Domestic territories banquet (2022)
Workshop / ⤷ Studio Ossidiana
The workshop took place with MIARD students at “Ca’ del Biondo”, a historical farm in the Boschetto area of Cremona, Italy. The workshop was dedicated to 1:1 prototyping and the development of a collective project through the use and re-use of available materials, tools, and spaces. The farm itself served as the context and working place for this exercise: a typical Cascina of the area, the building and its annexes were the manifestation of a secular history of farming and living in the area, dating back to the XVII century in the case of Ca’ del Biondo. Cascine used to be, and in some cases, still were, micro-villages tied to the surrounding land, where several families used to live and work the surrounding fields. However, with the progressive transformation of the Pianura Padana into a largely monocultural array of fields, devoted mainly to cereal production, much of the social, architectural, and environmental diversity of these areas had been lost.
Today, the cascine of the area spoke of an economy, labor dynamics, social relations, and engagement with land, water, plants, and animals which called for rediscovery and future-oriented projects. The ambition with this workshop was to explore possibilities for places such as Ca’ del Biondo to rediscover a vocation as providers not only of food or raw materials but of knowledge, proposing new forms of production and hospitality.
A collective platform/table was developed mainly with available materials (hay, soil, and lumber, all produced within the farm). The goal was to design, produce, install, and use the platform for a collective multi-species lunch within the farm’s garden. The project required thinking ahead about the experience as a moment to reflect on the ritual of sharing food, along with its spatial, temporal, and material dimensions: What would be eaten, upon which surface, with which instruments? How would the food be cooked? How would other species (for instance, the birds or the cows which lived in the farm) participate? How would matter be transformed into material, and produce transformed into food? Would the platform/carpet/table itself be edible? Would it return to being “matter” soon after the lunch? Would plants grow upon it, or animals burrow within it for months to come? Was it to be dispersed, atomized, or preserved? Which tools would be needed to cook or eat? The collective lunch served as both a final presentation and a chance to share food and thoughts of collective work.
The workshop had been part of Domestic Territories, an ongoing design research on new relations, spaces, and forms of encounter between humans, (other) animals, plants, and minerals.
