Using a mixture of poly- and permacultural techniques with newer technologies such as hydroponics, Nones-Kobiakov aims to build site-specific permaculture crops. These will in turn create self-sustaining ecosystems that grow specific recipes. This project will start with a selection of close family recipes, allowing sensorial memories to flourish. Her process has so far been more about rewinding than fast-forwarding. A search for pre-industrialized farming technologies allows for better understanding permaculture’s essence: the interconnectedness of all living and nonliving organisms to achieve a more positive, less energy-consuming outcome. In this project, too, geographical location activates several strands of connectivity: it has as much to do with the places that we are no longer a part of as with the spaces we currently occupy.
Andrea Nones-Kobiakov
Cooking for Change
Whatever That Ground May Be
Venezuelan artist Andrea Nones-Kobiakov’s project radically reimagines urban farming while focusing on family recipes and associations attached to certain smells and tastes.
Andrea Nones-Kobiakov
Based in Mexico City and working with Brazilian chef Manu Buffara as her mentor, Nones-Kobiakov aims to explore our relationship with our surroundings through food with this new type of memory-based urban farm.
Whatever That Ground May Be delves into the essence of food as memory, arguing that ingredients are capable of carrying layers of past lives and pieces of places. The associations we attach to certain smells and flavors go beyond ourselves, sometimes carrying generations of stories and feelings. At the same time, growing what you eat reignites a primal sensation; it changes our mindset as well as our immediate surroundings.
