Workshops
OPN Masterclass – 2017
Cooking Sections – Climavore: Post-Hyper-Fertile
Cooking Sections duo Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe led a three-day intensive workshop with ISU students. The workshop – titled “Climavore” – challenged the class “to frame the new seasons of food production and consumption that are appearing due to human-induced climatic events.” Over the three-day workshop students looked at Iowa’s landscape infrastructure and speculated how architecture can intervene in the production of other forms of landscapes. Students participated in working sessions, site visits, archival research, representation exercises and less conventional formats like using food and cooking as an exploration of landscape tactics. The outcome of the workshop consisted of three deliverables: A collective atlas of food infastructures, A projective speculation on CLIMAVORE infastructural landscapes for a less greenwashed future based on recent climatic events in the great plains, A last supper as a modeling exercise. The final supper took place at the Living History farm’s “Farm of the Future” exhibition space designed by Ray Crites.
From the brief
Increased precipitation leading to recurrent floods, longer-term winter temperatures, more frost-free days, higher summer humidity, soil eroding faster, plants flowering sooner, birds arriving earlier in spring, increase in asthma and allergies… Climate seems to be changing in Iowa and the Great Plains and resulting in new pest outbreaks, spreading invasive species, and accelerated wildfire activity amongst many other impacts. Different from the now obsolete cycle of spring, summer, autumn, and winter, climatic events spanning over days, months, years or centuries, are constructing the landscape anew. They happen discontinuously and repeat in non-linear cycles. Hence, CLIMAVORE proposes to investigate how to use food as a form of built infrastructure in order to rethink the landscapes of the future. What is the diet of a globally financialized landscape? What do we eat during seasons of polluted aquifers, periods of severe drought, or overpopulation of invasive species. CLIMAVORE questions the geopolitical forces that are creating new environmental pressure points for local inhabitants while restructuring climate in Iowa. The exponential growth of the fertilizer industry and the need to increase food production on a global scale has ensured we receive grains, fruits and vegetables all year round. This workshop will explore the edibility of our new climatic seasons. CLIMAVORE sets out to frame these new seasons of food production and consumption that are appearing as a result of human-induced climatic events. When soil nutrients are exploited to the point of exhaustion, productivity and efficiency are dependent on synthetic inputs; fertility becomes relative. When seasonal volatility transforms the internal clocks of species and all life is forced into a shielded interior, climate becomes relative.
more information on Cooking Sections
Student Work
