A research project by Yolenn Farges, in collaboration with Fondazione Studio Rizoma.
The Intersezioni Mediterranee project explores the complex relationship between two political and social dimensions that are not always connected: art and cuisine. This study aims to investigate how culinary and artistic traditions, intrinsically linked to local ecosystems, can offer new perspectives for understanding and rethinking the environmental and social challenges of our time.
Art, with its ability to interpret the world, and cuisine, as a tangible, everyday expression of care for natural resources, serve as vital tools for raising awareness and fostering a critical reassessment of Mediterranean ecosystems, balancing tradition and innovation. Through an interdisciplinary approach, this work highlights how the intersection of artistic and gastronomic practices can contribute to creating a sustainable and shared vision of the Mediterranean environment, offering creative solutions to current ecological and cultural challenges.
Building on Yolenn Farges’ research and using Palermo as a key point of observation, this project examines how the diverse Mediterranean coasts are deeply connected by culinary culture, history, and environmental conditions.
The research focuses on several key points, including:
- Exploring ecological, political, and economic issues related to food access in the Mediterranean region;
- The bidirectional relationship between human activities on land and sea;
- Changes in fishing, agriculture, land use, and food management;
- Shifting social perceptions of ecology, food, nutrition, and health;
- The right to access information about food production and consumption;
- The relationship between land and marine environments from a perspective of care;
- Discussions on cuisine, food production, and foraging as tools for regeneration and climate and social justice.
“Meals and tastings are precious moments of exchange between people, recipes, knowledge, stories, and fertile thoughts. Through this culinary exploration, I seek to revive a collective awareness of the interdependence between our actions on land and their impact on the sea, encouraging a respectful and sustainable approach to our ecosystems.”
By experimenting with this collection of culinary stories, we aim to integrate these elements to transform these practices into living artistic acts that invite the public and citizens to reflect on our relationship with the environment.
The research will take shape in various formats, including collected archives, culinary explorations, discussion groups, workshops, exchange sessions, and cooking experiences, along with other practices that can become regenerative gestures and concrete solutions for the future.
The Connection Between Food and Art
Throughout her explorations, Yolenn Farges has focused particularly on marine life, fascinated by the liminal, hybrid space between low and high tide. This has led her to question our relationship with coastlines and their inhabitants. Living in island and port environments such as Belle-Île, Marseille, and Palermo has reinforced her belief that our terrestrial activities impact the sea just as the sea influences us. This interconnection, linked to cuisine, becomes a way to deepen our intimacy with the marine environment. Cooking with the sea and foraging at low tide are ways to understand and care for this ecosystem.
“Cuisine is one of my deepest interests, first as a creative and sensory act. Over time, this interest expanded to include environmental concerns through the exploration of edible wild plants, marine life, and fermentation techniques. This journey naturally led me to connect these reflections with my artistic work, which already explores our relationship with environments and non-human species. Fermentation was my starting point, revealing the condition of our bodies as holobionts—organisms composed of billions of microbes essential for our survival, particularly our microbiota (a symbiosis of microbes inhabiting our digestive system). By welcoming these microbes through the consumption of fermented foods, we embrace our multiplicity. It also offers a way to reconsider the old paradigm of ‘nature,’ which separates humans from their environment rather than seeing them as interconnected and interdependent beings. I am also fascinated by the stories food tells, what it transmits across cultures and centuries. In recent years, I have spent a lot of time with elderly women in Belle-Île, listening to their stories about their relationship with the sea and collecting their recipes (particularly those using seaweed) as a record of ancestral practices that could be revived. Cooking thus becomes a way to connect with one another, as well as to strengthen our bond with the environment and its inhabitants. This research has led me to understand that food goes far beyond mere sustenance—it is a mirror of political, economic, and ecological realities, past and present. It is a field of collective struggle. The way we eat, our choices, are tools of renewal, resistance, and tangible means to act toward ecological transition and collective memory.”
2025 Planned Activities
- Workshops and discussion groups with teenagers in different parts of the Mediterranean and Atlantic
- Exchange sessions between national and international curators and artists
- Dialogues with resident artists (FSR)
- Periods of intergenerational workshops
Artist Biography
Born in 1994, Yolenn Farges lives and works between Palermo and Belle-Île-en-Mer. Bridging art, science, and cuisine, she works to create porous networks between coexisting beings and their evolving ecosystems, considering creation as a process of contamination and collaboration. Her work is also a space for circulating thoughts and knowledge, where dialogue and exchanges function as a social and political ecosystem. Her installations, often activated through participatory performances, bring together fungi, bacteria, propagating algae, and other species and food companions.