MENÜ imaginaire

The exhibition MENÜ imaginaire focused on the future of alimentation: artists, designers, and philosophers raise questions regarding the most pressing problems of food systems. Our lifestyle and consumption habits have a significant impact on the natural environment—the presented works and the speculative hypotheses set forth by them examine the impact of human activity on the environment through the topic of eating.

Most of us develop the most intimate bond with nature while eating: after all, eating is internalizing nature. The speculative futurology projects presented in the scope of MENÜ imaginaire query the idea that humans can be dissociated from the environment or “nature,” regardless of place of residence or lifestyle. The works at the exhibition render global processes—which are difficult to fathom on account of their scale—imaginable through the visceral, quotidian experience of eating. The body plays a special role in this thought experiment: not only as a terrain of reception, but—even reducing itself and its consumption, utilizing its own excrement as a resource—as an indicator organism that adapts to environmental changes. The ideas of the participating artists are diverse: some positions are optimistic, some are pessimistic, some reinterpret traditions, some build on the potentials of new technologies or question their efficiency.