Rural design conference scheduled for September 2006
January 21, 2006
(above: Wheatfield, a large public work by Agnes Denes, image copyright Agnes Denes)
Chapeau to John Thackara at the Doors of Perception blog who reports today about a rural design conference scheduled to take place September 4-7 2006 (somewhere) in the UK. Just have a look at what’s being developed for the programme! I am pleased to see that it is all about establishing and strengthening real connections between (urban) cultural producers and rural agriculture producers to the benefit of both.
In a conference forerunner in July of 2005, this is what they were talking about: farmers as curators - an international Rural Biennale for 2007, sustainable farm diversification, rural tourism, food marketing initiatives and staging the Rural Biennale as an integral part of a European Region of Rural Cultures and Farmer Creativity celebration.
To the list of interesting subjects already discussed and in the planning for September 2006, I would like to add: ‘rural farmer to urban farmer advisory partnerships for urban gardening/farming initiatives’. I can’t help but wonder if the experience and knowledge of the rural farmer can help urban farming inititives such as this wonderful urban farming project in East L.A from being under threat of closure due to urban land-use issues. Injecting (cultural) life into family farms suffering brunt of (European) Agricultural Policy might be just the ticket for rejuvenating a way of life under threat of extinction. Might not the urban farmer benefit from being part of this discussion and network?
- European Rural Culture events page
- Littoral - new zones for critical art practice. An excellent organisation website, with informative links on everything from an extremely mixed bag of individual artists and designers that use nature / agriculture / landscape as a creative platform, to cultural documents on foot and mouth disease!
- Cultural Documents of the Foot and Mouth Crisis in the UK
- Urban food gleaning project by Fallen Fruit
- The South Central Farms website is good reading if you want to get fired up!
- Pruned, weblog on landscape architecture and related fields.
- Pruned blog entry about South Central Farms in L.A.
- Pruned on artist Agnes Denes
- Brilliant films by Raymond Depardon about the demise of French farming communities in the Lozere were shown at the 2005 Int’l Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam (IDFA) as part of a special tribute programme.
- Farming as a a landscaping trend in suburbia! (Landscaping is responsible for more than 80% of water use in the suburbs.)
- Doors of Perception review of urban farming proposal by Dutch architect Winy Maas
- Non-sanctioned urban gardening in Istanbul, entry in culiblog
- Innovation Network Rural Areas and Agricultural Systems
technorati tags: rural design, food security, sustainability, farming, food-related art, food-related design, food-related film, Raymond Depardon, agricultural diversification, agricultural policy, urban gardening
debra at 11:47 | Comments (1) | post to del.icio.us
Food-related film at the Rotterdam International Film Festival
January 20, 2006
Petrolatum Spirit, film still from Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9, copyright Matthew Barney, used without permission
Pack up your yurt, we’re moving to Rotterdam for a little more than a week. January 25 - February 5, 2006 is the Rotterdam International Film Festival. The programming is dazzling, but I’ve created a short food-related film selection for anyone that believes it’s time to move beyond Tampopo. Having not yet seen these films, I am hoping that their content can be interpreted as food-related, in the culiblog sense of the word: food, food culture, food AS culture, and the culture that grows our food.
Tickets are available from Saturday January 21, 2006 at 09.00 hrs until Saturday February 4, 2006 at 21.00 hrs at the Festival Box Office located in ‘de Doelen’ (entrance Kruisplein), Rotterdam and, by telephone through +31 0(10) 890 9000
The culiblog food-related film selection for the International Film Festival Rotterdam 2006:
Sunday 29.1
10.30h - Kitchen
14.30h - Fish Fall in Love, culiblog review of Ali Rafi’i’s When Fish Fall in Love
Monday 30.1
19.00h - Drawing Restraint, culiblog review of Matthew Barney’s Drawing Restraint 9
21.45h - Eden
Tuesday 31.1
16.00h - Poulet poulet
17.30h - Mother of the Mother and also the Mother of the Mother’s Mother and Her Daughter
film still from Mother of the Mother and also the Mother of the Mother’s Mother and Her Daughter, copyright IFFRotterdam, used without permission
From Wednesday 01.2 until the festival’s end, I shall attend as many films as I please regardless of their food-related content. If you’re coming, drop me a line so that we can meet up and tuck into some excellent Rotterdam food.
technorati tags: International Film Festival Rotterdam, film, food-related film
debra at 22:40 | Comments (0) | post to del.icio.us
Madrid Fusion, only one more day, and you can’t go
January 18, 2006
Because this gastronomical summit is all sold out. Tomorrow is the last day of the three day event, Madrid Fusion IV, International Summit of Gastronomy. The programme is filled with restaurant industry pomp and poodle, showcasing valuable marriages between top chefs and industry giants like Nestle, Knorr and Maggi. There is an all-star, all-male lineup of superchefs, save the lone Elena Arzak, but her blurb only blurbs on about her father Juan Mari’s fathomless imagination.
Enough bitching and moaning, if I had gone, I would have been absolutely interested in the designer tapas competition, because frankly, many of the conference presentations are just camouflaged sales pitches. Example topic: ‘Cheese trolleys and trays in restaurants, the last rage.’ Yeah, that’s the last rage allright, just not in my world.
My ‘last rage’ is the presence of the angelic Alice Waters, there to accept a tribute on behalf of the Summit of Gastronomy for being a ‘Founder of New American Cuisine” (Waters is above all blame) when there are such uncool conference topics about the newest recipes for serving up a fish that is widely considered to be an endangered species. Although I’d be the first one to say that a restaurant is not a home kitchen, and therefore doesn’t have the same responsibilities in terms of teaching or practicing good health and consumer behaviour, I do wish that the designers of such events would moderate their sponsors (content) and take a stand against bad practices by bad boys.
Because in the name of wishful thinking, if I had to name one food trend that I would love to see spread like wildfire this year, it would be that the world’s league of exemplary chefs exclusively associate their names and restaurants with the best artisanal and local producers, producers of sustainable products. And maybe that IS just what the good folks at the Gastronomic Summit talked about today after the ‘Cod: new recipes, a thousand flavours’ presentation. Maybe there will be brilliant debate tomorrow during the Q&A after the ‘Canned Fish in Haute Cuisine’ discussion. Heq, I won’t be there to check, but I’ll ask Alice how it went when I see her at the Berlin Film Festival Slow Food Symposium next month.
- Cod, A Biography Of The Fish That Changed The World, by Mark Kurlansky
- film trailer, We Feed the World by Erwin Wagenhofer (partially in German, and may be considered by some to be ‘challenging’. It contains the three most brilliant quotes in the film, which I’ll happily translate for you if you need it.)
- culiblog reviews We Feed the World
- animation trailer, the Meatrix2 by Free Range Studios
technorati tags: sustainability, cod, fusion, gastronomy, culiblog, International Summit of of Gastronomy, Madrid, top chef, restaurant industry, endangered species, food trends, We Feed the World
debra at 19:20 | Comments (4) | post to del.icio.us
