Convivial Tables in Campo. You and I Eat The Same Tides

We look forward to seeing you on Saturday 30 September for the second edition of "Convivial Tables in Campo", this year curated by The Tidal Garden as part of the "Convivial Tables: Sapid Soil" program.

“You and I Eat The Same Tides” proposes the domestication of halophytes - more commonly known as saltmarsh plants, as a model for rethinking food over extended timeframes. Paraphrasing the saying "They planted so that we would eat. We plant so they can eat," halophytes are inherently intertwined with the latent and potential amphibious communities and landscapes. From this standpoint, the processes of digestion and cultivation, in tandem with the regulatory frameworks governing them, are inextricably enmeshed with both past and forthcoming kinship.

Drawing from these principles, the three segments comprising "You and I Eat the Same Tides" confront a not-yet that is already here. The invited contributors initiate their reflections from the vantage point of halophytes and the salinised farmlands of the Venice Lagoon to activate a series of instruments. These resist the politics of erasure of brackish worlds that are legitimised by the myth of infertility and outline amphibious worlds that are still possible.

SAN LORENZO CLOISTER

• 10:30 am–1:30 pm | "Beyond the Ecology of Waste: Narratives and Techniques for (re-) instituting the Lagoon". Workshop led by legal sociologist Veronica Pecile. By invitation only.

Beyond The Ecology of Waste, is a workshop that probes new legal techniques to safeguard salinised farmlands in the Venice Lagoon. Led by legal sociologist Veronica Pecile, the workshop revolves around the creation of a vocabulary that situates halophytes and salty lands in a non-anthropocentric temporal horizon. While history testifies to the use of law as a tool to erase the brackish ecosystems of the Lagoon, legal practices can still provide narratives capable of emancipating amphibious worlds from extractive regimes.

Evelyn Leveghi, after training in design disciplines in Milan and Venice, embarked on a path in Food Studies, first in Bologna and recently between Pollenzo and Turin as a PhD student in Food Politics. She approaches research with an eminently socio-political interest and employs design skills to find strategic solutions to complex systems. The topics she is investigating range from food rioting to democratizing decision-making in food governance.

Francesca Luise chose Cookeneim as her name to identify her cooking style. She lives in Venice, which, together with its Lagoon provide the background and nourish her dishes. She focuses on plant-based cooking, with one eye on the environment and relationships, and one on aesthetics. She has a home plant-based cooking workshop, is a private chef, and writes for Terra Nuova magazine, for which she edits the monthly natural cooking column that ranges from writing to photographing recipes.

Matteo Vianello is a researcher, architect, and PhD in Architecture. He approaches the study of landscape theories by writing and editing academic and non-academic publications, in parallel with teaching collaboration at Iuav in Venice. His research activity is focused on the relationships between ecologies and project, through the study of landscape representations and perceptions in Modern history. In 2022, she published the outcomes of the project/event Matters Of Lives: Encounters on the edge of the Pluriverse, a collective reflection on multispecies aesthetics and politics between human and non-human.

Sardea is a duo of experts, scholars, and cooks born from the collaboration between two women: Marta Meo and Beatrice Marca, who, from different educational backgrounds, architecture and art, have found their convergence in Venice, in taste and flavors. Since 2018, they have been cooking and consulting for small private events, brands, and Italian and foreign cultural institutions. They love to mix ingredients, techniques, and stories, starting from the Venetian gastronomic culture, whose dynamism can be an inspiration for a thoughtful reflection on the challenges of the present.

Veronica Pecile is broadly interested in sociolegal studies, critical theory, postcolonial studies and theories of spatiotemporality. In 2022/23 she was a fellow at the Collegium Helveticum with a research on legal techniques that challenge the linear notion of time and the individual subject at the core of modern Western law. Previously, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Global Law and Policy at Harvard Law School in 2021/22. She obtained her PhD in Law and Social Sciences from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) in 2019.

You And I Eat The Same Tides is part of Convivial Tables: Sapid Soil, curated by The Tidal Garden. The performance is part of the cycle of activities that contextualises the culinary events in broader chapters on the topic of conservation and its policies. Developed by The Tidal Garden with artists and academics, these events build on the entanglements between humans and Lagoon plants to explore paradigms of care rooted in more-than-human perspectives.