Food is Culture: a multimedia artwork will share stories and traditions behind European food heritage

The artwork will circulate in cultural spaces of European countries to celebrate the European Year of Cultural Heritage 2018

 

In the frame of the project Food is Culture, Slow Food – together with Kinookus association (Croatia), Nova Iskra Creative Hub (Serbia), Transpond AB (Sweden), and Europa Nostra (the leading European heritage network) – will create a multimedia artwork dedicated to European food culture. This exhibition will travel to cultural venues around Europe to spread the stories and traditions that make up our food heritage. The official launch of the project will take place during Terra Madre Salone del Gusto in Turin, Italy. On 23 September at 18:30 a video-clip promoting the European Year of Cultural Heritage and the message connected to food heritage will be presented to the public at PAV – Experimental centre of contemporary art (Turin – Via Giordano Bruno, 31).

The Food is Culture project aims at making European citizens aware that food heritage is a way to express their belonging to Europe and to better understand the richness and uniqueness of its cultural diversity. Attention needs to be paid to safeguard and valorise our shared food heritage: this work has been implemented for years by Slow Food, by collecting the disappearing local food heritage of Europe and of the entire world within the global catalogue of the Ark of Taste, which will inspire the enrich the artwork. contents

The main activities of the project include a multimedia artwork, a call to action aimed at chefs and school students, the creation of a human library with migrant stories and a call to EU and national institutions to highlight the importance of putting the safeguard of the European gastronomic cultural heritage higher in their political agendas.

MULTIMEDIA ARTWORK

The multimedia artwork, which combines the contribution of some artists, will start its journey in the first months of 2019 and will be exhibited in cultural spaces in Sweden, Serbia, Croatia and Italy. The artwork will be brought to Brussels to raise awareness of EU policy makers about the importance and value of gastronomic heritage. In June 2020 a final version of the artwork featuring the best results of the project’s activities will be presented at the Migranti Film Festival of Pollenzo.

The intangible cultural heritage of food in Europe is an enormous yet underestimated resource; it is largely used to promote tourism but hardly ever treated as a resource that can reinforce a sense of belonging to a common European space and social integration. The heritage represented by gastronomy is now fully recognised by UNESCO as representative of a cultural identity, and yet it’s in danger: industrial agriculture and the standardization of taste put at risk many foods and traditions. Awareness of traditional food origins and history, traditional processing and farming techniques, of religious rites and festivals is key to narrate our common European roots as well as the influences of centuries of migration.

The Food is Culture project is co-funded by the Creative Europe Programme of the European Union, with the contribution of the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Cuneo.

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