FIELD RESEARCH
To understand the reality of our time and be as close as possible to the current concerns, the curatorial team conducts regularly field research phases. These moments questioned our relationship with the living through a plurality of approaches and sensibilities, including decolonial and queer-feminist ones. Recognizing the complexity of our food systems - closely linked to human and animal health, land, water, climate, biodiversity, the economy - is a fundamental challenge for rethinking and reconfiguring them collectively.
In order to respond to the issues raised by our social and environmental systems and to the multiple emergencies, we are convinced that it is necessary to bring together diverse fields of competence and expertise, in a horizontal manner. Thus, our In the Field transdisciplinary research aimed to map, thematize, understand, question and contextualize the issues related to contemporary food systems and share them with our audiences and partners. It seems crucial to us to widen the network of cultural action and to show that artistic practices allow for a dialogue between approaches and research from natural and social sciences within the same platform.
foodculture days also proposes to reflect on the North-South dynamics and on the globalization of production systems that challenge the relationship between the rural and the urban. The phenomena of increasing urbanization and rural exodus are profoundly changing the relationship between notions of nature and culture. Our platform proposes to address these global issues, from a local context, so that audiences have the opportunity to reappropriate knowledge specific to the social history of nutrition and cultivation and to develop a critical mindset on the issues related to our plates and thus try to get out of a capitalist extractivist model.
We ask ourselves: How to get out of an oppositional logic and develop virtuous modes of human and inter-species cohabitation? How can we learn to better preserve, (re)distribute and share the planet's wealth? How can we understand the disproportionate relationships of scale between the existence of the human species and its environmental impact? Can food help us develop a sensory intelligence and reconnect us to organic matter?
In an effort to share and diseminate our reflexions, our observations are shared via our various communication channels as well as on Boca A Boca, our digital editorial project in Summer 2026.
FIEL RESEARCH HISTORIC
ART & SCIENCE
2022-2024: Fungi Cosmology Art & Science international Research Program
Initiated by Cab Patagonia (Chile) and LABVERDE (Brazil) and in collaboration with foodculture days and AIL - artist in lab, ZHDK- (Zurich)
Fungi Cosmology is a transdisciplinary research program by a group of artists, scientists, curators and anthropologists. The idea is to develop new knowledge and languages from the observation and analysis of the symbiotic relationships of fungi. The program is a three years project, held in the Amazon Patagonia and Switzerland. Check out the video of our first residency in Amazonia in March 2022 and an interview with Noemia Kazue Ishikawa, the mycologist who took part in the Amazon trip.
Calendar:
- March 2023: Fungi Cosmology 1/3 at LabVerde, Amazonia (Brazil)
- 13-31 March 2024: Encuentro Arte & Ciencia (Chile) + Field Trip 2/3 of Fungi Cosmology at CAB Patagonia (Chile).
- August 29 - September 10, 2024: Fungi Cosmology 3/3 in Zurich and Valais (Switzerland)
- March 2026: Exhibition at MUAC (Contemporary Museum of Santiago, Chile) and SPAZIO Suizo (Santiago, Chile). Curation & Production: CAB Patagonia. Find more information via this link.