EATING THE PLACE

ongoing

An artistic research on wild edible plants in anthropised spaces.

Eating the Place is an artistic practice of cultivating attention toward what usually remains at the margins of perception : wild plants.
Walking through the urban landscape, I notice every leaf, every flower growing between cracks in the pavement.

Most of them are edible.
Let’s collect them and go home and make a banquet.
Let’s eat the place.

To eat a place is not to exploit it, but to enter into a relationship with its ecology, history, and social fabric.

The act of cooking is a way to read the landscape, to question dominant food systems, and to activate forms of collective knowledge rooted in place.

For the past months, I’ve been walking through Brussels mapping wild edible plants and sharing this knowledge with others.
In a society that teaches us to value only what is expensive, dedicating time to wild plants is a quietly subversive act. It forces you to slow down and look at your environment differently.

Cooking the wilderness means reconnecting with a form of food freedom that is seasonal, healthy and accessible.

Sharing this knowledge with others means reconnecting to an ancient tradition that still survives in many parts of the world.

Eating the place unfolds as a walk through the spontaneous plants that inhabit our streets.
Working in public space allows the project to challenge the perceived boundary between nature and the city, revealing the porous relationship between the rural and the urban.

Conceived as an in situ project, Eating the place is re-created each time in close relationship with its context, allowing local ecologies, stories, and knowledge to reshape its form.

Eating the place is an opportunity to collectively question what surrounds us on a daily basis, while weaving together tradition and contemporary artistic practice.