Practicing with Communities: Food and Social Exchange
How can design, architecture, spatial and urban practice act in relation to present issues of crisis and conflicts? What role does different modes of practice, spaces and infrastructures have in responding to global challenges – from climate change and ecological collapses, geopolitical and economic crisis and displacement of people to issues of democracy, social justice and equality?
In this gathering we explore how design practices use food as a material and method for researching and discussing cultural diversity and hybridisation in relation to displacement, diasporic experiences and difficult heritage. Presentations by Francesca Gattello and Mayar El Bakry, introduction and moderation by Magnus Ericson.
Photo: Steffie De Gaetano
‘Salsa al Borgo’ workshop as part of Nourishing Coversations by Francesca Gattello, Steffie De Gaetano and Silvia Susanna during the DAAS Difficult Heritage Summer School, 2022
Food as material and processes, from tracing the complex histories and economies around ingredients and tools, to using cooking and eating as a convivial space, opens up possibilities for social exchange, connecting a plurality of experiences and knowledge, bodies and communities. How can design practice engage with diverse, fragile, and often marginalised individuals and groups? What can be its methods, possibilities and challenges? What impact may these initiatives have on a local scale? From a larger perspective, can this contribute to a better understanding of, respect fo and valuing of difference, and imagining new forms of world makings acknowledging the potential in a society characterised by diversity?
Designer and researcher Francesca Gattello presents two projects that use food and collective practice to address questions of participation, underrepresented experiences and knowledge, as well as difficult memories and heritage. A Mobile Cart for Food Distribution examines the kitchen as a space to foster engagement, inclusion, and collective practices. Developed through co-design methods, the project brings together vernacular knowledge, migrants’ expertise, and local craftsmanship and becomes a tool for reappropriating public space through convivial food distribution events, where cooking and sharing activate social exchange. A Mobile Kitchen for Borgo Rizza was conceived to subvert the difficult heritage of Borgo Rizza, a service centre built by the Entity of Colonization of the Sicilian Latifundia during the Fascist regime to implement the internal colonization of southern Italy. Operating within a framework of decolonial practices, it uses the act of cooking as a form of resistance. The kitchen becomes a tool for sharing memory and care, transforming food preparation into a collective momentum and by extending the domestic space into the public realm, it challenges institutional narratives and redefines the commons through conviviality, participation, and the celebration of diasporic knowledge rooted in place. Multidisciplinary designer Mayar El Bakry presents two projects, Qatayef Delights and Edible Synchronies, which engage with memory, belonging, and collective care through food-based, participatory practices. Both works treat kitchens, workshops, and community spaces as places for reflection, dialogue, and shared learning. Through cooking, tasting, and material experimentation, they bring stories, histories, and embodied experiences into conversation. Qatayef Delights invites participants to connect with Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme’s exhibition May amnesia never kiss us on the mouth by preparing traditional Arabic sweet dumplings and tea around a street-food installation—an homage to the mobile kitchens of SWANA street-food vendors that shape everyday urban life. Developed with Gabriela Aquije, Edible Synchronies traces relationships between people, land, and seasonal cycles in Andean landscapes through foraging, fermentation, and colour extraction, drawing on generational and communal knowledge. Though situated in different contexts and working across different geographies, both projects frame the museum and the community as spaces for inquiry. Food serves as a shared language for learning, reciprocity, and environmental and social awareness, making unseen histories and knowledges more tangible and present.
Francesca Gattello is an Italian social designer and independent researcher based in Palermo. Founder of Marginal Studio – a collective that explores the margins of design field and the roles it can play in the making of societies – and in 2020, she established the NGO LOTs – Libero Osservatorio Territoriale sud to foster socio-cultural innovation and storytelling in Sicily. Her work challenges the established design system through an experience-based approach, combining theory and grounded practice, nourished by explorations of the boundaries between design, art and architecture. She investigates notions of ‘material culture’ and ‘minor vernacular heritage’ in Mediterranean areas, as well as ‘civic and collective uses of means of production’ with the aim of reinventing narratives and traditions. She develops participatory practices and site-committed actions to create shared knowledges in marginalised contexts and with underprivileged communities. Currently artist in residence at IASPIS, her project The Kitchen as a Heterotopia examines the materiality of food as a tool to re-read histories, reclaim political agency, and imagine future hybridized cultures, with a specific focus on diasporic communities across Italy, Eritrea, and Sweden.
Mayar El Bakry is a Swiss-Egyptian multidisciplinary designer, researcher, curator, and educator, whose practice explores shifting identities, belonging, and the politics of care across cultural, ecological, and digital landscapes. Working at the intersections of artistic research, design, and storytelling, her projects investigate how softness – understood as vulnerability, attentiveness, and relationality – can operate as a form of resistance to extractive, colonial, and technocratic systems. Mayar develops research frameworks that think across multiple forms of access, combining image-making, embodied knowledge, narrative, and material inquiry. Recent work focuses on (ecological) grief and ritual as tools for sense-making and collective orientation, tracing connections between landscapes, infrastructures, and lived experience. Through storytelling as a design methodology, she creates spaces for dialogue, reflection, and imagination, inviting alternative ways of relating to territory, technology, and one another. Mayar has received multiple grants and regularly lectures at international institutions.
Magnus Ericson is Head of Applied arts IASPIS, responsible for IASPIS’ programme related to design, craft, architecture, spatial and urban practice.
Practicing with Communities: Food and Social Exchange is the first in a new series of public events at IASPIS organised as part of Practice Matters, a project exploring design, architecture, spatial and urban practice and its ability to act in relation to present urgent issues of crisis and conflicts. The project is developed in collaboration between IASPIS and Salt.