Foresta Food Lab
a space for food-based artistic practice
Vision
Food has been a long-term research and collaborative practice at Foresta. And food is never ‘only’ food. It is one of the fundamental ways of relating — to soil and seasons, to labour and memory, to ecology and imagination, to Earth beings and materials that make places possible. It is nourishment, but also language, ceremony, medicine, exchange, and responsibility. In the broader Foresta vision we approach food as a portal for world-making, an integral part of our platform for regenerative practice, rooted in attention, care, and collective inquiry.
We are thinking of food as a conversation, between people and other species, seasons and landscape, as a tribute to the passing of time and shifting cycles, to attention and listening, to regeneration and relation — agricultural, cultural, economical, intergenerational, embodied, multispecies.
Food is a relationship between arts, crafts and technology — meeting in all the tools we use when planting, harvesting, eating and interacting with ingredients. Food is connection — between those who grow, those who are being grown, those who receive, and those who dispose.
So what if we bring food back into the centre of our thinking and making? If food is a worlding practice, how do we strengthen regenerative food ecologies? What and who are included into those ecologies? How do we lay sustainable foundations for food sovereignty? How does food as poetry, friendship, memory, energy manifest?
Gradually, it was not only a cultural and philosophical investigation into food-worlds that was animating us. Gradually, a more grounded interest began to sprout — that of implementing regenerative agriculture and food production at Foresta on the land.
A garden of many gardens
Since a couple of years we have been in the presence of 3 ha piece of land in Asturias, northern Spain, with an intention for Foresta to begin growing as a real forest. Thinking tools that accompanied us throughout were mainly offered by the gardens — planetary garden, forest garden, garden of ecological re-story-ation. Lead by inquiries into what potential futures do gardens make possible, and if gardens are expressions of what we are tending and how, could gardens be partners in reimagining human becoming and our work in the world?
We have been researching the subjects around food forests for a few years, and growing ecosystems of co-liveable edible forests — forest gardens — became one of our main activities at Foresta on the land. So far we have planted the first couple of thousands of trees and bushes, made paths and terraces, tried to co-facilitate processes for soil regeneration, built the first structure on the land - an agropoetic pavilion, and constructed a heating and cooking prototype, aka stove and oven.
While thinking and walking with questions like what does this place want to become and what do we wish for it to become through our hopeful practice, gradually we grew to recognize the multitudes of diverse micro-worlds, landscapes, soils, microclimates, that are all part of this land. That this land too is a pluriverse, that it is too a world of many worlds. And so the idea for a garden of many gardens was born, emerging from the experience of getting to know this place closer.
It is thus our wish to offer to different artists and affine practitioners to bring their divergent worlding practices onto the common ground that is Foresta, to plant gardens that could live and evolve beside each other without any need to comply to a spectacle of sameness. It is our wish to invite you to join us in co-shaping the possible at Foresta on the land.
Invitation
The invitation is to engage with Foresta space for regenerative culture(s) as a site of ongoing practice — where food becomes a medium through which relationships are cultivated, observed, and transformed over time. It’s a proposal to root practice in place, to reconnect food, ecology and culture, to participate in the slow collective cultivation of a living system and be cultivated by it.
Residents and collaborators are invited to:
Grow ingredients they will later use
Develop new formats of culinary, ecological, and social practice
Experiment with ways of sharing food
We are interested in practices that engage food as relationship, poetry, medicine, ceremony, memory, friendship. Whether it’s about cooking, foraging, baking, fermentation, gardening, gathering, preservation, transformation, research, storytelling, ritual, hospitality, or forms that might not yet have a name, — what matters is not genre, but attunement. We value sensitivity and listening, reciprocity and openness to work with what is available, and to let the process be shaped by the land as much as by the artist.
Foresta garden as a framework for shared research and learning offers a space to ask questions that are at once practical and poetic. Not questions to resolve quickly, but questions to inhabit together, to dwell in over the changing seasons. It invites to join the beginning of a longer trajectory, of returning across seasons, of working with time, growing food from seed and following its cycles, building familiarity with local soils, plants, and microclimates, allowing relationships — ecological, human, multispecies — to deepen gradually.
This is not a call to produce outputs. It is a field for presence, exchange, and careful making. A residency here is an opportunity to slow down enough to sense what the place is already doing, what it is asking for, and what forms of nourishment, meaning, or repair might emerge through working with it.
Images: Foresta Collective from
*Architecture(s) of Connection at Bauhaus Earth with Jasmine Parsley
*(Un)mapping Pedagogies at Spore Initiative with Colectivo Suumil Móokt'aan
*Conviviality with plants at Transit.sk with all participants making food together
*Senses Series at Über den Tellerrand with all participants making food together
*Forms of Love at Woods in the City with participants making food together
Closing images: Eszter Kondor from
Invisible Maps at Dunjiva Kollektiv with Wilde Flora