Activating the City:
Urban Gastronomy concentrates on life, art and community
rediscovered through the gastronomy that keeps the
city vibrant. Gastronomy doesn’t simply remain in searching for star-rated restaurants or
consuming sensory experience of new taste, but it is inclusive
of the entire actions of exchange in producing ingredients, from planting and growing seed, buying and selling food
around the market, and exchanging conversations. Such activities invest vitality to the ‘city’, lead us to look
back into our lives, and create new community culture.
Avant-garde artists and
designers who sought to reconcile art and life, not only paid attention to creating art, but our lives and the fundamental
necessities in life. The faith that art could restore individual lives
while creating a new community is deeply rooted in the basis of our lives, which
are food, clothing and shelter and as architecture and design are the critical
means to actualize this, people began to dream of a utopian community, a city
that anyone could lead pleasant and healthy life.
Recently, artists, designers and architects who
imagine new life and community are having renewed thoughts in approaching the
‘issue of making a living’ or the ‘act of eating’, located at the base of our
lives. They rather imagined
design methodology as the device to form relationships among people in consideration
of how we shall live, than producing new object or work. Within this
process, gastronomy
combined with social movement in an interesting way, thus operating as the
element of practice in seeking healthy lives.
This exhibition presents
the ideas and activities of various subject, which recognizes food culture as creative and productive movements based on the three keywords, Food x Urban Mobility, Food x Community, and Food x
Sharing Culture upon the ‘stage of city’.
This exhibition intends to approach taste, experienced through food not
as means to satisfy sense, but as social mediator connecting individual and
individual, and individual and community and it would provide opportunity to
encounter the yet undiscovered sense of beauty within the city, recognizing the
renewed city that we live in.
