METAKITCHEN

Authors’ Comment

Metakitchen is an installation that brings together five relevant initiatives for a possible rewriting of the phenomenon of space production.
These practices have in common the orientation towards the recovery of a traditional craft, working with a certain material and social or spatial practices that can be models for sustainability. They are relevant to the practice of architecture both due to their interdisciplinary nature, being bridges with other fields, as well as the pioneering they propose in updating materials or techniques at hand, which belong to the history of places, with the potential to revitalize communities and inform about the identity generated by the relationship between place and community.
The installation brings together the transdisciplinary dialogues between architecture, experiments with natural building materials and vegetal fibres, vegetable growing, gastronomy, textile arts, carpentry, ceramics and, implicitly, the invisible social threads that these practices re-generate.
Metakitchen consists of an oversized round table manufactured out of wood and metal details designed and produced by Atelier Vast, a wood workshop initiated by a group of architects; around the table, Studio Mud, a local ceramic practice, produced the recipients used for displaying the "ingredients" each of the five "metacooks" are utilizing. The paper is manually produced from recycled paper by Stardust Architects.
The five "metacooks" gathering around the Metakitchen are:
- Historic Garden and Forgotten Herbs is a group focused on recovering historical gastronomic recipes and cultivating a garden with old varieties of vegetables;
- Atelier Terrapia is an initiative seaking ways to revitalize earth architecture;
- Living cities architecture is a collective aiming to recover and generate new hemp-based building materials;
- Atelier Tron looks into manners of dying natural textiles with plants;
- Culinaria analyses various fermentation processes.

Metakitchen is part of the Chronicles of the Future Superheroes exhibition, curated by Anca Verona Mihuleț at Kunsthalle Bega.
Kunsthalle Bega is an exhibitional space where contemporary art is exhibited and discussed, especially dedicated to young artists from Romania and the world. Every year, Kunsthalle Bega offers an award - Bega Art Prize - to a Romanian curator who has managed to change the rules of curatorial perception.
Kunsthalle Bega team: Alina Cristescu, Liviana Dan, Andreea Drăghicescu , Ugron Lajos, Bogdan Rața