Building on the Radical Kitchen: Recipes for Building Community and Creating Change programme launched in 2017, Serpentine presented a second season of its lunchtime gatherings in the Serpentine Pavilion, designed by Frida Escobedo. On Thursday 6 September, architects and urbanists Territorial Agency considered fossils.
On selected Thursdays over the summer, artists, activists and researchers gathered with the public to consider different global foodstuffs and elements – their stories, their movements and their relationship to time, empire and landscape. Visitors were invited to share food and reflect on empire, geological time, exchange and decolonisation, themes inspired by Escobedo’s design, which draws on the domestic architecture of her native Mexico and British materials and context, specifically the Prime Meridian line at the Royal Observatory.
Each lunchtime session focused on a different element or food item, tracing how ingredients such as sugar, grains and chilli have shaped the globalised world, and how consumption, exchange, politics and economics determine – and are determined by – these elements.
Radical Kitchen 2018 brought together questions generated through two major research strands undertaken by Serpentine Projects. The ongoing Rights to the City programme addresses housing rights, racial discrimination, privatisation of public space and the politics of care. Launching in 2018, General Ecology marks the Serpentine Galleries’ commitment to addressing questions around ecology, complexity, organisation and climate change.
John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog (Territorial Agency) are architects and urbanists. They have established Territorial Agency, an independent organisation that innovatively promotes and works for sustainable territorial transformations. Territorial Agency is engaged to strengthen the capacity of local and international communities in comprehensive spatial transformation management. Territorial Agency addresses the innovative modalities of organising and managing the relation between polity and space and it mobilises architecture and urbanism as the agencies of that relation.
Radical Kitchen 2018 was a collaboration with Nicoletta Fiorucci, Founder of Fiorucci Art Trust, and is supported by Aesop.
