Hand-painted ceramic pieces, handwritten wall text
50 x 50 x 2 cm


Who are the hungry? represents the first question in Asunción Molinos Gordo’s research into explanations for food poverty and illustrates the population sector who are deprived of stable access to food. It shows that it is primarily farmers themselves who fall victim to inadequate access and, as with other works included in the series, draws on mathematical illustrations to deliver her findings, conducted whilst on residency at the Delfina Foundation in London in 2014. The work itself is made up of four different ceramic pieces, and combines different histories of ceramic-making from the farming communities in Spain and Egypt where Molinos Gordo partially undertook her research. Her use of blue and white china, a form of ceramic painting usually carried out by hand, is part of her broader conceptual and material concern to highlight the forms of manipulation that contribute to the financial structures which characterize and control the global food system, as well as the available data around it. All of the works in the exhibition of which this was part, Hunger: A Man-made Object at Travesia Cuatro Gallery in Madrid in 2014, were crafted in some way. The inequalities which define the relation between where food accumulates and is extracted are viewed concretely by Molinos Gordo as artificial, represented by the array of both hand-crafted, machine-constructed, and computerized objects in her practice. 
– Elsa Gray