Open Restaurant
In collaboration with Fogo Island Arts, Shorefast Foundation and the community of Fogo Island, I performed Open Restaurant on Fogo Island, a project involving local growers and producers, and knowledge inherent to place. Each meal was sourced from local ingredients and shaped by food knowledge specific to the island’s communities and inhabitants.
Open Restaurant is an ongoing project first initiated in Berlin in 2012 as a way to bring people together around ideas of local and organic food.
Food is considered as a metaphor for our overall contemporary condition as a society, one that is over-industrialized and over-consuming, and has lost its connection to the natural world. Rediscovering this connection is a process of restoring, of returning our ways of being to an ideal state through which we can live in a sustainable way.
With a deep respect for traditional ways, Open Restaurant embraces local production in accordance with the seasons, and the possibilities of moving beyond subsistence practices towards experimentation and invention. From the French word ‘restaurer,’ meaning to ‘restore,’ Open Restaurant celebrates the sustaining properties of sharing food and diverse perspectives around a dinner table.
