The symposium The Invention of Enrichment: Dogs, Humans, Food, and Work is a research discussion in environmental imagination and desire.

At the heart of the dog-human relationship is food. But today, it’s not at all clear what follows from this well-rehearsed fact of humans and dogs sharing food. To try to understand the enormously complex thing that goes under the innocent name “dog food” one must disaggregate a bunch of rhetorically and semiotically different kinds of agency and infrastructure. As Lauren Berlant writes, about humans, “[T]he image of obesity as a phenomenon improvised by biopolitical experts needs to be separated from eating as a phenomenological act and from food as a space of expressivity as well as nourishment.” As more and more dogs become classified as obese, in the domain of biopolitical expertise, dog life will call for an ever-closer look at the complexity of food and the many critical frameworks and investigative methods it demands.

Keynote will be delivered by Margret Grebowitz and respondents will be Artan Sadiku, Elizabeta Sheleva and Slavco Dimitrov. The symposium is a part of the trilateral collaboration between artist groups in Prishtina – Kosovo, Skopje – North Macedonia and Sofia- Bulgaria.

The topics of the symposium are at the cross-section between environment, everyday culture and opens up a field or artistic re-invention and intervention in the human-nature-animal relationships. The symposium will enable local audiences from the three countries to share their views on environmental dynamics which are shaped by the human-dog relationships.