Call for Papers SOBRE_N11_2025 FOOD

Call for papers SOBRE_N11_2025

FOOD

Guest Editors: Valeria Mata, Magda Mària y Juan Calatrava.

Sections PANORAMA and PLIEGO

Call for articles and projects open until September 15, 2024

The journal SOBRE, in collaboration with the research project "Food and City" (PID2020-115039GB-I00), is issuing a call for contributions for SOBRE number 11, which will be published in January 2025, with the topic: FOOD.

Food is a cross-cutting fact that permeates all aspects of our lives. The processes of food production, as well as those of its preparation, distribution, consumption, and waste management, shape our landscapes, affect our relationship with the environment, impact our economy, influence our health and well-being, forming an intrinsic part of our culture since the beginning of history. Processes that can go unnoticed, intertwined in contemporary dynamics, and that on certain occasions become the center of our lives. Celebration, coexistence, shared life are culturally associated with culinary acts, exceeding the mere functional act of eating.

Food has never been strange to the world of cultural expressions. Anthropology and sociology have deeply studied the alimentary fact: how we relate to food, how traditions, customs, and knowledge associated with it are produced. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Jean-Pierre Vernant, Mircea Eliade, Marvin Harris, Michel De Certeau, Lucie Bolens, Juan Cruz, C. Ritchie or Ismael Sarmiento Rodríguez are just some of the main thinkers who, from very diverse points of view, have made the relationship between humans and food a central point of historical and cultural reflection. These approaches have been enriched in recent years by interdisciplinary studies, particularly bio-design, with prominent figures in the global movement on food and sustainability such as materials engineer and cook Johnny Drain.

Likewise, literature (from Rabelais, Cervantes, or Baltasar de Alcázar to Charles Dickens, Émile Zola, James Joyce or, more recentlry, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán and Toni Morrison), visual arts (from Arcimboldo, Brueghel, to Dutch still lifes by Clara Peeters and others, to Van Gogh, Francis Bacon, or Andy Warhol), or cinema (Luis Buñuel, Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Marco Ferrei, or Peter Greenaway) have echoed, from their respective specificities, this essential relationship of human habitation with food. Contemporary artistic production has also impacted this topic, with projects such as those by Judy Chicago, Sarah Lucas, or Gordon Matta-Clark, among others.

At certain moments in history, food has become relevant to the debate on architecture and urban design, as Carolyn Steel has studied (Hungry City, Sitopia). The implication of cooking both in the history of architecture and in the design of contemporary housing (let's remember Le Corbusier or Margarete Schütte-Lihotzky), as well as in the emancipation of women, has been the driving force for the study of this connection between architecture and food. Such as the texts by Dolores Hayden and the subsequent ones by Dupavillon, Clarisse, Aicher, Spechtenhauser, Oldenziel and Zachmann, Kinchin, or Anna Giannetti. The contemporary relationship with food products, how we access them and where, how they are manipulated in our homes and in our

cities, and ultimately how they affect our lives, cities, and territories have produced studies and projects of great interest. Such as those by Petrini, Berry, the PhD theses by Steegmann and Puigjaner, the research project "El menjar i l'espai públic urbà a Barcelona (LCF/PR/RC16)", or the monographic issues of Quaderns 271, About Buildings and Food, and Log 34, The Food Issue.

Recent exhibitions such as FOOD, dal cucchiaio al mondo (MAXXI Rome, 2015); Agriculture and Architecture. Taking the Country's Side (EPFL, Lausanne, 2020) curated by Sebastian Marot; Countryside, The Future (Guggenheim Museum, New York 2020) curated by Rem Koolhaas; as well as those carried out in the Spanish context, such as De la Huerta a la Mesa (Madrid Centro Centro, 2021) curated by Jorge Pérez Conde; or the Spanish pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2023, Foodscapes, curated by Eduardo Castillo Vinuesa and Manuel Ocaña, demonstrate that the gaze towards rural territory, productive space and its connection with urban life, as well as our personal and social relationship with food, are vital elements in contemporary society. They show a concern about how food affects urban resilience, the protection of productive human activities, its impact on public health, and our emotional well-being.

SOBRE_N11 proposes to question the relationship between food, art, and architecture. A global, interdisciplinary perspective, guided from the viewpoint of the disciplines of Art and Architecture, that allows us to collectively consider how we relate to the food process. Reflections and critical analysis on exhibitions, books, magazines, photographic, cinematic, artistic, architectural, or design projects that have addressed this topic in a relevant manner. As well as creative proposals that pose a revealing relationship of contemporary approaches.

SOBRE_N11 issues a call for the submission of research articles and creative projects (all of which will be blind peer reviewed) impacting analytically and critically on the topic.

The reception of articles (PANORAMA section) and projects (PLIEGO section) will be open until September 15, 2024.