In the Project Room of MIC Faenza, until April 26th, artist Itamar Gilboa presents “World of Plenty,” an installation that confronts one of the most striking paradoxes of our time: the coexistence of food abundance and global hunger. The project, curated by Alessandra Laitempergher, stems from a research line Gilboa has pursued for over fifteen years on food systems and consumption models, initiated with his “Food Chain Project.”
For this new work, the artist utilized functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to observe his own brain activity during fasting, transforming the collected data into three-dimensional models which were then translated into ceramic sculptures. In the installation, 260 white forms – corresponding to the number of people who die of hunger globally every fifteen minutes – occupy the space on a surface of tiles that reproduce sections of the artist’s brain. Alongside the sculptures, a film and a real-time counter introduce a temporal dimension that makes tangible the distance between global statistics and individual experience.
We spoke with the artist, tracing the process that led to the creation of “World of Plenty.”
Your artistic practice sits at the intersection of art, neuroscience, and technology. What led you to use functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate hunger?
“My practice is rooted in self-inquiry as a way to arrive at a shared understanding. I use my body, my habits, my memories, and my migrations as raw material, translating lived experience into works that move between personal subjectivity and collective condition. The methodology is both rigorous and intuitive: observing patterns over time, collecting traces of action, and distilling experience into form.”
Tell us more.
“When I started working on ‘World of Plenty,’ I wanted to shift the focus from the visible act of eating to the invisible condition that precedes it. I wondered if hunger could be understood – and perhaps even inferred – as a physical and neurological state, not just a social and political crisis. This curiosity led to a long research process and several fMRI sessions, which I undertook with neuroscientist Job van den Hurk, designed around my personal experience of hunger. I fasted and, inside the scanner, was exposed to food through sight and smell, looking at and smelling food while my brain activity was measured. Afterwards, I ate, returned to the scanner, and recorded brain activity again. By comparing these moments – fasting and eating – I was able to identify activity patterns that appeared specifically in the state of hunger, when the body is deprived of food and the desire becomes acute.”
“Those patterns became my raw material: a way to observe hunger from within and translate fleeting neural signals into a sculptural language.”
What does it mean, then, to “translate” brain activity into ceramic sculpture?
“Translating brain activity into ceramic is, for me, both a return to origins and a shift in register, from the immaterial language of scans and pixels to a material that carries history, weight, and tactility. Clay comes from the earth: the same soil from which food grows, where human life is formed, and to which we eventually return. In this sense, it brings together nourishment, DNA, labor, life, and death within a single substance. By choosing Italian clay, the work becomes materially rooted in the place where it is presented, connecting directly to MIC Faenza and the profound ceramic tradition that exists there.”
“Scale is essential. What begins as invisible neural activity becomes something you can stand next to, something your body can register. Scale transforms data into presence, and presence transforms information into experience. The white surface gives the sculptures an almost anatomical quality, as if they were specimens, allowing light and shadow to reveal their complexity while suggesting absence and fragility.”
You began working on “World of Plenty” in 2020. How did the global context of that time influence the project’s inception?
“I started working on ‘World of Plenty’ in 2020. At that time, I was already closely following the United Nations’ ambition to eradicate hunger by 2030 through the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Ending world hunger – goal number two, immediately after poverty eradication – seemed to me one of the most urgent global commitments of our time. Then the COVID-19 pandemic began to spread across Europe. It quickly became clear that the crisis would profoundly affect global food systems, especially in the most vulnerable regions. Supply chains were disrupted, economic instability increased, and millions of people already on the brink of food insecurity were pushed even closer to uncertainty.”
The work arises from a tension between abundance and scarcity, and even the title, “World of Plenty,” contains a paradox. Where does it come from?
“The title is taken from the 1942 war documentary ‘World of Plenty’ by Paul Rotha and Eric Knight, which already argued then that hunger was not caused by a lack of food, but by political decisions, economic systems, and unequal distribution. More than eighty years later, this observation remains disturbingly relevant. The title thus contains both a promise and a profound irony.”
In your opinion, how does the installation visually and conceptually convey this tension?
“In the installation, this contradiction unfolds through a series of interconnected elements. At its core are sculptural forms derived from my brain activity during an fMRI experiment after fasting. The brain clusters were first translated into digital models and 3D printed, and then transformed again into ceramic sculptures. This process already contains a paradox: highly advanced neuroscience and digital technologies are used to produce objects through one of humanity’s oldest techniques: ceramics. The base consists of ceramic tiles derived from flattened sections of my brain’s folding patterns, forming a kind of landscape or map that connects the artworks within a shared ground. A counter-clock marks the passage of time, imbuing time with a moral weight. It refers to the continuous number of people dying of hunger, transforming an abstract statistic into something immediate that unfolds in real-time. Rather than presenting hunger as a distant fact, the counter confronts viewers with its ongoing reality minute by minute as they move through the installation. It introduces a silent but persistent tension: the time it takes to look at the work, walk through the space, or pause to reflect is the same time in which lives are lost.”
“Alongside this, I created a porcelain sculpture of my own stomach after fasting. Covered in gold, it appears at first glance as a seductive object: beautiful, precious, and almost ornamental. However, its beauty is deceptive. The stomach is a place of desire, consumption, and need, but here it also suggests emptiness, vulnerability, and lack.”
What is the relationship between these elements and the film being projected?
“In the film, the viewer sees a long table covered with hundreds of food items, an image of overwhelming abundance that appears both familiar and excessive. At the center stands a solitary figure holding a brain that slowly melts. For me, this image introduces a sense of psychological and moral collapse within a landscape of abundance. The figure is surrounded by excess, yet what we witness is not nourishment or comfort, but disintegration. The melting brain suggests that abundance does not necessarily produce awareness, care, or balance; it can also generate numbness, detachment, and a loss of sensitivity towards what lies beyond one’s own field of vision.”
Your work often begins with scientific data and processes but arrives at deeply poetic outcomes. How would you describe the transition from data collection to building an emotional and immersive experience?
“What interests me is the transformation that occurs over time. Since my projects usually begin with intensive research and often require several years of development, I have time to live with the data, reflect on it, and test many different materials and forms before arriving at the final language of the work. I never want to limit myself to a single medium, because that freedom to experiment is one of the most exciting aspects of studio work. That research period allows the work to go beyond pure information and gradually become something tangible that people can feel and, hopefully, relate to. The transition from scientific data to poetic experience happens right there: through repetition, translation, trial and error, and the slow process of identifying the material and visual language capable of conveying not just information but also emotion.”
How do you experience the transition from a technological language to a traditional one like ceramics?
“Working with clay or porcelain doesn’t feel distant from technology to me. On the contrary, I experience it as a continuation of the same process in a different register. In the ‘Food Chain Project,’ for example, I already worked extensively with porcelain for a commission from the LAM Museum. So, when I started developing ‘World of Plenty’ with curator Alessandra Laitempergher for the Project Room of MIC Faenza, it was very natural to explore the possibility of working with Italian clay in that context.”
“The process itself moved through different worlds: from brain data to STL files, from digital scans to 3D models, from experiments with different scales and materials to the technical challenge of producing molds and finding the best way to realize the work in clay locally. It was a long journey, but also deeply exciting and rewarding. For me, that transition from a technological language to a traditional material like ceramics is not a contradiction. It is precisely the point where the work becomes most alive: where data acquires weight, fragility, texture, and a human presence.”
You collaborated with Aida Bertozzi to produce the sculptures. Could you tell us something about this collaboration?
“Working with Aida Bertozzi was essential for the realization of the sculptures. She was introduced to me by Claudia Casali, the museum’s director, who recognized the potential for a significant collaboration. Through Claudia, I also deepened my understanding of Faenza’s ceramic tradition and the extraordinary collection of MIC Faenza, which gave me a broader sense of the context and background of the process.”
“The collaboration first gave me the opportunity to spend time in the Faenza region and explore different local clays in relation to the visual and material result I was seeking. I ultimately chose white earthenware, a refined, porous, white-bodied ceramic, for its smooth surface and the precision it allowed.”
The sculptures rest on tiles that evoke sections of your brain. Does the idea of a “floor” suggest collapse, mapping, or territory?
“The base is composed of ceramic tiles derived from flattened sections of my brain’s folding patterns, forming a kind of landscape or map that connects the sculptures within a shared ground. It becomes a territory that connects us beyond individual and geographical boundaries. One of the things that struck me when I scanned and 3D printed my entire brain for the previous project ‘Body of Work’ is that, beyond the extraordinary beauty of its structure, it is actually very difficult to distinguish one human brain from another without very close examination. That realization stayed with me. In this work, the ‘floor’ suggests not so much a collapse as a common ground: a psychological and physical territory that we all inhabit, despite the boundaries and divisions we build around ourselves.”
If you had to summarize in one image or emotion what you hope visitors take away after experiencing “World of Plenty,” what would it be?
“I hope visitors leave with a deeply felt perception of scale in time; the realization that, within the span of an ordinary moment, an extraordinary human tragedy is already unfolding.”
