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THE KITCHEN SINK; (2010); Lili White; digi; TRT: 11.24
Bombarding you with information about the Earth and our food, that straddles the physical and metaphysical stratum, presenting implications that stretch between humor and horrific reality.

What was your creative process with this film?

I wanted to bombard the viewer with information about the Earth and our food, that straddled the physical and metaphysical stratum, to present implications that stretch between humor and horrific reality. Using views inside and outside my apartment, and different fruits and vegetables, an image-collage was built from the subjects presented in a text, whose poetic form is a kind of expanding multiplicity of potentials and encounters and juxtapositions and resonances.

All in all, The Kitchen Sink embodies the idea of plant EARTH as our sanctuary, articulating the intersection between nature and civilization; suggesting fissures between human and natural infrastructure. Its form grew in a “more, more, more” delivery that acts as an assault, like much of the violence found in human behavior.

A lot of the film centers on the “poppy” became a particularly interesting plant to use, as it has a myriad of functions, including that of a major addictive drug, its use in a poem about WWI, In Flanders Fields. So it acts as the force that joins together the subjects of food, war, and exploitation.

Other references include the following, gleaned from newspaper stories, the arts and scientific facts:

• The cycle of nature, and enactments of a ritualistic sort
• The risk of bees becoming extinct
• Agriculture and its relationship to charcoal and fossil fuel production
• Intricacies about famine, war, human consumption
• Details about vegetables
• Poppy crops found in oil producing regions
• Russia’s crop failure and peat fires in 2010
• Mono cropping
• Monsanto’s relation to seeds, genetic engineering, and business practices
• Dr. Rupert Sheldrake’s take on current issues of food production
• Excerpts from poems (In Flanders Fields, Oysters)
• Homage to film history images: Charlie Chaplin’s table ballet in The Goldrush and Melies’ Trip To The Moon
• The Chinese radical for “plant sprout” resembles a fork use for digging the ground and an eating implement used by Western society
• The Pleiades star cluster: used by ancient humana for planting information
• Various Goddesses, especially the Moon Goddess Diana/Artemis, who reflects light and has been used to symbolize American commerce as agriculture. Her attributes of gas flame and waterfall, used in Western art’s first installation by Marcel Duchamp, are included here.

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