Slow Disasters Awarded AHRC Design Generators Fund
Updated: Sep 24
Looking Forward Art Projects and Norwich University of the Arts have been awarded funding through the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s (AHRC) Design Generators programme, run by the Design Museum’s Future Observatory, to support Field Kitchen: Designing Edible Futures for Rewetted Landscapes from September 2026 to August 2027.
Initiated and developed by British artist Andrew Merritt, Field Kitchen is a new research project developed in partnership with Norwich University of the Arts, exploring how food, design and immersive technologies can help communities imagine climate-resilient landscapes.
The project will bring together creative practitioners, climate scientists, farmers, chefs and community organisations to explore how the Norfolk Broads can adapt to rising sea levels and more frequent flooding while supporting sustainable food production.
The research addresses one of the Broads’ greatest long-term challenges. Centuries of draining wetlands for agriculture have affected biodiversity, soil health and the landscape’s natural resilience. Restoring some areas to wetter forms of farming, known as paludiculture, could help reduce flood risk, capture carbon and support biodiversity, while creating new possibilities for food production. However, the transition also presents significant economic and cultural challenges for farmers and communities.
Researchers working with the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia, the Broads Authority, Broadland Catchment Partnership and the University of Cambridge, will identify crops suited to wetter landscapes. The project will then bring together Norfolk farmers, the Norfolk Food and Farming Discovery Trust and the Royal Norfolk Agricultural Association to consider new food products and economic models for regenerative farming.
The core project team consists of:
Andrew Merritt, Lead Artist
Carolina Lio-Rodrigues, Project Curator and Director at Looking Forward
Louis Nixon, NUA Dean of Research and Knowledge Exchange
Dan Lockton, Director of the Institute for Sustainable Worlds
Andrew Ferrell, NUA Senior Research Fellow
Candice Allison, NUA Development Curator
Francesca Fantoni, Assistant Curator at Looking Forward
Rather than relying solely on reports and scientific modelling, Field Kitchen will explore how food can help people imagine alternative futures through an approach known as edible scenario building. At the centre of the project is the ‘Field Kitchen’, a portable kitchen and exhibition space constructed from wetland materials. Travelling to sites across the Norfolk Broads, it will host meals, conversations and immersive experiences that bring farmers, residents, researchers and policymakers together to explore the region’s past, present and possible futures.
Participants will encounter and taste dishes created from climate-resilient crops such as rice and sorghum, alongside immersive visualisations of how the Broads could change over time. By combining food, design and storytelling, the project aims to make complex environmental challenges tangible and accessible, while creating spaces for collective imagining and exchange.
Field Kitchen forms the first part of the long-term project Slow Disasters in the UK, initiated by Andrew Merritt in 2022 and produced by Looking Forward Art Projects. Slow Disasters explores how art, food and collective forms of knowledge can contribute to understanding and responding to gradual environmental change. Alongside the UK, the project is developing through long-term collaborations in Mexico and South Africa, with curator Carolina Lio-Rodrigues and main partners Emilio Hernández Martínez of Cocina CoLaboratorio (MX) and Loubie Rusch of Local WILD Food Hub (ZA). The Gaia Art Foundation provides Andrew Merritt with long-term studio and research support for Slow Disasters.
