FOOD: A Convening - Active Cultures

Event Details

DATE: September 25, 2026 TIME: 9:30 AM – 4:00 PM

LOCATION: Philosophical Research Society

Registration

TICKET PRICE: $20

FOOD: A Convening brings together artists, cooks, farmers, writers, and organizers working at the intersection of food, art, and ecologies.

Across two days, the convening moves through performance, presentation, workshop, and shared meals, shaped by four distinct themes: food as medium, system, archive, and territory.

Together, we examine food as artistic medium and site of critical research, as ecological system and economic infrastructure, as archive of embodied memory and cultural preservation, and as territory: the ground on which land return and the transmission of plant knowledge are being actively reclaimed and restored.

September 25, 2026 at the Philosophical Research Society

The first day includes panel discussions, presentations, a workshop, and a breakout session, with beverages by senses coffee project and lunch prepared by chef Gerardo Gonzalez.

FOOD AS MEDIUM
What happens when food is not the subject of art, but the material of it? What kinds of political and cultural encounters become possible that other materials cannot stage?

A panel moderated by Nanette Orly, with Eva Aguila, Sita Kuratomi Bhaumik (People’s Kitchen Collective), and Heidi Ross. Performance by Adobo-Fish-Sauce.

FOOD AS SYSTEM
How does food connect us to the living systems we depend on, and what does it mean when those systems fail? How might fungal networks and rural communities reshape those conditions from within?

Workshop led by Aaron Tupac (Exploring the Mycoverse). Presentation by Jack Forinash (Blue Sky Center).

FOOD AS ARCHIVE
What does food remember, and what does it allow us to remember? What happens to this knowledge when communities are displaced and cultural traditions are interrupted?

A panel moderated by Jean Trinh, with Nadia Barhoum (Thurayya), Martin Draluck (Black Pot Supper Club), and Ginny Hwang (SSI YA GI).

FOOD AS TERRITORY
Who has the right to land, to food, to knowledge, and what does the work of reclaiming those rights look like in practice, not as a concept but as ongoing, daily work?

Presentation by Vincent Medina & Louis Trevino (mak-warép Ohlone Land Conservancy).

On Saturday, September 26 at the Feminist Center for Creative Work we will host Cocina Colaboratorio: Mesa Migrante, and FOOD: A Party. Both require separate registration.

About the Artists

Nadia Barhoum

Nadia Barhoum is the founder of a seed-saving and land stewardship initiative called Thurayya. She began farming in 2019, following a desire to be closer to the land in the way her family had been for generations in their small village of Al Malha, Palestine (they were ethnically cleansed from...

Cocina Colaboratorio

Cocina Colaboratorio is an ongoing mobile and on-site collective that brings farmers, scientists, creatives and cooks together around the kitchen table to connect, exchange knowledge and prototype new trans-disciplinary solutions to farming; a test ground for ideas that conciliate land restoration, conservation, food production and better livelihood in farming communities....

mak-warep Ohlone Land Conservancy

Vincent Medina and Louis Trevino are co-founders of the internationally recognized Cafe Ohlone, in Berkeley, and mak-warep Ohlone Land Conservancy. Thought leaders engaged with science centers and museums across the Bay Area, including the Lawrence Hall of Science, the California Academy of Sciences, the Chabot Space and Science Center, and...

Living Earth

By reimagining public art as a creative act of restoration, Living Earth is a collective project in cultivating meaningful connections with our immediate communities, histories, ecosystems, and the planet, ultimately rehabilitating our relationship with nature and ourselves.

Martin Draluck

Chef Martin Draluck is a Los Angeles–based chef, culinary historian, and founder of Black Pot Supper Club, a research-driven dining and archival project exploring Black American culinary and hospitality history. Through immersive dinners, exhibitions, public programs, and his growing collection of historic cookbooks, menus, photographs, and ephemera, he brings overlooked...

Jean Trinh

Jean Trinh is a James Beard Award-nominated writer whose stories have been featured in publications like Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and Food & Wine. She’s been writing about the intersection of food, culture, and arts for over a decade, covering everything from where to get the best...

senses coffee project

senses coffee project explores how our senses shape memory and create new ways of connecting with one another. Led by artist Mikey Muench, the project works across roasted specialty coffee, Thai seasonal snacks, household cleaning supplies, juice stains, drawing, and performance to revisit the flavors, smells, and rituals that structure...

Jack Forinash

As a rural dweller in his home community of the Cuyama Valley, California, Jack Forinash brings empathy and consideration to the practice of applied arts, architecture, community development, and good old-fashioned fun. He’s a cultural producer, community connector, builder, list-maker, spreadsheet artist, and amateur stargazer. In his director role at...

Adobo-Fish-Sauce

A Puerto Rican and a Cambodian walk into a kitchen. The kitchen is your heart. The food is made with food. The food is sometimes poems. Either way you are fed. Adobo-Fish-Sauce is an active choice to celebrate in the face of bitterness. It is responding to “Go back to...

Sita Kuratomi Bhaumik

Sita Kuratomi Bhaumik is an artist whose work has been called a “joyous political critique.” She sparks connection and tells the stories of migration and belonging through collaborative projects such as building and smashing a border wall out of piñatas and covering gallery walls in spices. South Asian and Japanese...

Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez

Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez is a curator, writer, and researcher working at the intersection of art and ecology. She is the founder and director of the Green Art Lab Alliance (established in 2012); a network comprising seventy art organizations across Europe, Latin America, the United States, Canada and Asia and of the...

Eva Aguila

Eva Aguila is a Mexican American interdisciplinary artist whose work examines the complexities of diasporic identity through video, sound, and installation. Born in Los Angeles as a first-generation American, Aguila centers her practice on oral histories of the Mexican diaspora, particularly drawing from her ancestral communities in rural Michoacán. Her...

Gerardo Gonzalez

Gerardo Gonzalez is a chef and Culinary Director of Salmon Creek Farm in Mendocino, California. His work spans restaurants, hospitality, wellness, retreats, and cultural programming, with an approach to food rooted in seasonality, nutrition, and a strong sense of place. Over the course of his career, he has developed culinary...

Aaron Tupac

Aaron Tupac (they/them) is a conservation mycologist and author of the upcoming book Meeting the Mushrooms of Los Angeles: Curiosity, Queerness, and How to Love a Fungus. They are the founder and organizer of Exploring the Mycoverse, a values-based fungi-inspired community in Los Angeles focused on building better relationship with...

Ginny Hwang

Ginny Hwang (she/her) is a Los Angeles-based garden designer specializing in edible and native plants with an emphasis on promoting biodiversity and closed-loop practices. She is 1/5 part of SSIYAGI (“seed story”), a collective that, with support from the artist-run non-profit GYOPO, generates programs to amplify immigrant stories about food,...

Heidi Ross

Heidi Ross is a chef and interdisciplinary artist who uses food as a medium across performance, sculpture, sound, and installation. Working with food as both a living material and collaborator, she transforms the everyday acts of cooking and feeding into artistic process and participatory experience. Her practice centers curiosity and...

About the Philosophical Research Society

The Philosophical Research Society is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit institution founded in 1934 as a repository of multicultural wisdom sources and a center of arts and learning. The mission of PRS is to study, conserve, teach, and publish knowledge of the principles of philosophy, religion, science and art, from all cultures and throughout history, in a universal and nonsectarian way. PRS provides an educational center, a public art and performance space, publications, and an esoteric philosophical research library to benefit all who seek the wisdom to live in harmony with themselves, their communities, and the wider world.

Credits

FOOD: A Convening is supported in part by the California Arts Council, a state agency, with the generous support of Sarah and Joel McHale, Kim and Keith Allen-Niesen, Betsy Greenberg and Steve NyBlom, and Joaquín Vargas M. In-kind support is provided by the Kimpton Everly Hotel, RG|MX, and William Grant & Sons.

Active Cultures is sustained through the generous support of the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture; the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs; the Vera R. Campbell Foundation; the Getty Foundation; Evans Hankey and Brooke Lane; the Jerry and Terri Kohl Family Foundation; the Maurice Marciano Family Foundation; the Offield Family Foundation; Teiger Foundation; James Cohan Gallery; C O U S I N S; Who Wants To Be A Millionaire/ABC; Active Cultures’ Board of Directors; the Members Circle Annual Fund; Green Art Lab Alliance (GALA); and the Los Angeles Visual Arts (LAVA) Coalition.