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 , Manon Briod & Mathieu Pochon, foodculture days , TETI Group and SAE Greenhouse Lab. Together, we unfolded 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, explored the invisible textures of the soil, its living organisms, and prophetic qualities. How can the unseen layers of the underground be made visible? What spectral presences insist on being revealed to the inhabitants above? How do we negotiate the pull of mythic exploration and industrial extraction, the force of the global and the lure of the local? The dinner returned to Orpheus and Eurydice, combining readings with topical dishes echoing the chapters of the first underground section in Mobile Soils. A collective incantatory address was to be produced during the event.

“Ground”, the second dinner in the series, explored 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. How to turn the relations of a greenhouse into a social, educational and cultural space for interpersonal relations, embodied gestures and non-production? How does soil nurture or feed us – and what do these processes look like? We understand soil as a body of knowledge, containing many (hi)stories. This dinner was a sensory exploration and haptic experience.

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

“Overground”, the final dinner of the series examines the circulation of plants and nutrients at ground level, questioning the transit of plants and seeds through various terrains. Traversing beyond the subterranean into the plane in which we most frequently encounter plant matter, the dinner investigates the cycling of nutrients amongst plants, illustrating the circulatory forms inherent to cultivation. With the participation of Grace Denis, Anne-Laure Franchette, Paloma Ayala, Kenza Benabderrazik and VOLUMES.

Using various texts from the final chapter of the publication Mobile Soils as a point of departure, the dinner proposed a playful and interactive methodology to consider these thematics while simultaneously delving into a research of the circulatory systems in practice at the SAE Greenhouse Lab, examining the role of specific plants as well as illuminating the value of nitrogen in such systems.

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.

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” in September 2023.

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.

In September 2023, 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.