SOBRE

Engulf or Nourish

Jorge Lorite Nueno — 2025-01-31

This text outlines a situational framework that allows for the future development of a philosophy of cooking, addressing the meanings already associated with cooking and food, the contemporary social and culinary landscape, and the ethical perspective that may be adopted. To this end, the text begins with a distinction between philosophies of cooking and food, setting itself apart from the more prevalent aesthetic-artistic discourse surrounding food. The analysis of certain food metaphors sheds light on the current consumption paradigm, positioning cooking as a privileged space from which to propose a change in our relationship with the world, as delineated by Everyday Aesthetics. This text paves the way for a study of culinary action that, grounded in its material necessity, could serve as a guide toward a more meaningful existence and, simultaneously, could give rise to an ethical framework capable of addressing the consumerist paradigm by exploring the path between consuming and nourishing.

The Hidden Dimension of Food

Artur Roig Pérez — 2025-01-31

This article provides an overview of the processes involved in harvesting, processing and selling four different types of food. The research explains the form of Barcelona from the textual and graphic reconstruction of the territories, landscapes, and architectures that host food production processes; the routes travelled, and the means of transport utilized to distribute it; and the squares and markets where it is offered to the public. This comprehensive examination of the various stages through which food is transported and distributed offers a novel approach to understanding the interrelationship between urban architecture and the city. It prompts a reflection of the underlying temporal and spatial dimensions of food provisioning in a metropolis.

About Food (1971-1973)

Rafael de Lacour — 2025-01-31

This text delves into the collaborative artistic manifestation of the restaurant Food, launched between 1971 and 1973 by Gordon Matta-Clark and his artist friends. The experience is analyzed from the recovery of documentation, especially the film, understood as a record of the process, as well as from the review of artistic expressions of the time, the environment, the context and the place. In order to frame Food and reveal its complexity, how it emerged and developed, the relationship with Matta-Clark's previous training, his career and the determining factor it had in his later works, -the sections of buildings-, are addressed. Finally, the study allows us to value the spatio-temporal, artistic and architectural conditions of Food through Gordon Matta-Clark's particular way of understanding space, the nature of continuous action in time, its connection with artistic practices and its peculiar architectural conception.

Architectural Culture and Food Culture

Ruth Varela — 2025-01-31

The Abastos Market in Santiago de Compostela - Praza de Abastos - designed by the Asturian architect Joaquín Vaquero Palacios (1900-1998), has not yet been sufficiently studied, despite being one of the masterpieces of 20th century Spanish architecture and an essential public infrastructure of Compostela's local food systems. A symbol of Galicia's food culture and a lesson in real architecture and a commitment to social reality, this market was designed, from its conception in 1937, with a profoundly visionary perspective: that of integrating the village and the countryside into the city. In doing so, it anticipated some of the guiding principles of the Milan Pact of 2015 and the European Green Pact of 2019, as well as serving as a tribute to the rich architectural culture of this Atlantic territory.

Food in the Public Space

Víctor Letelier — 2025-01-31

Food in the city reflects the essence of everyday life, strengthening both the identity and diversity of an urban environment. Through food, it is possible to understand how inhabitants interact and build bonds, allowing different cultures and realities to coexist and express themselves within a common territory. This article aims to reflect on food in the city from a cultural and social perspective, with a particular focus on the phenomenon of the completo in Talca (Chile). This analysis seeks to highlight how food, beyond its nutritional function, acts as a catalyst for activities, transforming the dynamics of the urban landscape. Finally, the article explores an urban intervention carried out in Talca by two young architecture students, who used food and a public event to explore the relationship between food and social space in the city.

The Coffee, the Cause of the German Territorial and Architectural Transformation of the Q’eqchi’ Alta Verapaz

Andrea Bardón de Tena — 2025-01-31

This article explores the impact of the coffee industry, developed mainly by Germans, on the territory of Alta Verapaz, Guatemala, and the indigenous Maya-Q'eqchi communities. Alta Verapaz received hundreds of Germans between 1865 and 1941. The integration of the coffee industry and German society and culture resulted in the acquisition and transformation of a large amount of Alta Verapaz as coffee plantations, the reconfiguration of the territory, the construction of new means of transportation, and the integration of new architectural typologies, public spaces, objects, and customs. This article explains the sequence of architectural and spatial consequences that the arrival of coffee had on the local Q'eqchi' habitat, their territory, architecture, and way of life.

Taste and territory as definers of identity

María del Carmen Díaz Ruiz — 2025-01-31

The artistic production of Antoni Miralda (Terrassa, 1942) has sought to show how food is a sign of identity of different cultures and territories that make up today's society. Far from separating us or being exclusive traits, he understands that multiculturalism is an enriching process that allows tongues, languages, and flavors to mix, offering an unprecedented cultural enrichment.

Kitchen Recipes

Anna Puigjaner — 2025-01-31

This paper examines the intersection of food, gender, and collective action in domestic and public spaces, inspired by Verónica Gago's Feminist International: How to Change Everything. Gago views kitchens as "situated apparatuses of collective intelligence," transforming them into political arenas. The article explores domestic kitchens, soup kitchens, and street cooking demonstrations as spaces that transcend food provision to become hubs of feminist resistance and social reconfiguration. Feminist strikes emerging from these contexts illustrate how women, lesbians, trans individuals, and others mobilize collective labor to critique systemic crises. Food is framed as a medium that reshapes kinships, reflecting societal structures such as labor dynamics, intimacy, and resistance. The processes of food production, provision, and consumption expose the gendered division of reproductive labor, shaping social and built environments. By reinterpreting kitchens as sites of feminist praxis, this work highlights the transformative potential of food-related practices to challenge systemic inequalities and build solidarity.

The First Bite

José Joaquín Parra-Bañón — 2025-01-31

The first food of which there has been a verbal and plastic record in the Mediterranean basin is that related to the mythical bite that a creature took from the piece of fruit that someone had forbidden others to eat. That first bite was executed by a symbolic woman to give rise to the human species: so that, standing up, against the celestial laws and to defend itself from nature, the journey of knowledge would begin. The brotherhood of eating and knowledge, the communion of culture and pleasure, was established at the origin. Here we analyze some exemplary cases of how, based on literature, art attributed appearance to that event: it designed a stage, built a set and dramatized an action that expressed desires through images. From Dürer to Oliveira, from Cranach to Marisa Vadillo, the persistence of the symbolic apple is evident, which, once The Garden of Earthly Delights was annihilated, would give rise to the invention of the great refectory that is the city.

Food as Rupture

Marta Fernández Calvo — 2025-01-31

This work aims to investigate food as rupture through the analysis of the projects Food Chorus and I turn bad things away (Yo echo para atrás las cosas malas), by visual artist and researcher Marta Fernández Calvo (Logroño, 1978), developed in Mexico and the United Kingdom between 2019 and 2021. The goal is to study the capacity of some ingredients and recipes to identify the emotional and geographical rupture implied by the disappearance or alteration of the relationship with a known territory. To this end, a series of artistic processes and devices are proposed through which to identify these ruptures and restore the spoken and corporal relationship with food.

Penitentiary regime

Colectivo Mancebía Postigo — 2025-01-31

Hunger strikes, ingestion of sharp objects, manifestos to demand dignified food, ingenious ways of cooking on the sly, escapes through the kitchen... The forms of struggle in state prisons during the last years of Franco's regime and until the 80s, especially those of people imprisoned for common crimes, are facts that are not part of the hegemonic discourse of the so-called transition, and therefore many people do not remember them or are unaware of them. Even less if it refers to cooking and food, an issue that, although of vital importance, often goes unnoticed or is considered marginal within the plot of History and Politics. Addressing the issue of food in spaces of deprivation of liberty seems relevant to understand practices that have to do with eating or not eating as modes of subjectivation, revolt and protest.

Editorial SOBRE_N11

Editor Sobre — 2025-01-31

The Contemporary Flanêur and its Displacement Towards the Urban Periphery

Aurora Alcaide-Ramírez — 2025-01-31

This article analyses the displacement of the flâneur toward contemporary urban peripheries, where his personality and activity are redefined. It argues that the city's margins offer fertile ground for observation and social critique, providing new perspectives for this character in the present day. The analysis is grounded in a review of the concepts of flâneur and periphery, and their treatment in contemporary photography, which is complemented by a study of three photographic projects: No soy de aquí by Gustavo Alemán, Cauce Oculto by Julián Garnés, and A Place to Be, carried out jointly. These projects capture the Murcian peripheries through a close yet distant gaze, where remembrance hybridizes with estrangement. Likewise, they document the landscape and fluid identity of these liminal zones, while reflecting on the social and political dynamics that shape them.

"I Have to Dwell in Your Mind"

José Luis Reyes-Criado — 2025-01-31

Since the 1990s, Digital Arts Festivals (DAFs) have been one of the most booming cultural formats dedicated to debate and artistic practice around the intersection of science-art-technology, electronic music and emerging aesthetics in the arts. Although DAFs constitute a vital platform for interdisciplinary dialogue between artists, creators, practitioners, academics and the general public, they have barely been analysed. Using a qualitative approach and multisite fieldwork developed between January 2021 and November 2022, based on semi-structured interviews, participant observation and structured documentation, I explore the notion of festivalscape by integrating the communication and digital marketing practices that these festivals undertake. Through three case studies––the Spanish festivals LEV, MIRA and MMMAD––I expose how these festivals communicate, by analyzing how these practices determine the configuration of identity and authenticity, and how they affect the working rhythms and careers of professionals and creators in the sector.

Transspecies Kitchen

Andrés Jaque — 2025-01-31

Architecture is not about space, nor is it about form. Architecture is how different forms of life enact their physical, neuronal, and metabolic entanglement – how they constitute themselves as inseparable. Architecture is how heterogeneous entities coproduce each other as bodied togetherness. Architecture is the making of transspecies and more-than-human envirobodiments. It is the making of the fleshy and the mineral, the technological and the biological indistinguishable. Any given body is a collective. Any given body is an assembly of diverse forms of life and other-than-life. Bodying is bodying-collectiveness. Bodies infiltrate other bodies and are infiltrated by living and nonliving entities. They become environment and climate. Climate is environments, bodies, land, minerals, earthiness, wetness, and technologies becoming enacted-togetherness. Climate is the architecturalization of bodies, land, minerals, earthiness, wetness, and technologies. Any existence is bodyenvironmental.

Culinary Tectonics

Eduardo Castillo-Vinuesa — 2025-01-31

Every time we eat, often without realizing it, we connect our palate to a multitude of distant places: supermarkets, greenhouses, farms, warehouses, logistical networks, cold chains, landfills... These unremarkable architectures rarely grace the polished pages of fashionable architecture magazines; yet, their impact on our way of life far exceeds that of any ostentatious building signed by the starchitect of the moment. Collectively, they form a vast distributed apparatus that enables the reassembly of the Earth’s crust into the building blocks of human life. This metabolic architecture, spanning multiple scales and conditions, remains largely overlooked by our discipline despite its vital importance. However, in a world where the molecular becomes tectonic, and every bite reverberates across the planet, the urgency to redesign it with its ecosystemic implications in mind has never been greater.

Gastrosophy

Lilian Weikert García — 2025-01-31

Gastrosophy is a “conscious” philosophy of food, a theory of care from the perspective of eating.
Gastrosophy takes a holistic view that spans from landscapes to the table, from agricultural practices to preventing food waste, from the working conditions of agricultural laborers to the celebration of communal festivals in towns with migrant populations. Everything is interconnected through food, allowing us to say that, through eating, we think about the territory in a general sense. Eating is a physiological act, but it is also political, cultural, and social. Gastrosophy is both knowledge and flavor.

The Knife Cuts When It Moves

nyamnyam — 2025-01-31

For years, we have dedicated ourselves to interviewing individuals engaged in the craft of knife-making. As we traveled to diverse regions for other projects, we persistently sought out someone who practiced this trade. At the time, our only aim was to listen extensively to how they experience such an intimate relationship with the manufacture of this object. The knife as an extension of our body. An intrinsic physicality emerges in the union of movements facilitated by a tool that, much like our bodies, evolves in form and function over the course of its life.

CVs and Reviewers

Editor Sobre — 2025-01-31

FoodCity Prato/Florence

David Arredondo Garrido — 2025-01-31

How can we regenerate a suburban space in progressive decline through agricultural activities and those related to food production and consumption? With this question as a premise, and using the urban edge of the Tuscan city of Prato as a case study, a large group of students and professors from the University of Granada, the Polytechnic University of Madrid, the University of Florence, and the Autonomous University of Lisbon worked intensively for a week in the FoodCity Prato/Florence workshop in February 2024. This workshop was part of the research activities of the R&D&I project PID2020-115039GB-I00 (Food and City, from the Domestic to the Public Space. Elements for a History, Arguments for the Contemporary Project, FoodCity). This article shows a selection of the work produced by the various participating teams of students.