"There is magic in the hidden and unexplored, the overlooked and unacknowledged, waiting to be noticed."
Food Design Nation is working on the creation of a Gastronomic Interpretation Center as part of the revitalization of the region of O’Higgins, Chile, as a gastronomic destination. This will be set out through a series of itinerant physical exhibits, originating from a hybrid residency which brings together transdisciplinary international artists with local Chilean artisans.
There is magic in the hidden and unexplored, the overlooked and unacknowledged, waiting to be noticed. Traveling lets us see the world through different eyes, shifting our lens and exposing vibrant brightness. Sometimes we need the perspective of others to reveal our own surroundings; And to illuminate the obscure; To reveal the value of what has always been right there. This interfacing can make us stronger; More in tune with other communities, the landscape, traditions, cultural heritage, and ancestral knowledge, through care, nourishment and understanding.
The digital realm gives us the opportunity to collectively investigate, search, learn, taste, think, and exchange culture and knowledge, build common ground between diverse voices, and travel without physically traveling. By moving slowly, staying awake and reconnecting with our senses, we can open ourselves to the beauty and richness of our ecosystems and biodiversity, culture and personal stories, and the generosity of giving and receiving.
Food Design Nation is working on a Gastronomic Interpretation Center as part of the revitalization of the region of O’Higgins, just south of Santiago, Chile, as a gastronomic destination. This mobile exhibition is scheduled to travel to three locations during the Chilean Spring/Summer (October to December 2022), and aims to be an interactive space that connects the local community with its territory, history, culture and traditions through food.
This mobile exhibition will store and show the artworks of nine selected artists, which will complete a twelve-week-long hybrid residency program, in pairs with local artisans and with the help of an interpreter. Together they will elaborate on one hand, an artwork encapsulating the ancestral knowledge and value of the region through typical edible goods, and on the other hand, crafting a documentary that epitomises the history, process, and reflections around the selected goods.
Please highlight how the concept/idea can be exemplary in this context
As Food Design Nation strives on cooperating for viable environmental practices, the artist residency program has been laid out in order to be carried out in a hybrid format. These configurations allow for the artists to balance their own rhythms of living while working on their projects in their own places and according to their own schedule. They will be able to connect via the internet with their desired artisans and practitioners, and our interpreters to execute informative and friendly expeditions and stay updated with the residence's schedules through thematic online checking points, masterclasses, and roundtables.
These expeditions will be carried out responsibly, and in rather curious and friendly tones with the O'Higgins locals. We fully trust our Chilean correspondents to engage respectfully through the expeditions because they have been doing so for many years counted, as they also respect and value the hyperlocal activities and processes of production of autochthonous goods, and have shared with us and the artists their trust and sakes to bring back light and value to regions like theirs, overrun by aggressive globalist practices.
In the residency's format, the desire to keep it in hybrid parameters comes from the need to stick to more eco-friendly practices within the creative industries. Avoiding flying people across oceans and continents will prove this time that an authentic collaboration can be made with the lowest possible carbon footprints while keeping the authenticity of the participating people, their seasons and their processes in a world that needs to strive for more connections at lower environmental costs.
Please highlight how the concept/idea can be exemplary in this context
Regarding aesthetics, the Somewhere Called O'Higgins project aims to join the traditional goods and values of the O'Higgins region with concurrent modern configurations of what is visual. This is represented not only in the project's graphic identity, but also through the whole residency process of combining international artists with local artisans and land workers, for their work to be exposed in an itinerant exhibition.
As the digital residency will be manifested physically - thus "hybrid" - through FDN, we have laid out a schedule of fifteen interactive online activities, over the twelve weeks of the residency, to involve the participants in workshops, masterclasses, and check-in points (typical of artistic projects), while also carrying out the other FDN activities, such as Serendipities for creative networking, Safaris to gather closely with experts of the relevant sectors and debate Roundtables, to lay the foundations of stronger morals for the project.
Previous activities englobe the online sphere of the project, the ones to follow, go with the physical aspects of it. The Expeditions, as mentioned, will become the core of the connection for the artists with the locals, their culture, values and knowledge through interpretations of FDN members and Chilean citizens, as they will be in charge of visiting the different homesteads of regional and traditional productions and communicate the traditions and issues of the region to be artistically interpreted.
Finally, as the residency will come to an end, the last physical link for the project will be carried out through the itinerant exhibition, where the artworks will be presented and exposed to the regional population in different localities. The working creatives are expected to be chosen from a quorum of different disciplines, as food innovation and plastic arts represent the sector, narrative specialists, researchers, and different creatives are scheduled to participate.
Please highlight how the concept/idea can be exemplary in this context
Food Design Nation and the team of the Somewhere Called O’Higgins project have pledged to export values of equality and inclusion into the project and its outcomes, as the selection process will be carried out in non-discriminatory and inclusive manners, and so will the residences and exhibition. It should go without saying that given our values, we are expecting for everyone involved in the project, acceptance as we will make up a space of mixed heritages, nationalities, genders, and sexual orientations.
In more details, the project has been open and will be so for public participation, giving equal opportunities to everyone interested as long as the selected applicants have access to stable internet connections, especially for the previously mentioned webinars and activities.
Nevertheless, the bases and motifs for FDN and the Regional Government of O’Higgins to collaborate lay on generating more inclusive art practices for the regional and native populations to be a part of, and so for their partnered foreign artists. This is to be achieved not only by the evident practices of co-design, but also by equally paying the locals and foreign artists on budgets for their works - to sustain affordability for both, and including interpreters and translators for the English and Spanish languages in all steps of the project’s process - to ease communication and curiosities at all times.
Through the exposed inclusive practices we will attempt for the end goals to also to reach the public, as we’re promoting citizen engagement not only for the creative processes, but also for the outcomes. Meaning this, the planned exhibition, as it will be itinerary, will reach three main cities in the O’Higgins region and will abide to architectural regulations of safety and inclusivity for people with reduced mobility and other disabilities, for example.
Please highlight how this approach can be exemplary
For this project, Food Design Nations has set these values for a trifecta of mutual indemnity in interactions. First, through the project’s graphic identity and general branding, the aesthetics are linked to the elements of sustainability, which then will become reflected through the concurring developing processes of the residence. Ergo, for the creation of the future artworks and curating processes of the exhibition and its buildings, sustainability is counted in as a primordial requisite for the project’s tone and carrying.
Then, when it comes to ensuring the authenticity of the sustainable aspects of the project, inclusion has been valued as a primordial piece on the project-building, knowing that for the project to comply with the promises of sustainability it has to consider not only all of the participating voices, but also, and especially, the ones that possess the ancestral knowledge of the O’Higgins ecosystem. It goes as said, that both FDN and the Somewhere Called O’Higgins project are inclusive platforms that do not discriminate between nationalities, ethnicities, genders, and sexual orientations.
Finally, for the project to bring authenticity on value as an outcome, the aesthetics of it are done and expressed considering the same values of inclusion, on letting artists from all over the world participate regardless of their physical qualities and while also listening closely to the natives and traditional populations of the O’Higgins region, as they will know better than anyone else the significance of their spaces and traditions, and so for the expression of them.
It must be taken into account how valuing sustainability has shaped the planning of the residency and will do so with the exhibition building, and the artwork crafting, as we have decided to run and compromise through online platforms while ensuring efficient communication between a diverse group of artists and the people of O’Higgins.
As distance and the pandemic have forced our creative processes through funnel-like developments, these have also come conceptual innovations after the narrowest side of the mental schemes. Firstly, to consider a more diverse audience of artists available to work for remote areas -like O’Higgins, the residence has been crafted to be fully efficient while carried out on every artist’s place and pace. As for many artists choosing to transfer their practices to another studio, sometimes across borders, and considering having to pay for it, when applying for residencies, this project has dissolved such problems while reassuring guides, interpreters, and follow-ups to the participating artists, all while being in their comfort places and while being remunerated for doing so.
The online element of this project goes on brand with the statements of Food Design Nation, therefore, it is set to board with efficiency. As FDN is a borderless community of food creatives fully based in the internet working for redefining global food systems into better futuristic solutions for today’s issues.
Now for the concerns of the region of O’Higgins, aggressive globalist practices such as overflowing imports of goods, land monoculture, and degradation of the value of what is native has left a generation of producers, artisans and home-cooks hanging on an uncertain future for their practices. While these sorts of situations should spark activist solutions, from Food Design Nation, a soft-powerful approach to the root issues is taking while artistically remembering and representing their practices to put them back on enlightened positions as a way to channel what the common social will strives for.
This soft power approach to the multifaceted issues of value in the region, as carried out in rather humanistic practices, such as the arts, can bee seen as a way to plant seeds of solutions and bring out the future reassurance of how valuable native ancestral knowledge is.
Overall, the project counts on three main phases for its organizational timeline and execution: internal work and applications, the residency, and three scheduled exhibitions. The foremost phase has been running since its announcement in mid-November and will finish when the application results get released on the 17th of March. For this section of the project, FDN has been working on crafting the project’s backbone to the detail; team-building, crafting the open call, giving a graphic image to the project, and running test expeditions have been some of the main activities which have set the base of the project.
The next phase: the residency, scheduled between the 1st of April until June the 17th. The residency will feature apart from follow-ups and guidance for the working artists different activities which come in the fashion of FDN’s procedures: one Serendipity for creative networking, five Safaris to gather closely with experts of the relevant sectors, and a Roundtable, to create stronger based morals for the projects. These activities, as planned, not only include all of the participating artists but also the selected artisans and producers of the O’Higgins region.
And for the final section of this project, a first half consists of planning the precise route of the itinerant exhibition and building it to detail. This section comes during the Chilean winter season, from July until the end of September of 2022. The other half and final stretch of the project, as the most awaited one is the actual exhibition and take-off on the itinerary, consisting of three main locations around the Chilean Spring and beginning of Summer, ergo October - December 2022.
Thereafter, we plan to modify and repeat the frameworks for different regions in Chile, as well as other gastronomic cultural destinations across the globe.
As we’re submitting this initiative for the New European Bauhaus Rising Stars Award, winning the 15.000 EUR prize, plus the communication package would be not only an achievement for us, FDN, but also for the people of O’Higgins and the crew of participating artists.
The work for this project, as mentioned, not only consists on artwork crafting and the exhibitions, it also integrates the documentation of the explorations that our Chile-based team will make to the different localities of the region, which will be edited in a short documentary format and is to be distributed to extrapolate the achievements of the artists, artisans and the project overall - all for the goal of bringing back value to the people that need it the most right now. Mentioning more details of this documentary should illustrate that sort of the prize will be allocated to count on ameliorating the editing of the audiovisual materials and assisting on the pitching and distribution of it to platforms with wide scopes of audiences.
Keeping on documenting the success of this project, it's inclusion in Food Design Nation’s periodical magazine, FDzeeN, will be the next step, as we have worked with journalists specialized in crafting cultural narratives around food, bringing well-endowed and quality content to our publication is on the list of goals for our team.
Finally, the success of this project with the endorsement of the New European Bauhaus Collective will mean, as said, a victory for the people involved in the outcome of it. Those who are in need of new value to their endangered practices aren’t only the peoples of O’Higgins, but the case is such for many worldwide. Hence, extrapolating this project to other areas of Chile, the Americas and the world is a win for the ones that fear the erasure of their heritage, and for us, whom with this award, will be able to lend a helping hand for the appreciation of their cultures.
@Caradonna, 2022
Content licensed to the European Union.