The research plan: Inés Ballesteros and Michela Dal Brollo
Stone soup is a folk tale in which two mysterious travellers go from village to village with nothing but a large pot. Whenever they arrive somewhere, they make soup with the only ingredient being a stone found locally. This arouses the curiosity of the inhabitants, who are eager to taste this special soup. When the villagers came to ask them for the soup, the two travellers asked them to bring a number of ingredients to make the soup even tastier. Soon the whole village was sitting together at the table, slurping the soup that had been made with everyone's contribution.
The seed of our research lies in the fact that we live in two different countries. This forced us to think about how we position ourselves in the contemporary phenomenon of nomadic artistic practices and mobility. How can we devise strategies that can be applied to different types of environments? It is also a question of cohabitation. Not only between people, but also between other life forms. What does it mean to adapt to your environment and learn from it instead of wanting to change it? How can we practise this adaptability? Cooking became a way to get started with all these questions.
We want to create a space where artists, residents, curious minds and sceptics can come together. The most important element in facilitating this is a portable rocket stove and, of course, food. Stone Soup will be a nomadic restaurant that grows and transforms in relation to its environment. For example, our cooking equipment is not prepared in advance. We rely on what is available in the area and on the residents we meet. From local knowledge about edible plants to agricultural waste that we use as fuel for our oven. Every place is brimming with relationships and interactions. We want to uncover those stories and find out how we can blend and exchange them with our own knowledge as Stone Soup Travellers. We use our equipment as a medium to reuse rather than produce, and we make knowledge sustainable through mutual exchange. This is related to a broader view of food culture and consumerism. In this way, our artistic practice and our way of life are intertwined. We explore possible ways of life and develop ideas that have the potential for change.
The coronavirus crisis shows the fragility of our consumer-oriented, neoliberal society. Although the pandemic has made our project more difficult to carry out, it is also more relevant than ever. In our research, we look for loose spaces: spaces where the meaning and function of things are not entirely fixed. At the moment, people are questioning the former norm, they are experiencing first-hand how fragile that system is, and this is creating a kind of mental loose space. This is an ideal breeding ground for other, more sustainable alternatives to take hold. The current crisis gives us the opportunity to consider our ideas not only ideologically, but also from a current necessity.
This image (see above, ed.) represents the Stone Soup process. The empty pot can be filled with ingredients and stories, in relation to the environment and the encounters that take place within it. The image was created by sending a Photoshop file back and forth to each other, an accumulation of layers and ideas as an analogy for the way we work together.
Read more about Stone Soup by Inés Ballesteros and Michela Dal Brollo here.