[-empyre-] Mapping Food trails ...

[Amanda McDonald Crowley]

On Mar 4, 2016, at 5:47 PM, Stefani Bardin wrote:

> ----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------

> 
>  https://ipk.nyu.edu/ipk-working-groups/foodandthecity
> 
> We are so interested in hearing from you all on my many levels including knowledge you may have about great interventions currently happening in the food system.  
> Any experience you may have had around mapping/visualizing/building a platform for such a fluid, mercurial and unwieldy topic?


Apologies all for the slow start. New York City has been a little crazy busy these last days with the various art fairs and related events!

Firstly thanks Stefani for the great introduction to the No Free Lunch project and Food and the City research group.

Stefani and Marina recently invited me to join the group, and I have been thoroughly enjoying the monthly meetings.  And in fact last Friday they invited me to present on artists who are doing work in this area. Some of the works I presented were by artists who think about mapping, and systems thinking.

One of the projects that immediately came to mind was Esther Polak, Ieva Auzina and RIXC's award winning MILK project, http://www.milkproject.net. Developed in 2005, they were exploring the idea of a Europe with no borders; ad also thinking of the international food trade routes, in this case milk, produced by Latvian farmers, made into cheese with the help of an Italian expert, transported to the Netherlands,  finally consumed by Dutch citizens. 

Nomadic Milk, undertaken by Polak in Nigeria in 2009 was a direct follow on to this project.Here Polak traveled to Nigeria accompanied by a custom built robot. Here she worked with a nomadic Fulani family of cow herders in Abuja’s vicinity; and the truck drivers who provided the distribution routes of a powdered milk brand from city Lagos to the Abuja. What's especially interesting for me in the project is that they map these trade routes specifically by means of the people involved. The projects both allow groups of people involved to gather around the image and reflect communally. And simultaneously the installations that are developed from this research, and community building also have beautiful and innovative mapping, as well as intimate and important storytelling aspects.
Here's information on the project: http://nomadicmilk.net/blog/?page_id=2
The interactive web version of the project: http://nomadicmilk.net/
And video documentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdSdGKvCvpA

Photographer Henry Hargreaves literally makes wonderful maps of foods, http://henryhargreaves.com/food-maps-2 

Leah Gauthier, while undertaking a residency at Eyebeam developed a project called Sharecropper, which was a series of "micro" food growing spaces across New York City, which for her was as much about building a network and community across the city through growing food. Perhaps not so much about mapping or cartography, as a way to navigate the city through building a community through sharing food. http://leahgauthier.com/sharecropper/?page_id=8

One the the grass roots DIY projects I'm rather fond of is "Falling Fruit" a collaborative mapping project, and is open for anyone to contribute. Its a pretty extensive mapping of "urban harvesting"  - any foods that are in public space, be that good foraging spots, fruit trees in urban or suburban gardens that might overhand public land, or good spots for freegan-style dumpster diving. https://fallingfruit.org/?c=forager%2Cfreegan&locale=en

There are of course quite a number of these mapping projects.

Another that comes to mind is Fallen Fruit's Endless Orchard, an extension of their Urban Fruit Trails project is a really great project to plant, map, and share fruit specifically. http://fallenfruit.org/projects/endlessorchard/

I'd love it if others might share mapping projects that might be relevant to this line of investigation.

amanda