Proposal for the open call: Food Culture Days 2027 - Biennale Vevey
Fatty acid collective : Johanna Keck, Giulia Baldissera, Romina Totaro

An exploration of food, territory and collective rituals through cooking, material experimentation and exchange.

The project reimagines the banquet as a contemporary ritual of gathering, where abundance is understood not through excess, but through diversity, transformation and sharing.

Rooted in the histories of plants and the territories they inhabit, the project explores the relationships between local agriculture, migration, colonial exchange and food cultures. Regional varieties meet plants that have travelled across continents, revealing how our understanding of what is “local” has always been shaped by movement, adaptation and exchange.

At the heart of the project is an open kitchen, surrounded by a continuous communal table. Cooking becomes a visible and collective act, bringing growers, foragers, cooks and guests into a shared environment of preparation, eating and learning.

Working with limited resources, the kitchen becomes a space for experimentation. Fermentation, drying, pickling and other preservation techniques extend the life of ingredients, allowing peels, seeds and surplus to move from one meal to another. Nothing is considered simply waste: food by-products are transformed into edible vessels, serving elements and experimental biomaterials.

This circular approach extends into the scenography. Semi-transparent bio-textiles developed from fruit residues, starches, algae and fermentation by-products inhabit the pavilion, creating a soft, evolving landscape around the kitchen. Each textile connects to the botanical research behind the menu, carrying the stories of selected plants into the spatial experience.

Throughout the festival, the pavilion continuously transforms. Shared meals, workshops and conversations with local growers, seed keepers and makers turn the space into a living archive of ingredients, materials, practices and knowledge.

More than a place to eat, the banquet becomes a temporary commons: a space where cooking, making and gathering intersect, and where generosity emerges from what we can share, transform and learn from one another.