Future Topophagies

Here are some images from a workshop I co-organized with Valentine Cadieux and Steve Dietz through the University of Minnesota and Northern Lights in Minneapolis, MN at the end of September 2014. The workshop was staged in conjunction with the show thinking making living at the Nash Gallery at the U of MN. We couldn’t have run this without the generous coordination of Christine Baeumler. And I’d have been helpless without Valentine Cadieux. It was  an exciting, fast, and very productive process. I *think* everyone had a good time and got a lot out of the experience.

We drew from a set of seven constraints, imagined future picnics based on those constraints, and at the end of day two, prototyped the food and packaging we’d use if we were to make such a public event. I will be writing up the scenarios shortly.

While these participants came from art, social science, history, ecocriticism, architecture, biology, climatology, and politics, I think you could run this workshop with a wide variety of people and publics, and turn up relevant, and resonant results.

Participants:  Stephen Sebestyen, Laura Bigger, Teréz Iacovino, Matthew Tucker, Sarah Peters, Cam Gordon, Tracey Deutsch, Karen Moss, Sandra Teitge, Aaron Dysart, Andrea Steudel, Molly Balcom Raleigh, Christine Baeumler, Kenny Blumenfeld,  Shanai Matteson, Sarah Nassif, Molly Reichert, Ryan Seibold, Bunmi Odumuye, Emily Stover, interns Andrea, Marie, and Della, and Janaki Ranpura (in spirit and email)

Images: M Zurkow, V Cadieux and Sarah Nassif.
More images by Laura Bigger here.