Aterraterra and Cooking Sections invite Sicily-based farmers, activists and researchers to talk about their practices and the ways they face a time of climate change, water scarcity, water mismanagement, exploitation of workers and other challenges that are linked to intensive agriculture. This round table discussion aims to bring together different realities that work toward an agroecological way of farming and eating and also invite the public to get to know the story behind the products they buy. After the discussion there will be an aperitivo including the products of the invited farmers.
The meeting is curated by Aterraterra and is organised in partnership with CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA. Aterraterra Lab is the base of Aterraterra (Fabio Aranzulla and Luca Cinquemani), a project that intersects agriculture, art and activism. In their garden in Palermo, they harvest wild food plants, flowers, medicinal and aromatic herbs and ancient, rare vegetables. Their interspecies and intercultural dialogue, in which all parameters are continually reassessed and negotiated between all the involved, flows seamlessly into dismantling neo-coloniality, industrialisation and dominant discourses through the research of plant and culinary histories and collaborations that bring marginality to the centre. Examples of this are the collective’s research work around the Ethiopian red aubergine (Solanum aethiopicum) in Italy, known only as the red aubergine of Rotonda (often ignoring the reasons for its arrival in Italy, linked to colonialism); or on the ancient grains that are so much celebrated today and which are not so ancient but largely created during the fascist era. A network of artists, activists, agricultural cooperatives, agricultural labourers, cultural associations, cooks, researchers, scientists, etc., both Italian and international, has formed around Aterraterra and the Aterraterra Lab programme.
CLIMAVORE is a research platform, an agency and a movement that questions how to eat as humans change climates. New human-made ‘seasons’ are blurring the lines between spring, summer, autumn and winter, or yearly monsoon events. Instead, periods of polluted seas, soil exhaustion or fertiliser runoff are more influential on our foodscapes. CLIMAVORE, a term coined by Cooking Sections in 2015, is a call to rethink a truly broken food chain, and move beyond a carnivore, omnivore, locavore, vegetarian or vegan diet to tackle these new seasonalities, while addressing the extractive and intensive practices that lead to them. CLIMAVORE collaborates long-term with marine biologists, botanists, farmers, chefs, fisherfolk, anthropologists, geneticists, environmentalists, oenologists, chemists, soil scientists, conservationists, herders, among many others living on the frontiers of the climate emergency. With bases in London, Skye and Madrid, CLIMAVORE facilitates the space and necessary action to transform food production, distribution and consumption in order to reimagine new horizons that can grow food while cultivating habitats.
With the supporto of:
