Soil Kitchen

The loss of biodiversity, declining food sovereignty, scarcity of resources, in short, the climate crisis, all of this is increasingly being described as a crisis of sensibilities, as a state of lacking emotional capacities and sensitive registers for material and immaterial resources, for human and non-human actors. But can art, culinary, food, design, handcraft and fashion be suitable mediators to restore these sensibilities? This was the idea behind the project “Soil Kitchen” in cooperation with HLMW9 Michlbeuern.

HLMW9 Michlbeuern is a secondary school in Vienna with a focus on gastronomy and fashion professions. The school is highly active when it comes to giving students a practise-oriented curriculum. However, the Soil Kitchen project was particularly exceptional in the sense that it brought together the usually separate subject areas of gastronomy and fashion in the sense of a creative symbiosis and united representation. The desire of ambitioned students and teachers for interdisciplinary collaboration met with the co-creative approach of the Trustmaking Urban Living Lab.

Co-creating a dinner experience using local materials

As part of a co-created dinner, the different skills of the students in terms of fashion, design, crafts and cooking were to contribute to making the material and immaterial resources of Rothneusiedl visible. The objective of creating a contact zone in Rothneusiedl for different stakeholders could therefore be interpreted freely and applied by the young people themselves. The soil in Rothneusiedl represented a loose red thread, which was obvious in a project that deals with place specifics – in Rothneusiedl we find one of the most fertile and high-quality arable soils in Austria. At the end of the co-creation process, the result was a dinner experience that referred to the place in all its elements: From the menu plan, which was created by the pupils almost exclusively using local products from Rothneusiedl, to home-made pottery crafted from local excavated soil, as well as site-specific fashion and decoration using a plant printing process.

Approaching the place

However, Soil Kitchen was less a one-off dinner event rather than an intensive and long-term engagement with the place itself. In advance of the dinner, the students were introduced to the site and its actors in thematic workshops and were able to work and experiment the local products and materials. While the first meeting, six months before the dinner, was dedicated to brainstorming ideas and visions of what a Soil Kitchen Dinner could look like, the following workshops focused on making the ideas more and more concrete in small steps. In this process, it was necessary to constantly mediate between desires and practical constraints and to negotiate ideas and their implementation. The search for and finding of compromises between all participants is ultimately also practicing democracy based on respectful interaction and appreciation of different skills and the joint learning process.

Hands-on material and immaterial resources

The first workshops were characterized by the exploration of the location, getting to know the stakeholders and their stories as well as input on specific challenges of the place. In a further phase, students had the opportunity to work “hands-on” with local materials and products that were of interest to them in the context of the dinner experience. Separate workshops were guided and dedicated to pickling and fermenting vegetables from local farmers as well as screen printing self-designed service-outfits and tablecloth that referred to the natural qualities of Rothneusiedl.

The Wild Clay workshop emphasized the topic of soil in the most direct sensory way. Clay was excavated locally from future urban development areas around Rothneusiedl, prepared and used for on-site pottery of plates, dishes, decorative elements and abstract “conversation pieces” made use of at the dinner. In this way future building ground was translated to a new sense and meaning: Soil not only as a base for food production but also as a building material for the production of craftwork, art, or little pieces of architecture.

From-farm-to-fork curated by youth

The impressions from the workshops “fermented” in the minds of the pupils into a concept for a “from-farm-to-fork dinner”, which took place in mid-June at the Zukunftshof in Rothneusiedl. The invited guests, among them teachers, representatives of the City of Vienna, housing developers, and neighbours, were presented a multi-course vegetarian menu that not only reflected the students’ cultural background with recipes from their parents’ homes, but also aimed to create a symbiosis with the local products and materials from Rothneusiedl.

The young people were given responsibility for curating the evening in terms of the schedule, the menu, dramaturgy, localisation, organization, content, and aesthetics. They not only brought in the products from the workshops, such as the ceramics they made, but also ideas on how the ingredients of the menu could be presented in a creative way.

To challenge classic role divisions during a dinner, the pupils developed a playful role-reversal game, with the result that during some courses the pupils were the ones being served whereas the guest could prove themselves in the kitchen or in service. However also the predefined distribution of roles between the fashion class and the gastronomy class and were mixed up during the joint project: The business class found creative expression in pottery, while the fashion class mastered table service as well as organizing and planning the dinner.

When interacting with the guests, the students’ initial insecurity and shyness quickly gave way to nonchalance, charm and humor, confidence and pride in their own abilities. This also represented the process of gaining ownership of the Soil Kitchen throughout the project and their appropriation of the public space according to their needs.

Amuse-Gueule of speculative Futures

The dinner as such was also an inventory of a place that is undergoing strong processes of change. Rothneusiedl is one of the largest urban development projects in Vienna. So not much will remain of the peripheral, agricultural, almost village-like character.
However, this inventory was ultimately also the impetus for a process of reflection on the city of the future, in which the pupils themselves shape the framework. Our hope was to evoke related thoughts in the students by engaging with site-specific cuisine, design, agriculture and working with local materials. Ultimately, Soil Kitchen is a collaboratively developed format and a didactic tool, to integrate complex topics into an emotionally tangible context. As a methodology it can be transferred to other local contexts.
As part of the dinner, a co-designed exhibition was presented by pupils with students from Studio Social Design, which took up the topic of the future even more explicitly. The question of what a Soil Kitchen Dinner at the Zukunftshof could look like in 2050 was explored together in a workshop: How will we eat? What will we eat? The students’ utopian and dystopian contributions about those speculative futures were illustrated with the help of AI and presented at Zukunftshof.

Dinner guests were also invited to put artifacts from the evening such as leftovers, table decorations or photographs into a time capsule, which was left on the fields of the Zukunftshof as “Amuse-Gueule from the past” to the city of the future and its inhabitants. The collective burying of the time capsule on the fields of Rothneuiedl marked the end of the dinner experience, which was not least due to the professionalism and creativity of the students a success.

With the Soil Kitchen, the students created the necessary social and cultural infrastructure in the public space, which made it possible for different actors to come together. The contact zone was thus interpreted literally – a shared meal is a catalyst for social interaction between people from different backgrounds. When a communal meal fosters respectful encounters, idea exchanges, and shared curiosity, it reveals that every small gesture carries something bigger within it.

Soil Kitchen 2024

Students from HLMW9:

• Amina Eckl, Anesa Eckl, Taha Salaman, Malte Lungstraß, Leonardo Martinelli, Emirhan Terzi, Filip Solomun, Zahra Mirzaei (4HKA).

• Sophie Dietz, Amelie Fink, Mohamed Gabut, Lea Leb, Tarik Purkovic und Emily Reiter (4HKB).

• Theresa Bier, Hannah Györffy, Annika Heiling, Lieselotte Heimerl, Rebecca Krytinar, Natalia Lepcio, Lenka Mecarova, Vanessa Mihajlovic, David Mulaomerovic, Leonore Nemecz, Su-A Park, Emir Ramazanoglu, Ronja Salenka, Lorena Semiga, Sam Steiner, Theresa Tanzer, Johanna Vychytil, Marie Therese Wagner und Anna-Lena Wannenmacher (3HMA).

Teaching staff from HLMW9: Lucia Di Bella, Nikolas Kurz

Supporting teaching staff from HLMW9: Angela Beran, Sabine Desbonnets, Lukas Friess, Katharina Holovlasky, Ingrid König, Sebastian Reffener, Karin Weingartshofer

Heads of Subject Departments: Eveline Kopf, Sylvia Pehak, Katharina Pum

School principal: Johannes Töglhofer

Project Future Food (Studio Social Design): Benjamin Amiel, Susanne Buechele, Laura Fellerer

Supervision Pottery: Hannah Hausegger, Magdalena Reiner, Lea Romm

Trustmaking: Veronika Hackl, Sebastian Hafner, Elina Kränzle, Thomas Romm

External Partners: Gerald Parzer (ÖSW); Thomas Mosor, Adelheid Sagmeister (MA22)