Metakitchen
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Project Description
Metakitchen is an installation that brings together 5 Romanian practices who tackle subjects such as mapping local resources, regaining the knowledge about the territory we inhabit and recovering historical recipes. They address fields like gastronomy, textiles, ceramics and building material production. When we, as designers, decide what is the raw material that will become part of the final object we have envisioned, we implicitly decide upon the way we use the territories we inhabit.
Geographical Scope
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Urban or rural issues
Physical or other transformations
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Description of the project
Summary
Metakitchen is an art installation, a collective, circular table which is hosting 5 hybrid practices with at least one member that has been trained as an architect and has either further specialised or has migrated towards a different field. We have generically called this groups, the hybrid architects or the metacooks, emphasising their role in bridging the field of the built environment with other tangent fields, extremely relevant in the process of change towards a more responsible way of building. We played with the metaphor of the kitchen considering the materials as ingredients and the working methods as recipes, hoping that down scaling the building process to an almost ordinary domestic kitchen table may be a chance to better understand processes that seem too complex or too far away.
The 5 practices exhibited are:
Forgotten herbs and The historical garden, Mona Petre, a graphic artist with a big interdisciplinary group. Her aim was to recover knowledge about the plants that grow in our surroundings and their potential in the gastronomy field.They have built a collective garden inside the Botanical Garden, in Bucharest as an educational tool.
Atelier Terrapia - Alina Negru-Romania and Alessandro Serra-Italy, architects specialised in earth built heritage and the historical practices related to this material.
Living Cities Architecture and Hempcrete - Andreea Mihai and Vlad Sadici, architects and pioneers of the use of hemp in the building industry as one of the most sustainable processes, through the entire life span of the building.
Culinaria - Magda Vieriu, architect. She has built a micro-laboratory in her own kitchen focused on fermentation processes that she has studied or inherited from her grandmother.
Atelier Tron - Andreea Tron, an architect who has migrated towards the field of textiles, now experimenting with ecoprint and extracting pigments from plants.
Key objectives for sustainability
The key objectives of our project in terms of sustainability are : raising awareness around themes like mapping local eco-friendly resources, recovering the knowledge of using them and imagining and testing ways of mixing old and new techniques in the fields related to the production of space.
Sustainability is at the core of each of the five groups exhibited, their aim is to reintroduce in the common practices of their fields materials and techniques of processing those materials which are friendly to the environment. Either if we talk about the way we look at the plants we cultivate for our own food, or the materials we use for building our houses, or the way we understand the role of maintenance, in terms of energy needed for heating or cooling or even for repairing parts of the building when they are broken, or if we look at the textile industry or the waste that can become a new resource, we can rewrite all of these narratives and our choices, if we have full acces to transparent life cycles of materials and most importantly to all the life that stays behind a piece of material. If we experience empathy for the human and non human implications of the production cycle of every piece of a wall, a cloth or a plate, we can surely build solidarity around sustainable choices.
We are exhibiting on the round table not only the story of a certain material, but also the story of a person or a group of people who have an identity which is already linked to that material or process, they have been studying for years already its history and the way we can reintroduce some of its traditional ways of use in contemporary practices, they have already started testing along with other groups spread internationally and their work is paving the new possible paths towards more accessible and ecological production chains which also imply strengthening the power of local communities.
Key objectives for aesthetics and quality
An added value of the installation is the fact that it has been designed by us in collaboration with a local wood workshop, Atelier Vast (also a hybrid architects team), which have been our main collaborators since 2017. They have built it inspired by a traditional handsaw, with small details suggesting its language. The tableware was also designed and made by a very dear collaborator of ours, Studio Mud, a ceramic workshop hold by two people initially trained as architects.
And last, we, Stardust Architects, have had a small intervention on the table, by producing the paper used for the labels. We have recycled paper from our studio and from our colleagues and friends and we have learned the process of hand making our own paper.
But the main aesthetic gesture is the central idea of the installation which is the analogy with the kitchen table, giving its haptic qualities. One can not only understand processes, recipes, but also smell and touch ingredients, such as oils, dried plants, printed tissues, earth biscuits and hemp in small bricks, or vinegar doing its job in fermenting and transforming the life of a fruit.
All of our practices, either curators, designers, producers or exhibitors of this installation are capable through our body of work to stand as a prove for the most important aesthetic goal of the installation : demonstrating the traditional materials and techniques can be introduced in contemporary languages without losing the qualities and needs of everyday life today. We are therefore, bridging not only different fields, but also the past with the present and the future of the material culture with a focus on the built environment.
Key objectives for inclusion
The Metakitchen has never been thought as a static installation. Its ideal state is exactly as its name implies, in the process of metacooking. So, it is mainly suppose to host moments of gathering when one or more of the metacooks are sharing their knowledge through workshops for the public. During the exhibition (it has been part of Chronicles of the Future Superheroes, curated by Anca Verona Mihulet, at the Kunsthalle Bega, Timisoara, Romania from october 2021 to march 2022) it hosted all the five metacooks who came from all over Romania - Timisoara, Brasov, Bucuresti. Each of them hold a small presentation of their practice inside the installation and also a 3-6 hours workshop. All of the workshops were open to the public and had up to 10 participants each. A very important aspect was the fact that the workshops were held in a community garden, Greenfeel Timisoara, a very impressive project which is also pioneering for sustainable practices and was a perfect partner for reaching a different public. Therefore, the installation being exhibited in an art gallery, hosting people from the fields of gastronomy, textiles, ceramics and architecture and holding workshops within a garden situated at the outskirts of the city, brought together a wide range of people.
The second type of workshops were dedicated to children and were organised by De-a Arhitectura, a local educational NGO which has produced especially for this installation a series of tools called "The house, a guest in the nature" inviting children to imagine the houses of tomorrow starting with the ingredients, recipes exhibited on the table (the future superheros of the built environment). They came up with a very impressive collection of responses. We had 4 workshops, divided in two age categories.
We (stardust architects) hold a series of two workshops of hand made recycled paper for two classes of children from vulnerable social environments, situated in a village nearby Timisoara.
Results in relation to category
In terms of circularity we have envisioned this table as a symbol of production chain. Therefore, we have the Historical Garden where you can grow the plants, such as hemp, lavender, thyme. A part of the hemp goes to the bricks composed of Hempcrete (a mix of hemp, lime and water), a part of it can be used only for insulating earth walls that can afterwards receive finishes made of oils extracted from lavender and thyme (as Atelier Terrapia shows on the earth biscuits samples exhibited on the table). Another part of the hemp goes to the textile manufacture and can be painted with some other vegetables or fruits of the garden, such as onion skin and nutshells (Atelier Tron). Of course, not before having used the nuts and the onions for one of the extraordinary recipes recovered by Forgotten Plants from a very interesting local historical gastronomy book. And if there is any waste at all, there comes Culinaria to use it with its magical mother of vinegar in order to make the most incredible transformation process that can even lead to new forms of food or biomaterials.
It is both a metaphor and a very pragmatic mis-en-scene. It does not imply an actual universal solution, but it does imply a very strong suggestion of a possible link that we can start building in our societies.
We acknowledge the fact that reintroducing such natural materials obtained with care and time into an industry which is based on efficiency and profit oriented processes is not an easy task. Nevertheless, we think one of the keys that might make this transition possible is the human connection that they imply with the territory and the social network which gives the sense of belonging. Understanding the cycle that is hidden behind any piece of brick which makes a building and the consequences it has on a certain geography both in terms of natural and human ecosystems is what might make us slowly give up choosing the cheapest material instead of the most sustainable one.
How Citizens benefit
At first, we were two architects and an art curator imagining this project, afterwards we had 5 groups added to the project as the main characters, then the wood and the ceramics workshops and then the education NGO which led the workshops for children. We have obtained finance for this installation with the help of the art gallery which hosted the entire exhibition. They have accessed financial resources coming from The National Cultural Fund, The Local Timisoara Center for Cultural Projects and the National Chamber of Architects Fund. We had a partnership with a community garden nearby the city which hosted the workshops for adults.
Besides linking all of this team of people or institutional entities around the project we have had a wide variety of public attending the workshops. People who have been directly interested in the work of one of the metacooks, or in the subject they are tackling through their work, students, gardeners from the community garden, or people coming from the arts, the regular public of the art gallery, children from different age categories targeted by the educational NGO and the children coming from the village nearby Timisoara, form the vulnerable categories.
Another objective of the implications of the installation is to strengthen the relations between the metacooks which, being part of the local pioneers in sustainability they already knew each other and have been following each others works, but after the marathon of workshops and having been put on the same table we believe the paths of possible further collaborations has been opened.
Physical or other transformations
Innovative character
The innovative character of the project consists of proposing a different way of choosing the resources. The mainstream paths are focused on the result which is very often a sum of aesthetic languages that have been built by trends set by the market, completely oblivious to the local resources both in terms of material or social matters. The aim of investing with each project in the possible links between the local knowledge manifested as crafts and the final result of a project is what we see as a responsible way of acting in all of these fields from gastronomy to building techniques. And another mission is to make this transfer of responsibility from professionals towards clients.
Learning transferred to other parties
The installation will travel to Bucharest in May 2022, as it will be exhibited during Romanian Design Week and further more, it has received the invitation to be exhibited in another important city in the NE part of Romania, in Iasi, in autumn.
Its itinerant character will obviously raise the number of the targeted public both for exhibitions or workshops. We have also already had the opportunity to think about it in a very different cultural context. It was about a Norwegian Art and Crafts Center which was organising an exhibition in order to promote their artists. They had an international call for curators, therefore we applied with the Metakitchen proposing them to use the infrastructure of the installation as a pretext for exhibiting local groups. We took into consideration different options of building it up, either around materials or the processes they imply, or even around a sort of dialogue between the Romanian and the Norwegian metacooks. The project was admitted in the shortlist, therefore we are very confident about its high level of adaptability to different social and geographical contexts. We are very much interested in gaining this perspective of a collection of Metakitchens from all around Europe and beyond in order to try to make comparisons between local and more wider solutions. Also, this journey of the installation might represent an opportunity for the metacooks from around the world to meet their pairs from different cultural contexts and to transfer their knowledge to one another, learn and give back what they know.
