Broadcasting from Crown Heights, MOLD and Yardy World's short film is a collective message from Brooklyn about food sovereignty, resilience and culture during this precarious period of both pandemic and revolution.
Inspired by 90’s MTV programmes, TikTok videos, the powerful video work of artist Arthur Jafa, and Jenn Nkiru’s “cosmic archaeology,” the film constructs a narrative about place and participation through a series vignettes, while challenging the conventions of cooking shows by using black pop culture and historic references as moments of friction against how we understand imagery and viewership.
By sharing the ways that individuals and communities in Brooklyn have responded to the anxieties of system collapse with networks of care and radical imagination, the film invites viewers to become active participants in an inequitably designed food system that only has space for consumers. The text from MOLD’s manifesto, Your Mouth Has Power (2019), which champions the creation of hyperlocal food ecologies, will be a portal to enter into this field of ideas and will provide a scaffold for drawing together disparate actions, ideas, places, and collaborators emanating from our neighbourhood to yours.
MOLD (thisismold.com) is a critically-acclaimed print and online magazine about designing the future of food. Through original reporting, MOLD explores how designers can address the coming food crisis by creating products and systems that will help feed 9 billion people by the year 2050. In addition to the website and a self-published bi-annual print magazine, MOLD hosts events and exhibitions, works with next generation food and lifestyle brands, and commissions products from emerging designers. MOLD has shown at the London Design Museum, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, and is currently part of "Designs for Different Futures," which debuted at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2019) and is now on view at the Walker Art Museum.
Chef and artist DeVonn Francis is making waves in the culinary scene. He is the founder of Yardy World, which is a one of a kind hospitality company. Francis is a first-generation Jamaican American. His background is in design and performance studies, from his time at Cooper Union. Since founding Yardy World in 2017, Francis continues to use his culinary practice to explore the role of food and art in Caribbean culture. Yardy World has gone on to produce experiential dinner parties, create brand campaigns, and develop activations in order to redefine and reaffirm the importance of diversity and inclusivity in the New York landscape.
