"Food for Landscapes: Recipes for Slow Disasters" at Design Week Cape Town
- Carolina Lio
- Oct 9
- 2 min read
Updated: 1 day ago
An exhibition and public session in Cape Town, resulting from a Field Kitchen activation in the Lynedoch Valley, South Africa.
Exhibition Venue
Church House, 1 Queen Victoria Street, Cape Town
Exhibition Opening Hours
23 - 25 October 2025 10:00 - 17:00
26 October 2025 10:00 - 16:00
Interactive Session with the Public
26 October 2025 14:00 - 15:30 (RSVP here)
Field Kitchen is part of Field Hospital, a methodology being activated across three continents. It uses art, food, and ecological research as a provocation to explore restoring damaged landscapes from “slow disasters” and rebuilding relationships between people and place. Slow Disasters is a term that the project initiator, British artist Andrew Merritt, coined to describe the long-term destruction of landscapes and their bioculture.
For the first step of a long-term activation in South Africa, Andrew and local wild food expert Loubie Rusch of the Sustainability Institute in Lynedoch are partnering with The British Council and Design Week South Africa.
In the Lynedoch Valley, a group of local participants interacts with visual representations and food flavours that indicate how relationships with food and place have altered across time. Four maps of the Valley, each representing a different period in its history, along with tasters and sample packaged foods from each period, illustrate how the Valley’s “slow disaster” has played out.
Questions such as “What food does the landscape need?” and “Is there an appetite for interventions that regenerate lost relationships?” prompt participants to mark on the maps how they envision recipes or interventions revealing pathways to healing.
The result is displayed in Church House, Cape Town, with an installation part of the Design Week Cape Town (23-26 October) and a participatory session on the last day.
Andrew Merritt, the initiator of Field Hospital, is an artist and co-founder of Something & Son, a collaborative practice creating socially and environmentally engaged projects. Past projects have been commissioned by Tate, V&A, and the Gwangju Biennale. His work often takes the form of functional sculptures, community infrastructures, and speculative systems that reimagine relationships between people and the planet. His work has been exhibited internationally, including Tate Britain, Tate Modern, V&A Museum, Gwangju Biennale, FACT Gallery, Deon Foundation, MAK Vienna, Artangel, Cultural Olympia, Somerset House, Folkestone Triennial, Design Museum, Wellcome Collection, Istanbul Design Biennial, South London Gallery and Museo Jumex, amongst others. Andrew is also a founder of Makerversity, Somerset House.
Loubie Rusch is the founder of the Local WILD Food Hub, which she coordinates at the Sustainability Institute in Lynedoch: an international living and learning centre where children, youth and adults explore the role of imagination in ways of being that are restorative, and where research and teaching impact social justice and sustainability futures.
