OPEN CALL: 2024 Food Action Awards by CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA

CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA is offering two awards to advance projects that respond to food in the new seasons of the climate crisis, such as drought, polluted oceans or fertiliser runoff.

The first award, Research Action, is open to those with at least five years of practice. This award of 25,000 GBP includes all fees and production costs.

The second award, Emerging Practice, is open to recent RCA graduates (within the last six years). This award of 15,000 GBP includes all fees and production costs.

These situated research awards are open to international practitioners, collectives and researchers in the areas of architecture, visual arts, food studies, farming, environmental humanities or any other related discipline. The aim is to support infrastructural prototypes, field trials, landworkers solidarity networks, BIPOC farming initiatives, queer ecologies or microclimatic environments among other strategies towards building alternative diets that benefit human and nonhuman nourishing.

Since the Industrial Revolution and especially after WWII, seasons have been shifting at unexpected rates, together with the food produce and harvests that are meant to follow them. Longer dry periods and more extreme monsoon-related events in central India are severely affecting grain harvest. Hotter winters in the east coast of the US deprive trees of the chill hours they require to bear stone fruit. Prolonged dry spells during the rainy season in Ghana and Ivory Coast are threatening cocoa supply in the world’s top producing countries. In Europe, the first day of spring has advanced by six to eight days in the past thirty years. Wine harvests in Burgundy, France, now start in mid-August, almost a month earlier than many decades ago. Signs that once allowed us to organise life around seasons are a sign of an imminent collapse. In the climate crisis new seasons are emerging, defined by droughts, heatwaves, polluted seas, soil infertility, movement of deserts or invasive species.

CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA launches the 2024 Food Action Awards, inviting proposals to identify new seasons of the climate crisis and their manifestation in other geographies facing similar conditions along the broken food chain. Proposals should include research into legacies of extractivism and possible reparative futures to address how we eat as humans change the climate.

We encourage practices that include multiple backgrounds and perspectives, activate multiple channels for the distribution of research outcomes, and construct a network of collaborators and other institutional contacts. Confirmed collaboration with local partners or organisations on the ground is highly desirable. The start date should be summer 2024, with completion within 12 months.

All applications will be reviewed based on their engagement with the CLIMAVORE themes and situated contemporary challenges, long-term commitment to a site and the depth of the project’s investigation. Proposals that demonstrate critical and forward thinking, specificity, situatedness and a distinctive research theme and methodology are preferred.

Deadline for applications is Sunday April 21, 11:59pm (GMT). Visit the RCA website for full details, submission requirements, further information and FAQs. For more information on the Seasons of the climate crisis visit CLIMAVORE.