Umi no Oya, 2024, Ewen Chardronnet and Maya Minder
Umi no Oya, 2024, Ewen Chardronnet and Maya Minder

Preview Screening of “Umi No Oya”

Presented as part of the “Arts and Culture Project” by Otemon Gakuin University’s Faculty of Sociology in collaboration with Vitality.Swiss

The “Arts and Culture Project” organized annually by the Faculty of Sociology at Otemon Gakuin University aims to provide learning opportunities through arts and culture for students and the community, fostering local engagement. As this year’s focus is on themes such as “Reevaluating Life and the Environment” and “The Transformation of Food,” the documentary Umi No Oya will be screening on December 21, in collaboration with the Embassy and its Vitality.Swiss program.

Exploring New Perspectives on Life, Environment, and Food

As the realities of climate change intensify, there is an urgent need to fundamentally reconsider our relationships with life and the environment. How will the act of eating, which sustains us, evolve within this shifting context?
This year, Otemon Gakuin University’s Faculty of Sociology presents its annual Arts and Culture Project in collaboration with Vitality.Swiss. We are honored to welcome Swiss artist, chef, and Vitality Ambassador Maya Minder, alongside author and curator Ewen Chardronnet, to discuss these pressing themes. The event will feature a preview screening and discussion of Umi No Oya (2024), inviting participants to reflect on the “Reevaluation of Life and the Environment” and the “Transformation of Food.”

For information on the documentary Umi No Oya, please see here: Swiss Cinema Days and the report

Event Overview

Preview Screening & Talk Session: Umi No Oya (2024)
Arts and Culture Project of Otemon Gakuin University Faculty of Sociology

Date and Time:
Saturday, December 21, 2024, 13:00 – 16:00 (Doors open at 12:30, Screening at 13:00, Talk Session at 14:20)
Venue: WAM Hall, 2nd Basement Floor, Ibaraki City Gender Equality Center Rose WAM
4-7 Motomachi, Ibaraki City, Osaka 567-0882 

Speakers:
Maya Minder | Artist, Chef, and Vitality.Swiss Ambassador
Ewen Chardronnet | Author, Journalist, and Curator
Yosaku Matsutani (Moderator) | Professor of Otemon Gakuin University

Simultaneous interpretation available (English and Japanese)

Participation Fee: Free

Registration: Registration will be accepted on a first-come, first-served basis until December 20 (Friday),
through the form here: Registration form
Please note that depending on cancellations and social circumstances, additional selections or re-applications may take place
Inquiry: Cultural Promotion Division, Ibaraki City Phone: 072-620-1810 (9:00 – 17:00 PM)

Maya Minder (1983, CH) is an artist and chef working in the field of Eat Art. “Cooking thus transforms us”, is a framework she weaves like a strings through her work. Cooking serves her to reveal the metaphor of the human transformation of raw nature into cooked culture and she combines it to the evolutionary ideas of a symbiotic co-existence between plants, animals and humans. She creates entanglements between human commodities and animism of nature. A table of diversity, not yet digested. Following the Biohacker, Maker and Thirdspace movement she uses grassroots ideas, safe zones and citizen science into her field to enable collective story telling through food and cooking. Maya Minder lives and works in Zurich and is co-founder of the Open Science Lab at Zentralwaescherei Zurich. She’s a board member of Food Culture Days (Vevey, CH) and co-president of the Swiss Mechatronic Art Society - SGMK (Zurich, CH). With a Korean mother and a Swiss father with British roots, Maya Minder defines herself as a native of planet Earth. She’s currently ambassador for Vitality.Swiss - on the road to World Expo 2025 Osaka Kansai - program of the Embassy of Switzerland in Japan. https://sonmas.ch

Ewen Chardronnet (1971, FR) is an artist, author, journalist and curator. He is currently editor-in-chief of the bilingual web magazine Makery.info, The Laboratory Planet occasional newspaper and coordinator of the Creative Europe cooperation programs “More-Than-Planet” (2022-2025) and “Rewilding Cultures” (2022-2026). In his work, he is interested in practices, tactics and speculations that connect artistic research and scientific knowledge to the creation of social situations that intertwine discourses and shifts of perspectives in the very fabric of society. Since 2016, Ewen Chardronnet and Xavier Bailly (CNRS-Sorbonne, Roscoff Marine Station) lead the art & marine science platform Roscosmoe.org. Recent books include “Mojave Epiphanie - une histoire secrète du programme spatial américain” (Actes Sud - Inculte, 2016), “Space Without Rockets” (ed., UV editions, 2022).

Yosaku Matsutani is currently a professor in the Department of Sociology at Otemon Gakuin University in Osaka, Japan. He specializes in aesthetics, art and media theory, and visual culture studies. He works on problems of art practices since the aesthetic turn, the relationship between science, technology, and art, and the sensibilities common to various organisms and things. Recent articles include “Encounter with the Moon: Critical Reflections on JAXA’s “Lunar Farming” from the Perspective of Post-Earth Aesthetics,” and co-authored “Two Approaches to Human-decentred Design: Between Life and Matter”.

Workshops with Maya Minder in Japan

December 10, 2024, at the Consulate of Switzerland in Osaka (Swissnex Japan)

December, 2024 As a program ofthe exhibition Dancing with All Things—Ecology of Empathy at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa (Exhibition dates: Saturday, November 2, 2024 - Sunday, March 16, 2025)

Event details will be updated. Check each organizer’s page for the latest info.

Article’s cover:
Umi no Oya, 2024, Ewen Chardronnet and Maya Minder