HCMC – SURVIVALISM: Eating the Apocalypse By ‘The Weather Bureau’

Sat 30 Nov 2013
Talk: 5.30 pm
Pop-up exhibition: 6.30 pm
San Art Laboratory

From the organizer:

Based on their ongoing exploration on using food as material in recreating and photographing natural disasters, ‘The Weather Bureau’ (represented in Saigon by Lena Cobangbang) is prompted by the recent ravage of the Southern islands of Visayas in The Philippines. The overwhelming call for international awareness in coping with climate change and the everyday struggle one faces amidst the crisis brought on by natural disasters and social weathering (wars, economic embargos, economic policies), ‘The Weather Bureau’ decided to make an installation that refers to the tenuous relationship between concepts of survival , preservation and consumption. In this installation the refrigerator is used as a metaphorical and visual platform for their objects and tableaus. Composed of jars of preserved and fermented vegetables and fruits, carved and composed as idyllic postcard rural landscapes; apocalyptic scenarios of cooked food but sealed in the freezer compartment – all is sealed in posterity for their picturesqueness or kept for future consumption. The wealth and diversity of the food culture of Vietnam provides a veritable source for exploration for this artistic duo. Examining ideas of conflict between hunger and waste, amplified further in ‘The Weather Bureau’s physical distance from the current crisis of their homeland, this project cynically refers to general worldwide hunger brought about by social and natural change, which with time, perhaps brings us closer to an apocalypse or total dystopia.

ABOUT ‘THE WEATHER BUREAU’

‘The Weather Bureau’ designs propositionary structures and conditions for an ideal state of utopia. They build these designs from seemingly failed plans of defunct totalitarian states. They seek to re-adapt/ rehabilitate in order to question the possibility of a utopia, which perhaps is just a nowhereland in timeless stasis. Founded in 2010 by Lena Cobangbang and Mike Crisostomo, who started collaborating as production designers and product stylists for ad virals, print, packaging designs and stage sceneries. Their vision as ‘The Weather Bureau’ is to picture essences of the ideal as inherently dictated by the constraints of the form, illustrating perhaps an ideology in plasticity.

‘The Weather Bureau’ are the second artist-guests to take part in ‘Prod/Ponder’, the artist-in-residence program as part of ‘Conscious Realities’, a 3 year initiative bringing a cross range of interdisciplinary artists and thinkers from South East Asia, South Asia, Latin America and Africa to Vietnam.