FOOD RCA
London, UK / 29th October – 2nd November 2012
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An interdisciplinary, cross-departmental workshop run for AcrossRCA, a week of collaborative projects exploring new ideas, approaches and skills at the Royal College of Art.
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The week was very much about practical, hands-on learning, using food, and the idea of the kitchen cycle as a way in to discussing and drawing analogies between many other subjects from geopolitics, the idea of linear progress and perpetual growth, Monoculture, Permaculture design, to performance.
The starting point was a field trip to Norfolk, sourcing food, foraging, and visiting farms and people engaged in production on the historic Holkham and Salle estates, to gain a broad perspective on growing from small-scale production to large-scale input-intensive industrial agriculture; Monoculture to Permaculture. We spoke to Katie in the Walled Garden, Paul director of farming at Holkham, Jolyon churchwarden at Salle, and Philip, a near-self-sufficient violinmaker and beekeeper.
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This was not only an opportunity to re-connect with where our food comes and reiterate the importance of direct sensory experience, but also a group-building exercise.
Nissa Nishikawa led movement workshops helping to facilitate a process of re-sensitization both to ourselves and to the natural world. Sasa Stucin led a jelly workshop, extracting gelatin from the trotters of the suckling pig we brought back from Norfolk, “Good Architecture and good food are the essential foundations of every healthy society”.
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As we now face a ‘food-crisis’ (prices are expected to go up 30% this year with massive crop failures globally esp. of wheat in Russia and USA), this could be a crucial time to re-imagine food and work towards the transition from a society of over-consumption and immense wastefulness to an interconnected society of designers, artists, writers, producers and farmers working together to create localized, regenerative food systems.