OPEN CALL: Cookbooks and Manuals Tallinn Architecture Biennale

The global food system, from the overgrowth of chickens to the entirety of the agri-food industry, is the world’s second largest emitter of greenhouse gases. As the need for food continues to grow in response to increasing urbanization, the alienation between people and their provision sources also grows. We continue to produce and consume our edibles by reinforcing carbon dependency, often unaware of the links between the sourcing, production and distribution of food, and the ways in which we consume it. In many ways, we are estranged from the journey of the edible arriving to our table.

This open call urges architects and designers to reimagine planetary food systems, along with architecture’s expressive capacity to metabolize, digest and generate resources. How can we redefine traditional practices upon which the global food systems have been operating for the last decades and urge new forms of localization and production? How can we explore alternative pathways between production and consumption? How might we foster circular processes and economies through design?

The spatial and existential connections between architecture and food surface in different scales: from the gut of our bodies to the ecology of territories and the technology of building systems. They bring together the farm, the city, injustice, and the stomach. With a focus on the urban and architectural implications of food systems (production, distribution, consumption, decomposition) and the urgency for productivity in cities, the Future Food Deal open call aims to present alternative forms of urban farming, new local and interspecies ecologies for food production or zero food miles practices that reconnect communities with their food, among other topics.

We seek a diverse range of projects developed in the form of cookbooks and manuals that will constitute new guidelines of food-driven and food-oriented projects within design disciplines. Submitted proposals are invited to explore the principles of kinship, interspecies alliances, circularity, and localization and to ask what new rituals, practices and architectures can emerge from the networks of food production, consumption distribution and decay.

The deadline for submissions is May 13, 2022.

Information about submission requirements are available on the TAB 2022 website. All work is to be submitted via email to futurefooddeal@tab.ee. The OPEN CALL is interdisciplinary and open to individuals, collectives, institutions, or industrial partnerships whose proposals reimagine the relationships between food systems and the architecture of buildings and cities. There are no restrictions on eligibility. Work may range from practical proposals to speculative projects that imagine far-future contexts. Participants are encouraged to submit reformatted versions of their ongoing or completed projects and research work or propose entirely new work based on the themes of the open call. The Future Food Deal will be showcased in the format of cookbooks and open manuals in the TAB 2022 exhibition.

The Future Food Deal open call is organized by the curatorial team of the upcoming Tallinn Architecture Biennale (TAB) Edible, Or, The Architecture of Metabolism opening in September 2022. TAB 2022 is curated by Lydia Kallipoliti and Areti Markopoulou in collaboration with assistant curator Sonia Sobrino Ralston.