Hosted at Serendipity Arts Festival 2024
Concept by Priya Mani
More about the project here

The Visual Encyclopaedia of Indian Foods (VEIF) Experience was a multi-sensory, immersive project at Serendipity Arts Festival that blended visual art, culinary heritage, ingredient storytelling, and interactive technology. Created by artist and researcher Priya Mani, the installation invited audiences to engage with everyday Indian ingredients in new, reflective, and imaginative ways.

Using an ingredient-led narrative structure, VEIF revealed both the visible and invisible layers of meaning within the foods we cook and eat daily. Ingredients carry tacit cultural knowledge — about medicine, seasonality, biodiversity, ritual, and community practices — much of which is preserved in communal food almanacs and oral traditions, vital for imagining regenerative food systems of the future.

Key highlights included:

• An interactive visual installation that reframed quotidian ingredients through photography, video, and image-making techniques, encouraging viewers to reconsider food as both sustenance and cultural archive.

• A multi-sensory environment that challenged conventional perceptions of everyday cooking and its relationship to identity, ecology, and knowledge systems.

• A daily series of ingredient-focussed talks hosted from 16–22 December, each day spotlighting a different food item and its deeper cultural and ecological narratives:

  • 16 December: Rice

  • 17 December: Coffee

  • 18 December: Chillies & Triphal

  • 19 December: Bread

  • 20 December: Coconut

  • 21 December: Sugar

  • 22 December: Onion

Each talk served as a reflection on the histories, conservation practices, and evolving meaning of these ingredients, opening up layered conversations around gastronomy, memory, and climate resilience.

About Priya Mani:
Priya is a multidisciplinary artist, food culture researcher, and founder of Cookalore, a platform exploring culinary heritage through art, documentation, and food-based experiences. Her work interrogates how everyday food practices encode knowledge systems and cultural identity.