The way we eat is the way we shape our planet and our future.
Feeding a growing population while making healthy food available to all social strata and preserving the planet’s resources is one of the most important challenges of our time and questions our current food systems and cultural practices.
Within just a few decades, our way of eating has evolved into a complex interplay of science, technology and culture – a jumble of different systems at both the local and global level. In the search for future-oriented alternatives, the question can no longer focus solely on WHAT we will eat. Product-oriented approaches, such as in-vitro meat or insect bars, only offer medium-term solutions as long as the systems they are embedded in remain the same.
Instead, it is the food systems in which we operate that must be questioned. This pertains to, for example, the basic principle of the supermarket as the central supply point, which has hardly changed since the 1930s, our relationship to farm animals and microorganisms as well as our culturally shaped understanding of nature and time.
To this end, FOOD FICTIONS deals with the question of HOW we grow, produce, process and share our food. How can we rethink existing food systems and the roles that wholesalers, restaurateurs, consumers and agriculturists play in it? Where are the boundaries between consumers and producers? And what role do eating cultures and traditions play? What is the role of bio economy approaches in fostering new solutions?
Against this background, the FOOD FICTIONS exhibition presents five speculative future scenarios developed in collaboration with experts from research and development: Urban Food Market, Responsible Meat, From Leaf to root, Open Source Algae, Bacterial Food. The scenarios shed light on some of the bio economy’s „hidden champions“, such as trees and microorganisms, and question the boundaries between nature, technology and culture.
Through speculative stories envisioning our future food culture, Food Fictions take you on a journey and invite you to discuss, intervene and speculate.
FOOD FICTIONS – POPUP EXHIBITION
FOOD FICTIONS SCENARIOS & SPECULATIVE ARTEFACTS
PROJECT BACKGROUND
The Food Fictions project is realised in terms of my position at the Fraunhofer CeRRI and is being funded by the BMBF (Federal Ministry of Education and Research) as part of the „Wissenschaftsjahr 2020|21“.
The aim of the project is to develop and explore design-based methods for explorative formats of participatory science communication and explores „food“ as an object of investigation on the future.
The future scenarios in this project are based on a scientific foundation: In an interdisciplinary collaboration with scientific experts from the field, five different scenarios we’re developed and transferred in to speculative artefacts and to an exhibition format, which was presented at Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin in September 2020.
Furthermore, the project investigates on immersive and multisensory speculative experiences: Together with Inés Lauber, the scenarios were translated into an edible menu, which was part of the „Cooking the Future-Workshop“.
