Food Landscapes

Abstract8 was commissioned by Associate Professor and Researcher Dr. Joshua Zeunert to create a vibrant and eye-opening virtual video archive, Food Landscapes, that allows users to navigate a variety of media including 360-degree drone photography, interactive 3D food models, an interactive globe, and much more.

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The premise of Food Landscape is to connect the foods we eat with the landscapes that produce them. It features a diverse array of agricultural landscapes and commercial food-producing sites from across the Australian continent. Viewers are invited to reflect on their food choices through a collection of agri-food videos that span all states and territories, encompassing all commodities and major industries, and covering all scales of commercial farming.

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For an enhanced experience, viewers are encouraged to pair the exhibition with their meal of choice. Sit back, take a bite, and contemplate the origins of the various flavors, textures, plants, and animals you're consuming. Each mouthful and interconnected video links you with different locations, agricultural practices, communities of farmers, pickers, processors, and packers, as well as diverse catchments and soil types, and a range of environmental, health, social, economic, and animal welfare implications.

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The archive boasts more than 880 food landscape clips captured by Dr. Zeunert, totaling over eight-and-a-half hours of footage.

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Dr Zeunert's work is not intended as a critique of farmers. Instead, it challenges the constraints imposed on Australian farmers by corporate-influenced and neoliberal government-constructed agri-food systems. The overarching message of this comprehensive collection of footage is that Australia's agribusiness systems prioritize profit over the planet and people. The exhibition raises the question: How long can this approach be sustained?