Empathy begins with acknowledging the position of our body in relation to the world. In As Above, so Below Mariana Sanchez Salvador & Rain Wu consider the macro and micro scales of our world to exercise empathy not simply towards a different body, but also across time and dimensions. Food is followed from past to present and into the future, and from the micro to the macro scale – the meal, the settlement, the landscape, the cosmos, down to the microbial and viral in our guts and in the air – in order to discover a new perspective on our world.

Food spans across all aspects of our lives, from the most profane everyday nourishment to the sacrifices that made an anthropological imprint on the collective psyche. It connects science and myth, known and unknown.

The film makes use of archive images and microscopic photography of edible substances – fruits, vegetables, grain, fish, vitamins – as a metaphor of the macro, to create a timeless, scaleless world.

Rain Wu is a British-Taiwanese artist and architect based in London. Her work is conceptually driven and materialises in different forms and scales, from drawing, sculpture, food performance to architectural installation. Her work has been exhibited at Sharjah Biennial, Taipei Biennial, The Palestinian Museum, London Design Biennale and Lisbon Architecture Triennale. She was one of the Designers in Residence at the Design Museum London in 2016, an artist in residence at The Van Eyck (NL) 2018–19, and she is currently an associate lecturer at University of the Arts London.

Mariana Sanchez Salvador is a Portuguese architect and researcher at DINAMIA'CET-IUL – Centre for Socioeconomic and Territorial Studies (ISCTE-Lisbon University Institute). Her research focuses on how the spaces we inhabit – from the city to the house – are transformed by the food we eat and by food-related activities, operating as a spatial design tool. She is the author of Arquitectura e Comensalidade (2016) and has published articles related to her research.