Metabolism is the process through which an organism transforms what it ingests in order to generate energy and sustain life. This exhibition takes that idea as a starting point to think of the archive as a metabolic system: a space where images, texts, memories, and documents are consumed and transformed, generating new readings that make other narratives possible. Just as food passes through different processes of transformation that alter the body, the archive undergoes interpretive and recontextualizing processes that change the way we understand the past, thereby shaping how we comprehend the present and imagine the future.

The projects brought together in Metabolisms stem from the idea that food not only guarantees subsistence, but also shapes social structures, cultural imaginaries, and power relations. Food appears as a territory where both intimate and collective dimensions are intertwined. Each project approaches the archive as a space in constant change, where food practices are recovered and interpreted through new perspectives.

The artists work with historical documents, family narratives, consumer objects, oral traditions, and situated forms of knowledge to show how food acts as a cultural machine that shapes subjectivities, identities, and forms of relation. The archive ceases to be a static container of the past and becomes an active space, traversed by processes of transformation, where relationships with food reveal historical, affective, and political structures that shape our everyday experience. Food becomes a material through which to think about how societies digest, transform, and metabolize their own history.

Home is made up of flavors and rituals, where eating means more than just having a meal. When we talk about food, we talk about stories, memories, and experiences that cross places and generations. Food nourishes memory, identity, and bonds that shape the story of who we are.

The works gathered here look at food as a ritual that keeps history and identity alive, reimagined, and shared. From the communal Ramadan table in Cairo to intimate family recipes in Greece, from archives of migration to mythic reinterpretations of the Lotus Eaters, each project reveals how food shapes our individual and collective memory.

Here, “home” is not a fixed wall but a practice of sharing, continuously reimagined with every meal, every story, every bite.