Menu
Produced during their time as a Junior Fellow at Artengine, Technically Soup was commissioned for our shared kitchen and lounge area. This area is an important space in the Artengine facility, where we come together around a table in as many configurations as their are members of our community. Walsh has been exploring the intersection of food and art in her practice for many years and we wanted them to bring this artistic perspective into our most social of spaces. Come by for a bowl of something we can technically call soup!
This single channel video piece was made for spaces that host, and facilitate collaboration and conversation.
Soup serves as a vessel for communal gathering, bringing individuals together around a shared nourishing experience. I believe that almost anything can be referred to as soup. And, no, I am not just talking about those food debates over cereal being soup, and hot dogs being sandwiches. Parties are soup. Conferences are soup. Any cluster of varying energies is a soup.
Everything happening in the space you are existing in right now is indeed a soup.
Expanding on the idea of soup as a network, I wanted to see what else it was capable of being.
Through a homemade liquid greenscreen, I layer colours and textures inspired by my visualization of graphing and internet networks and how those types of soup function as “nodes” and “edges”. Nodes represent individual components, while edges signify the relation between those individual components. It takes multiple interconnected nodes to create internet networks, mirroring the collaborative nature of both soup-making and data sharing. Acting as a bridge between the foundational makeup of the internet and soup networks, Technically Soup aims to fortify the implicit community that these elements conjure.
Technically Soup invites viewers to contemplate the expansive potential of soup as both a tangible substance and a metaphorical framework for understanding connectivity. By embracing the fluidity of definitions and the interplay between diverse elements, I seek to expand our perception of what constitutes food and how it can serve as a catalyst for community and
conversation.
Okay but really, isn’t this video Technically Soup?
Annika Walsh Biography
Annika Walsh is an emerging transdisciplinary artist who works with the relationships between food, identity, and community. They are currently a graduate student at the University of British Columbia, pursuing an MSc. in Integrated Studies in Land and Food Systems, and are an alumni of the University of Ottawa with a BFA. Annika’s work frequently reflects on their own authentic existence, deriving from various, sometimes colliding, established groups.
https://www.annikawalsh.com/