Project Carrageenan @projectcarrageenan - Tumblr Blog

memory in milk puddings

Project Carrageenan presentation at Cuimhne symposium, An Lanntair, Stornoway, 23-24 April 2018.

Cuimhne combined academic thought, archive footage, making and live performance for a particular focus on memory, oral tradition and creativity. Project Carrageenan’s presentation focused particularly on the traditional harvesting processes and equipment, and culinary preparation of Carrageen in the Outer Hebrides using archival texts and material from the School of Scottish Studies Archive and Flora Celtica Archive.

#conference

Carrageen Apparatus

Tent Gallery Edinburgh, 18-20 January 2018

Carrageen Apparatus imagines and re-invents the harvesting equipment and culinary tools used by carrageeners. Playing on the idea of the makeshift, the crafted objects exist within a liminal space where myth and fact do not form a duality, but rather seem to hold a complicit role. They are informed by both archival research and our personal interactions with the seaweed, resulting in objects that are ready to receive new narratives.

The materials used to form the apparatus are primarily seaware sourced from Scottish shores, re-purposed, mended and transformed using preowned materials. The materiality of the exhibits reflects a way of life of those who would have interacted with carrageen on a daily basis, living by the shore and relying on what would have been available. The objects are accompanied by a series of photographic slides depicting the artists’ research and explorations at the shoreline and within the domestic.

#exhibition

#exhibition #apparatus

#folklore #ritual #performance

preparations for the offering of the carrageen pudding, Bragar, October 2017

various Carrageens found at various locations on Scotland’s coast

#research

presentation and exhibition of Project Carrageenan in postcard and audio and visual format at the ‘Postcards from the Anthropocene’ symposium and exhibition at the University of Edinburgh’s School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture 22-24 June 2017

[postcard text]

Project Carrageenan

"carrageenan never was and still isn't the formless textureless and odourless 'ghost' that it is for our average chocolate milk drinker"

(Lanfranco Blanchetti-Revelli, Sea Harvesters, Traders and Corporations, p.38)

This postcard shows an apparition of the Carrageenan Ghost as a skin made from pure carrageenan.

In its form as the additive E407, the Carrageenan Ghost hides in various processed foods. The additive becomes part of the way in which we understand and recognise food; the ghost enters our cultural subconscious.

Carrageenan also becomes the ghost of a disappearing local economy based around seaweed. The increasing demand for carrageenan, and the scale of a global market, necessitates carrageenan to be imported to Scotland. Carrageenan was originally derived from the seaweed Chondrus crispus which grows on the shores of Scotland.

The Chondrus crispus seaweed is also embedded in a fading oral folk culture that informs us of its traditional use in cooking and as a folk medicine to cure several ailments.

Intrigue also lies in the mysterious nature of carrageenan. Though the seaweed is widely dispersed along the coasts of Scotland, difficulties have been encountered in finding the seaweed that is the source of Carrageenan. It has become a mysterious, mythical, transformative being.

This postcard is extracted from Project Carrageenan, a wider investigation endeavouring to document the Carrageenan Ghost through a collection of images, archival folklore and made objects. This collection explores and imagines the various transformations and apparitions of the Carrageenan Ghost, the substance carrageenan and of Chondrus crispus, the seaweed which contains it.

#exhibition #conference

A recipe from our E407 dinner...

#recipe #cooking #E407

Most Carrageenan used nowadays is extracted from Kappaphycus alvarezii and Eucheuma denticulatum, rather than from Chondrus crispus.

source: FAO

#facts #research

“a craft derived from the curious properties of the Carrageen seaweed”

still from ‘Art of the Marbler’, 1970, Bedfordshire Record Office of Cockerell marbling

#craft

harvesting baby Carrageen

18 March, Isle of Lewis

photo: Alex Hackett

#field

Scottish tradition says that Carrageen is best bleached in the sun on a clover lawn and that it should be rained on thrice

‘Seaweed in the Kitchen’ Fiona Bird, 2015, p.26

#food #folk

Many of us can perhaps remember the time when extreme notions prevailed relative to the life-supporting power of jelly. No sooner was an invalid discharged from the doctor's hands than the nurse began to ply the patient with her jellies.

"Jelly." 1862.The Friend; a Religious and Literary Journal (1827-1906), Jan 18, 158. https://search-proquest-com.ezproxy.is.ed.ac.uk/docview/91086130?accountid=10673