Zain Abuseir

“Archive of Ecologies”

Planetary heating, pandemics, systemic social injustice, and rising food prices altered food accessibility and systems. Technological advances in agricultural practices increased crop yields at the cost of biodiversity, which dropped so low that only 30 crops provide 95% of human-energy needs, and the U.S. lost over 90% of its produce varieties since the 1900s.2 This threatens agricultural history, and destabilizes culinary operations as a cultural process and mediator between nature and society.3 Processing, preserving, producing, preparing, and presenting food are operations that help archive heritage, societal and cultural memories, and intergenerational traditions. The studio explores methods of spatializing these operations by proposing an Archive of Food Ecologies that makes visible the rhythm, choreography and amplitude of food processes, states and consumption.

We will start the semester by reading a few references that will guide the initial speculative thinking. We will then use architectural representation methods to draw [out] relationships within culinary processes and meal choreographies indexing social and cultural traces, all the while mediating ripeness and decay. We will then use the last and longest part of the semester to explore spatial configurations and develop a design proposal to preserve [in]tangible food ecologies.