Spring News
Dearest friends, colleagues, and lovers,
This is a time of growth, movement and change as the buffalos on the outskirts of Istanbul are roaming and their pastures preparing for the 2nd Buffalo Festival that will take place on 1 June; farmers across Sicily and Puglia are planting seeds to enhance food security in the face of drought and growing heat stress and CLIMAVORE restaurants in Skye and Raasay are gearing towards serving millions of oysters and mussels that will be transformed into Bivalve Murals and tiles. That and much more below!
CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA Food Action Awards
We are excited to share this open call with you and hope you circulate it amongst your friends, peers and colleagues. In order to advance food systems in the new seasons of the climate crisis, CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA has launched the 2024 Food Action Awards. The call is open to international practitioners, collectives and researchers in the areas of architecture, visual arts, food studies, farming, environmental humanities or any other related discipline. The aim is to support infrastructural prototypes, field trials, land-worker solidarity networks, BIPOC farming initiatives, queer ecologies or microclimatic environments among other strategies towards building alternative diets that benefit human and nonhuman nourishing.
The first award, Research Action, is open to those with at least five years of practice. This award of 25,000 GBP includes all fees and production costs.
The second award, Emerging Practice, is open to recent RCA graduates (within the last six years). This award of 15,000 GBP includes all fees and production costs.
To read about participation and submission guidelines go to the CLIMAVORE website, RCA website, or download the Open Call PDF.
The CLIMAVORE Assembly
In October 2023, we gathered over 250 farmers, curators, policymakers, artists, chefs and growers at the CLIMAVORE Assembly to debate new cultural and artistic tactics for ecologically driven action and policy making. It was a shared effort to reimagine the role that museums and cultural platforms have, as agents of transformation in food and agricultural systems within the climate crisis. Temporarily occupying two landmark sites in Rome–Museo delle Civiltà (Museum of Civilisations) and Campidoglio (the seat of the City Senate)–the Assembly brought together a diverse set of voices to think, contend and question our collective role, as cultural producers, farmers, policy makers, activists, researchers, educators, thinkers, cooperatives, in addressing the broken food system. Over three nights and two days of presentations, workshops, debates, meals, dances, and impromptu conversations we worked to find common ground between the manifold participants. Many ideas, agreement and dissent emerged around the role that cultural production has in a just transition of our food system towards networks of solidarity across the Mediterranean and beyond. The Assembly established an exciting collaboration between farmers and CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA and we are excited to share more about it in the coming months.
Read the CLIMAVORE Assembly Summary of Thoughts and Actions or watch the short summary video
Bivalve Murals
In Skye and Raasay, the work of CLIMAVORE continues with exciting developments. Since 2019, CLIMAVORE has been collecting waste shells from partner restaurants in the islands of Skye and Raasay, and reconfiguring them into a new material for a series of artworks by Cooking Sections. Made out of crushed seashells and Skye’s water, they consist of murals celebrating the future of the coast and the tidal commons. Born to support alternative aquacultures, the five unique murals are like the two shells of an oyster or a mussel: each commissioned panel has a mirrored twin. One will be installed in a public location in schools and community halls on the two islands while the other will enter an accessible art collection. Similar to how towns are twinned, we see these murals as umbilical cords feeding and supporting each other. Interested to learn more about the project watch this video or get in touch!
Becoming Shellfish at Harvard GSD
Last month, Daniel presented our lecture Becoming Shellfish; Architectures of Intertidal Cohabitation at Harvard GSD. The talk focuses on our ongoing work in Skye and its tidal zone, a liminal space that challenges the ecological, legal and financial thresholds of coastal areas. Following CLIMAVORE, a framework that investigates ways of metabolising climate breakdown, these littoral spaces are at the core of entanglements between risk and social security, profit margins and contamination struggles, geological processes and weather events; between what is used and what is refused. Thinking with waste seashells and beach-cast seaweeds allows us to expand the possibilities of caring for coastal ecologies while sensing and monitoring human actions affecting them. As awareness about the environmental footprint of construction and the ‘mitigation’ of its associated toxicities increases, transitions to other forms of building may connect to materials from intertidal origin that can also contribute to addressing the broken food chain. Seaweeds and bivalves have been key in human and nonhuman diets, and used as building substrate across geographies over millennia. Their role in providing nourishment and shelter has supported coastal dwellers to invent unique forms of collective usership through cultivation, harvest, sourcing, processing; and building techniques such as thatching, cladding, insulation, and plastering. Both an ingredient and a material, they can advance an architecture for the tidal commons.
MANDA FESTIVALI 1 June 2024
In just a few weeks we will gather together in Istanbul with herders, musicians, kaymak producers, chefs and the residents of Istanbul to celebrate the 2nd Buffalo Festival on 1 June 2024.
The Manda Festivali is an annual gathering, celebrated every year since 2022. It highlights the presence and permanence of both water buffalo and herders in Istanbul, while preserving the historic food heritage of such practices. Bringing together local herders, musicians, environmentalists, artists, biologists, cheese makers and the general public, the festival offers walks, performances, workshops, and tasting of buffalo milk products. In its third year, the festival offers Istanbul’s residents, food producers and ecologists an opportunity to come together and cherish the wetlands and the buffalos and the herders that protect them.
Through these different activities, Water Buffalo Commons proposes a prototype for how post-industrial landscapes within urban peripheries can be rehabilitated into productive ‘food-belts’ that feed the city, through the creation of plural economies, including culinary and cultural tourism to help transform and safeguard ecosystems for future generations.
Water Buffalo Commons is a project developed as part of CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA which reimagines foodways for drylands and wetlands in the climate crisis. It advances ecological networks to produce new knowledge and action towards spatial justice. For festival and buffalo updates follow CLIMAVORE on Instagram
Klima Biennial Opens this weekend
Songs for the Changing Seasons is an exhibition curated by Filipa Ramos, and Lucia Pietroiusti as part of the newly inaugurated Klima Biennial, Vienna running between 06.04. – 14.07.2024. The exhibitions brings together an international group of artists to reflect on the myriad ways, at once concrete and poetic, in which art is addressing the realities, effects and consequences of planetary transformation. Songs for the Changing Seasons considers forms of love, attention, repair and grief that meet with ecological challenges and damages. Assuming environmental transformation as a reality, the exhibition looks at where, when and how trouble is felt and expressed, and how art offers vital ways to articulate, interpret and cope with this trouble. As part of the exhibition we are presenting Salmon: Feed Chains the third and last part of the trilogy When [Salmon [Salmon Salmon]]. Read all about it here.