Eating

Every third Friday of each month, the SAE Greenhouse opens its doors for Bar*tering.

This monthly gathering provides an opportunity to collectively reconsider and explore Food as a common resource, aiming to de-commodify and reimagine our practices related to food consumption. The BAR*tering community brings forth their abundance, offering whatever they have or desire. Together, participants engage in sharing drinks and food, swapping seeds and sprouts, exchanging recipes, and conducting taste tests for various food experiments. It fosters cycles of reciprocity in nourishment.

Bar*tering is a wonderful occasion to connect diverse practices and exchange ideas with individuals passionate about food and agricultural systems. This monthly event provides an open space for creative and delicious experiments. Over the past months, we’ve had the pleasure of tasting the delightful fermentations crafted by Patricia Nydegger, some of which incorporate harvested products from our planting beds!

This series of three dinners is a collaboration between Arvae (https://www.arvae.ch/ ), Manon Briod & Mathieu Pochon, foodculture days (https://www.foodculturedays.com/en/ ), TETI Group (https://www.tetigroup.org/ ) and SAE Greenhouse Lab. Together, we will unfold the three chapters of the publication “MobileSoils” by TETI Press: investigating the mineral and rooted discussions of the underground, looking at the layered and planted conversations on the ground, and finally exploring the circulating patterns across the overground.

“Underground”, the first dinner in the series, explores the invisible textures of the soil, its living organisms, and prophetic qualities. How can the unseen layers of the underground be made visible?

«Ground», the second dinner in the series, explores the dynamics of “giving and taking”, “production and consumption”, “human beings and machines”, “linear and circular”, addressing food and agricultural practices and through scientific and socio-political questions.

The third dinner “Overground” will be Organized by the Food Culture Days on September 23rd – More info to come.

These events took place with the support of Pro Helvetia and Migros Pioneer Fund.

The collective Cocinas Alterinas ( with Gabriela Aquije Zegarra and Mayar El Bakry ) explored nourishment and care with northern winter (seamless) scarcity, in synchronicity with cooking methods and flavours from the Nile desert and the Andes dry season. Restitute value to slow-cooking, through diasporic and indigenous knowledge from the global south. Thinking through flavour, acting through regenerative ways of cooking against climate emergency.

The project Remapping Zurich offers an alternative guide for Zurich. This digital platform proposes a decolonial memory culture of the city, enabling people to engage with different layers of (neo)colonialism, racism as well as with actions of resistance to various oppressive structures and possible practices of decoloniality. It offers historic context as well as decolonial and anti- racist strategies, that were developed as an alternative response to ongoing colonial and racist remnants in the city of Zurich.

In July 2022 the project and the content of the newly created platform (https://remappingzurich.ch/ ) was presented to a broader audience in the SAE Greenhouse

For the International Network for Urban Research and Action Conference (INURA). Claske Dijkema, Senior Researcher at swisspeace and lecturer at the University of Basel, responsible for a seminar on “Decolonising the Swiss urban landscape” in the MA Critical Urbanisms, invited the participants of the workshop “Getting rid of the M-word?” to the SAE Greenhouse.

Together with Maria Ordonez, we presented the work of the collective Decolonize Zürich and the Remapping Zurichproject (presented in june 2022 in the Greenhouse).

With the participants, we drew a map of an imaginary city and how it is linked to colonialism (who). We introduced the topic of micropolitical aspects of colonialism, shifting the reflection to the level of the body, following feminist theory.

For the Vienna Design Week, the Kompost Studio with Michelle Skelsgaard Sørensen & Sebastian Reichmann and Regina Idiartegaray organised the Urban Food & Design Symposium, with the theme of “The City As A Resource” on Friday 22 September.

An urban innovation journey that explored topics such as design, urban food culture, sustainability and hospitality. Kenza Benabderrazik opened the day and provided a short presentation on post-growth for food systems, the commons, care and transformative journeys. Kenza moderated the conversation on Urban Soil with the artists Grace Denis, Omer Polak, and the Pony Earth team.

On Friday 29 September, the Consulate of Switzerland in Venice hosted the 2023 edition of Snack the System in collaboration with Bites of Transfoodmation.

Kenza was part of a panel discussion on Food and Cities and moderated the workshop with Carolina Tockars Wernick as a continuation of “Collage Partage”, initated with arvae in June 2023.

This was an opportunity to reflect on the future of Food Systems through the intriguing connections between Art and Food.