprint. And even this has actually a pretty enormous footprint that we can try to reduce in a whole bunch of different ways which I think is really important.

I think we're only really reckoning now with what we have done to our soil, what our cities are doing to our soil. I think it's becoming clearer and clearer that soil health is extremely important for the production of food for the production of health, even, you know, I mean, there's sort of native knowledge confirmed later by science and so on. That you know children who grew up in farms who grew up with that sort of quote unquote dirty environment actually build very strong immune systems that help them to navigate life more healthily as they grow older. The importance of soil in fostering, you know, cross species interlinkages and you know mycelial communication and so on and so forth. The importance of farm practices in my own, you know, sort of research on rice, understanding how people talk about something called Pulichaman. Pulichaman means sour soil. Literally, it's a reference to the fermented quality of the soil that is necessary for a certain kind of range of microbial activity that then makes rice production so much easier. Right. I mean, because my research is on rice we've focused and spoken about that but I think that same insight applies to growing in general. And so we're starting to understand all of these things the importance and incredible importance of the of the soil and its health to so much of what we do, but I don't think we've fully reckoned with what we've done to our soil.

Deepa 39:34
Yeah, I read the other day I think it was a publication in forgetting now I think it was one of the major journals like nature of somebody talking about the city of Mumbai right or the big urban centers of our world actually sinking a little bit because of the rate by which we've extracted water and increase the weight on the land itself right and so there's something happening to the soil beneath our feet and it's not only the soil that we used to grow stuff it's the soil on which we build it's the soil on which we stand if the soil that sustains us in every sense of that term. And so I think what this project has done has also helped me to understand how else we might ask that question, and how else we might reckon with some of those connections which I don't think we've done enough to reckon with at all.

Anna 40:53
Thank you for listening to the Three Fields podcast. Three Fields is an international co-commission between Abandon Normal Devices, Fak’ugesi, Arts Catalyst, Fast Familiar, and Unbox Cultural Futures.

It is funded by the British Council's International Collaboration Grant and supported using public funding by Arts Council England.