We are outside, on the shore of Vevey where the crystal-clear waters of Lake Geneva glisten under a precocious summer sun. In a simple turn of the head, a breathtaking panorama unfolds, between the UNESCO world heritage terraced vineyards of Lavaux, the vastness of the lake itself and the snow-capped mountains of the Savoy Alps on the other side.

We are a composite of artists, gastronomes, scientists, cooks, philosophers, activists, researchers, gardeners, and winemakers—or something in between—and we are assembled under a pavilion-like structure with an open kitchen and a bar. Chairs and tables are scattered around, transforming the grassed area on the lakeshore promenade into a meeting place: a restaurant, a lecture hall, a reception hall, and a performance space all at the same time. We are attending the foodculture days biennial festival in late May into early June of 2023. But we also constitute it. The festival provides a framework, a platform, a curatorial concept, a space, a point in time, an exhibition—but it is nourished by the different practices of its attendees that are gathered through an extensive programme, personal exchanges and the generous work of volunteers that engage in hospitality tasks.

People come and go, engage and seclude themselves, absorb information and consume a meal, enjoy the view and go for a swim or a stroll to visit parts of the festival that are dispersed throughout the city. Everyone talks about their respective field of practice but in reaching out to others, in partaking in this festival that is meant to bridge, in exchanging, it becomes clear that everyone searches in fact for the in-betweens, the assemblages and paths towards a seemingly dystopic future. In the wake of climate breakdowns, collaboration, connection and conviviality appear to be the only antidote.

As a trained art historian participating as a researcher and as a volunteer, this made me reflect on several aspects of my practice. Let me give you a personal note. After getting in contact with the project through different events that were carried out in 2022 and having established personal connections, I participated with the goal to include foodculture days as my first case study in my PhD thesis, intendeding to absorb and document everything. I rented an apartment for the duration of the festival and signed up for the volunteering programme. I was dedicated and ready. And I was immediately overwhelmed by the radical relational character of the act of eating, by the intensity and immediacy of social interactions, the simultaneity of events, and more personal questions of who and where I want to be in the world.

Quickly, I abandoned my urge to document everything and fully immersed myself. As personal connections grew, I was able to ease into the unfolding days and, during my volunteer shifts, I was surprised to realise how much I used to enjoy and clearly missed the physical and mental activities of hosting, waitressing, and catering. Introducing myself repeatedly in different encounters and describing my practice and interests in sometimes brief and at other times extensive conversations turned out to be a reflection on how my ways of thinking and acting were formed over the years. Toward the end, I remember laying on a bench listening to Maya Minder’s stimulating lecture on her artistic research on seaweed. Overwhelmed with information and impressions, I was not able to perform my scientific routine: to sit up straight and take notes. As the screen was almost invisible from the sun, I allowed myself to simply listen to my body, to lay down, take mental notes and have an embodied experience of what it means to be part of a collective consciousness. Some people were cooking, others were cleaning dishes, some coming back from swimming, some were lying down drawing, some were sitting up intently taking notes. Snippets evaporated into everyone’s ears, triggered memories or associations, mixing with the noises of gastronomy and incipient summer at the lakeside. An earlier realization during a conversation helped me ease: I found that I am more interested in the general flow and overall structure of the event than in every single contribution and detail.

During my art history studies, I learned associative thinking and a criticality towards historical narratives, to see connections—between people, objects, historical continuities, regions, different areas of life—and to reflect on privileges and blind spots. I focused on decolonial museology and was thinking in depth about how museums and object categories came along, why we, in Euro-Western thought, developed a cultural practice of (supposedly) autonomous art, all the while I was simultaneously working in gastronomy since I had turned 18. I wrote my master’s thesis on Adrian Piper’s 2018 retrospective at MoMA in New York and her activities in the field of art, philosophy and yoga, which she describes as practices rather than mere theoretical occupations that intersect and inform each other. This perspective influenced me in becoming daring to connect different interests and areas of my life without regard for the conventions of the respective fields. Art, to me, is a tool, a philosophical one, as well as a social practice to reflect and meditate about our being and acting in the world. It can enable activism and socio-political engagement to challenge hegemonic power structures but it can also be a rather intimate way to discover which aspects, questions, or circumstances move a person so much that they create something sensually perceptible in the world.

I am currently part of an academic project connecting art and culture to ecological questions which allows me to bridge my professional becoming to core memories from my early childhood. Growing up in an environmentally aware household that was concerned with food politics within the German eco-movement as well as emphasising French culture around the quality of food informs my current research interest in art forms that bridge agroecology and food politics. Through these practices, I am concerned with the climate emergency, environmental justice and interspecies connections, and how to facilitate these concerns and practices through institutional structures and curatorial practices. My realization at the festival was that vital and holistic forms of living, creating and being in the world – be it artistic, academic, or institutional – don’t fit in rigid time regimes and evade the event logics of temporal projects.

As mentioned above, I think intensely about institutional structures within the cultural field, and how museum collections and scientific disciplines emerged, mainly to understand the framework that defines our cultural practice around making art. The museum is conceived to preserve and transcend time, directly linked to European historiography which emerged in the 18th century during the Enlightenment. The perception of one’s own present as the end of a positive development is structured linearly as a narrative of progress. In order to tell this form of history with objects, the institution is conceptually based on principles of categorization, discrimination, and separation to organize a seemingly chaotic world. Its practice of accumulating, handling, exhibiting and taking care of objects in a very particular timely order of permanence speaks volumes about the Euro-modern definition of objects as dead and passive. Part of the decolonial discourse in museology is exactly that this does not comply with other cosmovisions, where the distinction between humans and their surroundings is non-hierarchical, and objects are part of a shared living and animated world. Both the institution and the hegemonic timeline of a technoscientific world that associates future with progress are modern paradigms that are nowadays called into question by the environmental crisis: the future is uncertain and the Euro-Western world slowly becomes aware of the cyclical and intricately entangled nature of micro- and macro-networks that make up our world systems.

The pluriverse is defined as a world where many worlds fit in, where countless and diverse systems and locally rooted practices intersect and exist in sync with one another³. foodculture days created exactly a pluriverse during the days of its festival: the open pavilion-like structure at Vevey’s promenade, exposed to the weather, hosted different practices, different species and elements. It allowed for processes to unfold in various rhythms. We overlapped, paralleled, intersected, followed, and echoed each other, we dispersed through the city, including restaurants, cafes, museums, public and agricultural spaces. After all, we are living matter, part of a living world. Meditating about food practices makes that perfectly clear: when we zoom into the metabolizing processes of our bodies and that of other species, truly immersing and defining ourselves as part of the cyclical nature of death and decay within a foodweb, we get a glimpse of the ever-evolving character of living matter and our entanglements with a vital material world. Maya Minder’s lecture was enriched by her companion, an 18-year-old spirulina kefir that travels with her. These microorganisms involved in the fermentation process created, within days, a nutrient-rich drink, generously offered to us to consume. Under the guidance of Domingo Club, other participants became hosts to grow mycelia with their own body temperature to ferment soybeans into tempeh by wearing a necklace for several days.

I was trained to describe passive objects, temporary but finite exhibitions, and to value historical distance for better analysis. Now, I am simultaneously confronted with and part of the living cultural format that is foodculture days. It is impossible to describe every aspect in hindsight, it is evolving in form and format and points towards the future. To situate myself as part of a living network means to learn from practices that were developed to do so. In tending to the multispecies worlds that compose soils, permacultural practices of soil care might teach me how a lively form of multispecies curating in the cultural field could look like. And for that, I need to be outside first—in the fields, open-air cafes and at the lakeside of Vevey.

Feed the hungry ghosts when they come for dinner —

Lucy Cordes Engelman

The art world is facing a problem: art itself is not sustainable. To be precise, what we consider as art does not contribute materially to a sustainable human existence within planetary ecology. As global warming unfolds all over the planet and while simultaneously art professionals seem increasingly willing to address our ecological role in the world, one cannot but notice an apparent futility in reducing the many aspects of the Anthropocene, e.g., resource extractivism and soil degradation, global commerce and trade routes, or energetic carbon-dependency and data-mining, to art’s content. Many artists are also activists in parallel to their creative work, yet often it appears as if both artists and curators remain content with works that merely “address” or “represent” climate change. Meanwhile, the Adornoian presumption of autonomous art persists—art ought not to do more than propose an aesthetic form for whichever content.

This conversation is particularly crucial in Switzerland as the upcoming cultural message (Kulturbotschaft)—a quadrennial set of guidelines informing all governmental cultural support in the country—is currently under consultation. The government’s draft dedicates a large section acknowledging that a cultural change is needed to contribute to a sustainable society,yet the course of action remains unclear. Besides a clear vision concerning architecture (Baukultur), the message limits itself to calling for a debate between funding bodies and institutions with the aim to reduce carbon emissions in cultural production. Simply put, this draft does not present a developed or convincing vision for a possible sustainable culture.

As a cultural event, foodculture days is not conceived with an explicitly political goal or position. Rather, the biennial functions as a platform for artists, designers, architects, chefs, and activists to present and discuss their work. It is a public forum, accompanied by the different kinds of pleasure food and gastronomy propose, for sustainable ecological and social relationships. This already is a provocation. Vevey, the city that hosts the event every two years, is home to the global headquarters of Nestlé, one of the largest food conglomerates worldwide and a controversial socio-political actor in the Global South.

This provocation is two-fold: the obvious one is by offering a platform for alternative perspectives on food, cooking, and care that defy this seemingly unavoidable corporate behemoth controlling worldwide food supply. Taking into account local cultures, social structures, and environmental challenges, cultural initiatives such as foodculture days counter the global experience of grocery shopping that make products traded and/or produced by a handful of Western companies inevitable. In this way, the artistic projects presented at foodculture days go beyond capitalist realism and the myth that only corporate techno-solutions may heal global ailments.

The second provocation runs deeper and confronts the traditional understanding of art in Switzerland. foodculture days outspokenly aims to overcome the traditional boundaries between contemporary art, performance, design, architecture, and food culture. Regardless of their field of practice, the participants come with an ideological aim, all sharing an interest in situating their practice in a determined context as well as in interacting with other participants and visitors of the biennial alike. Such interests are a decisive factor in the development of creative approaches that transcend traditional ideas of art, constituting the core of foodculture days’ program.

As a matter of fact, Nestlé itself ran a cultural foundation in Switzerland for many years, through which they supported cultural producers until 2022. Even though it never happened, it could have seemed natural for Nestlé to be interested in supporting a project like foodculture days. But, like most funding bodies in Switzerland, Nestlé’s cultural fund made a distinction between visual arts and other cultural formats. Nestlé’s specialty was its focus on providing instrumental support to non-institutional, often precarious exhibition spaces and cultural initiatives. Unsurprisingly, the projects they funded mostly catered to conservative notions of art that maintained the Adornoian autonomy of the artwork.

To be fair, most art funding in Switzerland relies on the same distinctions and the Nestlé foundation only represents a broadly accepted yet restrictive understanding of art. The experience of navigating artistic and cultural production in this country shows that the national foundation Pro Helvetia functions as a compass for other funding bodies and institutions: beyond technical tax and customs definitions, there is no official understanding of art or culture in Switzerland. What constitutes art is, instead, defined discursively through research and events. And, although Pro Helvetia is a forthcoming and responsive institution, when they support a project such as foodculture days they do so categorizing it not as “visual arts” but rather as “interdisciplinary”—a vaguely defined funding category.

The categorization of foodculture days as “interdisciplinary” is symptomatic of this general conservatism insofar as it preserves the autonomy of visual arts by offering this new, ad hoc vessel instead of adapting preexisting concepts to new practices. This raises the question of how trailblazing cultural institutions may become financially sustainable if public and private funding structures do not reflect their needs. Up to this day, the challenge of developing sustainable cultural formats and suitable funding structures is still up to the cultural initiators themselves.

The issue here is that the cultural innovation required for new sustainable art forms is not taking place within already established institutions. Admittedly, larger institutions and museums in Switzerland have taken up measures to reduce or mitigate their environmental impact and should be commended for doing so. For example, Swiss institutions optimize art handling and off-set flights. Some may even renovate, looking into alternative forms of insulation and heating. In some cases, art institutions have also programmed events and exhibitions that address or represent climate change, but these initiatives have yet to succeed in fundamentally transforming the cultural sector to make it structurally sustainable.

For such a change to happen, a necessary step would be to carefully reconsider the core business of these institutions, namely the definition of art itself. Every institution maintains such a definition that informs every aspect of its operation. A sustainable definition of art would, in other words, impact museum and exhibitory practices, notably by raising unprecedented questions such as to which end and how do we archive and conserve art? How can exhibitions respond to ecological processes rather than to cycles of attention? Are research and production possible without extractivist practices? And can sustainability be concretized otherwise than by merely representing climate change?

With its original focus and approach the foodculture days biennial manages to transcend naturalized ideas of autonomous art. In terms of sustainability, their main challenge is rather an infrastructural one: how to achieve long-term viability? With challenged access to structural funding and limited budgets, the success of a project like foodculture days remains reliant on significant personal commitment from the team year-round as well as unpaid labor from numerous volunteers to carry out decisive day-to-day tasks during the biennial. Though highly motivated, the people involved are objectively putting themselves at risk of exhaustion or burnout to meet expectations and achieve the ambitions of foodculture days. With an entire funding strategy to reinvent for each new edition, the perpetuation of such a project represents a Sisyphean task that constantly flirts with the personal limits of the people committed to its success.

After four editions but still without structural funding, the biennial has not yet developed its structural resilience. The current cultural funding scheme focusing on supporting one-off events appears like the main obstacle to durably establishing a new class of sustainable art projects. The biggest challenge for foodculture days henceforth is, therefore, its own institutionalization in order to develop long-term perspectives and cultural accountability. The biennial has already shaken things up by establishing a forum for sustainable cultural forms that does not adhere to autonomous terms of culture. If we are to develop an understanding of sustainable culture, for an art that is not beyond politics or the environment, then we must question the function of institutions themselves. We must now focus on cultivating ecological aesthesis: a sustainable understanding of art and thinking of art as inherently embedded in political and environmental processes. Only then will we have a base to create the institutional and economic structures needed for an ongoing transformation of our aesthetic climate.