Project

Nourriture passe Nature, is the application of the conception and construction process of an outdoor kitchen, as an investigation strategy for the agricultural fields of Zone Sensible. The urban farm located in the parisian suburb of Saint-Denis, recently recuperated by the artist collective Parti Poétique, is a new field for research around the themes of nature-culture-food.

As part of the opening of the exhibition space 365, Parti Poétique invited Constructlab to live and invest the farm during a 10-day residency. Our active presence through living, sleeping and eating from the fields, allowed us to question different ways of occupying and thinking about place, situating ourselves as bodies in a system of flux. What does it mean to build in a naturally rich and humid land which favours, since the middle ages, the development of a vegetable culture once feeding a large part of the parisian population? What is it to transform energy (in the shape of vegetables) into food in the middle of the fields that produced them, and the subsequent production of culture through their transformation? These were some of the questions that occupied our minds …

Within the one hectare that delimits the Zone Sensible, we find what they refer to as the Place de l’Étoile; a central point where eight parcels, each with their own set of living organisms, converge. Seeing the heart of the kitchen as the place where raw ingredients are transformed into meals and ideas are nourished and confronted, marking the passage from nature to culture, the Place de l’Étoile seemed like a perfect place to welcome it.

Building one module a day, we invested the Place de l’Étoile and invited others to share it with us. Small guitar concerts, cultivation moments, the departure of farm visits and dinners progressively occupied the space as we were building it. The construction of the kitchen thus articulated itself around vegetable crops, at the heart of an ecosystem of relationships between the different actors of the farm and its surroundings. This processual intervention, through its mediating function, materialized the search for a common ground between agriculture, culture and architecture. The kitchen with an agora like arrangement welcomes activities related to the agricultural fields, cooking sessions, informal gatherings and artistic interventions.