Gossip and the Commons (2025)
with Kita Rancaño Ward

Within the framework of Walk&Talk – Arts Biennial 2025, Inês Coelho da Silva and Kita Rancaño Ward reimagine gossip as a vital form of ecological communication and cultural transmission across species in the project Gossip and the Commons. Investigating landscapes and multispecies communities, the artists reclaim gossip and the tradition of oral storytelling as vehicles for local knowledge, regenerative practices, and essential tools of interconnection across species and generations.

The project explores popular sayings, songs, stories, and other intangible forms of knowledge, conceiving them as commons that sustain social and ecological relationships. In collaboration with local neighbours, including the grandmothers of the project A Avó Veio Trabalhar, native plants, and Holstein-Friesian cows, the artists created an edible sculpture for the cows, presented and consumed by them, establishing a direct dialogue between knowledge, nourishment, and ecosystem.

Community workshops transformed folk songs and everyday interactions into vehicles of connection between humans, animals, and landscape. Within a regenerative cycle of giving and receiving, knowledge gathered through gossip and craft became food for the animals, who, by grazing, nourished the land, perpetuating a flow of care and interdependence.

From this practice emerged a multidimensional installation comprising a documentary video, the edible sculpture, benches designed for observation, and postcards for the circulation of stories, inviting the audience to actively participate in the transmission and expansion of these shared knowledges.

Commissioned by Walk&Talk - Bienal de Artes, Açores, PT

Photographs by Inês Coelho da Silva