about

SPECULATIVE FOOD FUTURING

World food systems account for up to 29% of global greenhouse gas emissions through production, distribution, processing and waste(1). While ensuring adequate nutrition is a key principle of food security in Australia and globally (2), climate change presents new challenges for future food systems and communicators. There is now a “greater awareness of balancing the need to feed a growing population and maintaining environmental integrity” whilst, considering the “social aspects of how people interact with food” (3).

Fair Share Fare was established in 2016 by artists Jen Rae and Dawn Weleski (co-founder of Conflict Kitchen) to explore the future of food, in the context of the climate emergency, through research, collaborative + multi-platform creative works and community projects. Projects become data generators, solutionary sparks and help form communities around a problem.

We aim to:

• dispel myths and increase literacy around food justice;

• help decolonise thinking around food provenance, whilst advocating for food and land sovereignty;

• activate skills and knowledge sharing around food systems to support future food security; and,

• to reimagine a food system that should have been and still could be.

Since 2020, Fair Share Fare has been working collaboratively with the Open Food Network Australia on co-designing food systems with communities in Moreland and Nillumbik.

If you're interested in commissioning Fair Share Fare to develop a project or co-design food systems with your community, please get in touch.

Our ethos and protocol of understanding for food projects + events

Food is labour.  Food is knowledge. Food is technology.  Food is energy.  Food is medicine. Take what you need, enjoy and share with others. Come back for more, but waste not.

This is not catering.  Context is everything.  Food will be experienced. Expectations could be disrupted.

_____

 1.Vermeulen, S. J., B. M. Campbell and J. S. I. Ingram (2012). "Climate Change and Food Systems." Annual Review of Environment and Resources 37(1): 195-222.
2. For example, in 2015, world leaders at the UN unveiled the Sustainable Development Goals, providing a road map to mobilise efforts on 17 interrelated global challenges including sustainable food systems. 
3. PMSEIC (2010). Australia and Food Security in a Changing World. Canberra, Australia, The Prime Minister’s Science, Engineering and Innovation Council.

Jen Rae (Creative Lead and Director)
Dr Jen Rae is a Narrm (Melbourne)-based artist-researcher of Canadian Métis-Scottish descent. Her 15-year practice-led research expertise is in the discursive field of contemporary environmental art and arts-based environmental communication. It is centred around cultural responses to climate change, specifically the role of artists. Her work is engaged in discourses around food in/security, disaster preparedness and speculative futures predominantly articulated through multi-platform creative projects, transdisciplinary collaborative methodologies, and community alliances. Jen is the Director and Creative Lead of Fair Share Fare – where art, performance, disaster preparedness and cookery collide into positive disruption.

Jen is a lead artist-researcher in Arts House’s REFUGE project and a board member of the International Environmental Communication Association and the Creative Recovery Network (AUS). Jen Rae along with Maree Grenfell (Resilient Melbourne) recently led a 2-day Resilience Creative Lab with the City of Vancouver - a deep dive lab inviting First Nations, artists, emergency services, local government, philanthropist, academics and young adults to explore creative responses to climate related disasters in a localised context. She has lectured at the postgraduate level in socially engaged art and performance at Victorian College of the Arts and Deakin University.

Dawn Weleski (Co-founder and 2016 collaborator)
Dawn Weleski’s practice administers a political stress test, antagonizing routine cultural behavior by re-purposing underground brawls, revolutionary protests, and political offices as transformative social stages. Recent projects include City Council Wrestling, a series of wrestling matches where citizens, pro-am wrestlers, and city council members personified their political passions into wrestling characters; “I will not bomb Iran” (100 times), a curriculum designed and taught by Weleski to generate student-authored apologies on behalf of the United States; and Condi Undone, a public project at Stanford University and throughout institutions in East Palo Alto, Menlo Park and Palo Alto, CA and mockumentary on the life of Condoleeza Rice with a Rice lookalike narrating her role in the gentrification of East Palo Alto and increase in conservative policy at Stanford University with a script culled from hundreds of public opinions in the area. Weleski codirects Conflict Kitchen, a take out restaurant that serves cuisine from countries with which the U.S. government is in conflict, which has been covered by over 650 international media and news outlets worldwide and was the North American finalist for the Second Annual International Public Art Award and finalist for the Visible Award (international), both in 2015.
Weleski holds an MFA in Art Practice from Stanford University and has exhibited at The Mercosul Biennial, Brazil; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; San Jose Museum of Art, San Jose; Anyang Public Art Project, South Korea; The CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Art, San Francisco; Ft. Mason Center for Arts and Culture, San Francisco; Townhouse Gallery, Cairo; Festival Belluard Bollwerk International, Switzerland; The Mattress Factory Museum, Pittsburgh; and 91mQ, Berlin among others; has been a resident at The Headlands Center for the Arts, SOMA Mexico City, and The Atlantic Center for the Arts; and is a fellow at the STUDIO for Creative Inquiry at Carnegie Mellon University.