Convivial Tables

Convivial Tables is TBA21–Academy’s active research program dedicated to the ties between food and ecology and the way these affect bodies of water, led by María Montero Sierra and Barbara Nardacchione with Markus Reymann. This research program is aligned with the principles of regeneration and more-than-human rights promoted by the project Zoöp, which TBA21–Academy is a partner in.

For its third edition, Convivial Tables is curated by Barena Bianca, a lagoon artivism collective active since 2018.

Re-Stor(y)ing Oceania is the thematic basis for talking about environmental issues through the Convivial Tables 2024 program.

Subsoil and ocean exploitation, political and military conflicts over expanding territorial waters, and privatization of common goods cause not only environmental but also cultural damage: devaluing, erasing, and eventually forgetting ancient production techniques. Diverse local knowledges indeed emerge from territorial specificities, but are being eroded everywhere to make way for standardized techniques linked to industrial and large-scale distribution dynamics, causing a dangerous cultural removal: a collective amnesia that leads communities to forget their localized culture and connection to the ecosystem—the so-called shifting baseline syndrome.

These phenomena, evident in the Pacific areas and foregrounded in the Re-Stor(y)ing Oceania exhibition, are the critical basis on which to design a “resistance diet” that can survive, adapt to, stem, and counteract the changes taking place.

The design of a diet for resistance is not intended to be limited to a specific geographic area, but rather to be shared with places and people who face similar environmental, economic and social situations: loss of fertile soil and damage to marine ecosystems, pollution of land, air and water, decline of biodiversity, monocultures and overfishing, use of harmful substances and trawling, depopulation of territories and loss of traditional knowledge, standardization of production and distribution. Venice will be the ground on which to start this research with the intention to create synergies with other geographies and communities.

A public workshop, aimed at including participants sensitive to the issues and areas taken as reference, is essential to raise awareness of a resilient diet by making us aware of how food is able to give voice and concreteness to one's choices on environmental, social and economic issues.

The ultimate goal of Convivial Tables 2024 program is to guide participants in designing a diet for resistance that can be disseminated and implemented publicly and privately by workshop participants, the Ocean Space audience, and Ocean Space itself.

• 8 June: culinary installation and workshop launch by Barena Bianca: culinary installation and workshop launch by Barena Bianca
• 16 June: field trip between gardens and salt marshes with the Sestante cooperative's hybrid motorboat (open to participants selected through open call)
• 23 June: time for conversation and experimentation in Ocean Space spaces (open to participants selected through open call)
• 14 September: solar oven construction workshop
• 28 September: final event with talk, presentation of the resistance diet manifesto, and convivial cooking

Barena Bianca is a lagoon artivism collective active since 2018. Its starting point is the idea that protecting an ecosystem and caring for the people who inhabit it are two aspects impossible to separate. The name Barena Bianca and the choice to work on wetlands as fundamental ecosystem elements and at the same time existential metaphors stem from the awareness that lagoon erosion and erosion of the city fabric are due to causes closely interconnected. In recent years, Barena Bianca has exhibited and presented her projects in Venice, Italy and abroad (England, Sweden, Turkey and Indonesia), and one of the most relevant results has been the didactic work in contact with Venetian schools (Canal Elementary School, Benedetti Tommaseo High School) and the local community through “Piantagruèl, the school of lagoon wildness” developed with MetaForte (Cavallino).