Visual Arts | Performances | Architecture | Cooking Sessions | Thematic Meals | Music & Sound intervention | Screenings | Interdisciplinary Dialogues | Workshops | Eco-pedagogy Program | Mediation and Transmission
How can art contribute to fostering proximity with our foodscapes and support both a culinary and planetary turn?
Since its inception in 2017, foodculture days’ Biennale of socially engaged art and practices questions our relationship to the world and supports plurality in all its forms. It is the main project of the eponymous platform and aims to be a catalyst for discussion and action through environmental and social claims. The projects that will be developed and presented provide opportunities to imagine models of organisation, management, integrity and interdependence, as well as models of resistance in conjunctions to questions of food sovereignty, sustainability, resilience and collective responsibility.
- Borders, limits and boundaries | As spaces of confrontation at different scales.
The 2025 Biennale will offer the chance to ponder on the dynamics specific to borders, limits and boundaries (social, geographical, disciplinary, planetary) and to explore their possible use as spaces of collective socialisation, negotiation and emancipation rather than areas of division and alienation only. For this purpose, foodculture days is particularly interested in three type of spaces:
- The Territory
Thanks to its extensive program, the biennial gives a nuanced reading of the regional territory, gathering a multitude of stakeholders from the food, environmental and gastronomic sectors, as well as from the cultural scene and civil society. It also offers a broader reading of the territory of Vevey and its different ecosystems as well as of the tensions between the local bioregion and the globalised geopolitical dynamics, embodied by the presence of the international headquarters of Nestlé in the same city.
- The Public space:
The 2025 Biennale will continue to reclaim the city as a common good by transforming the public space of Vevey into a living laboratory, a space for wandering, contemplation, exchange, and vibrant creations. During five days, the biennale allows the public to rediscover the urban space and everyday locations (markets, streets, cafes, shops, ...) from an audacious and poetical perspective. A fundamental ritual of life, the act of eating is explored through the specificities of the spaces engaged and in conversation with the programmed projects. Food is approached there as a subject of research, a medium, and a vector for convivial interaction.
- The Kitchen / Central Location:
The Kitchen / The Central Space represents the transdisciplinary hearth of the Biennale. Through spatial, architectural and scenographic approach and thinking, the vision of foodculture days materialises itself for five days on the shores of Leman Lake. The Kitchen / Central Location works as an open-air contact zone for the various disciplines invited to interact, with the aim of stimulating a dialogue between different types of knowledge.
foodculture days champions the legitimation of cooking as a form of cultural expression, a social medium and as a thinking tool on the notion of identity and on environmental issues. Through (culinary) performances, collective cooking sessions, workshops and open discussions, the event will offer the opportunity to consider food as a vector for cultural democracy.
Artistic Creation | Through its potential and role in addressing social and environmental challenges
As a cultural and multidisciplinary event, the Biennale places at the center the role and potential of artistic creation in raising awareness about ecological responsibility, social cohesion, and the imagination of possible futures, particularly through collaborative and participative projects. Combining ecological, cultural, social, health, economic and political issues, food serves as a poetic, metaphorical, and plastic material for this reflection.
With the aim of offering a place for critical and accessible exchange, committed and sensitive, and above all fertile for collective reflection, the initiative invites the public to take part in the projects in various forms using the unifying power of food, in an alarming global geopolitical, social and environmental context.
Convinced that art is a vector for emancipation and better living together, foodculture days aims to promote current artistic creation in all its forms and to make it accessible to all, free of charge.