The Future Foodscapes Research Unit is an interdisciplinary collective after our own hearts. Their focus is on rethinking the future of the planetary food system through a series of research and speculative projects, one of which sees the kitchen as an externalised stomach.
Functioning as an Open Research Platform, the FFRU was founded to rethink the future of the food system in a planetary context by exploring its relationship with built and natural environments, the role of technology and policy in future agri-food models, and how art, architecture, and culture contribute to its transformation.
“The way we produce, distribute, and consume food mobilises our societies, shapes our metropolises, and transforms our geographies more radically than any other energy source.”
Future Foodscapes Research Unit
The FFRU was created as the proposal for the Spanish Pavilion of the 18th Architecture Biennale in Venice 2023. It is composed of many members and agents with different levels of involvement. Its core membership consists of interdisciplinary researchers who come from a position of investigatory architecture: Eduardo Castillo-Vinuesa, Irene Domínguez Serrano, Carlo Udina, Mireia Figueras Cortés, Marcia Belén Ardiles, Pedro Sanguino and Claudia López García.
This core is connected to a growing community of experts and institutions that support the unit’s work and research. Among these experts are Uriel Fogué, Guillermo Fernández Abascal, Manijeh Verghese, Gilda Zazzara, Hannah Landecker, and Lavinia Maddaluno, and institutions such as TBA 21 and the European Climate Foundation.
“By eating, we digest territories. Initiated some 12,000 years ago, the food system is the first, and perhaps most successful, geoengineering project ever undertaken by our species.”
Future Foodscapes Research Unit
The FFRU looks at the potential impact of reshaping the food system as an architectural endeavour. Together they have put together a fantastic resource compendium of some 300 hístorical, speculative and investigative case study projects. Its primary objective is to “identify, categorise, and analyse a range of case studies – including businesses, start-ups, technologies, strategies, practices, and emerging dynamics – that when properly scaled, have the potential to create a food system capable of feeding the world without depleting the planet.”
The FFRU has also initiated a series of “Reports” under the mentorship of architect and researcher Marina Otero Verzier one of which we have featured below:
Territorial Stomach
“Territorial Stomach” is an audiovisual report authored by architects and researchers Belén Ardiles and Irene Domínguez as members of the Future Foodscapes Research Unit. Made in a dry educational film format using collaged vintage imagery and an automated narrator, the film explores the potential of the kitchen as a site of alternative ways of food preparation and consumption in the future. The narrator begins by looking at “hyper-technified” current kitchen formats and their historical function as environments of production and labour dynamics.
“Territorial kitchens are externalised stomachs with other dimensions of scale and connection”
Belén Ardiles and Irene Domínguez
It gets interesting when the narrator invites us to perceive kitchens not as architectural spaces, but as artificial extensions of the human stomach. The human digestive system, we are taught at school, is responsible for turning food into nutrients for our bodies to thrive. But it cannot be done without help. Microbes within our bodies are largely responsible for that process as are microbes outside out bodies, such as the ones that make bread or koji or cheese for us. Other processes are necessary to aid digestion through food production too, such as ovens, fires and fridges in the kitchen.
These “expanded stomachs” that we call kitchens exist as “a series of architectures, spaces, and technologies that transform our digestions into a collective endeavour by instrumentalising both known and unknown bodies” operating within and beyond domestic environments.
“This relationship between humans and externalised stomachs began 500,000 years ago with the domestication of fire, the first extension of the biological stomach outside the body.”
Belén Ardiles and Irene Domínguez
When the kitchen becomes a territorial event, say the authors, “its redesign becomes a transformative force capable of reshaping our cultural and social frameworks as well as their underlying ecological paradigms. In a world where social and cultural norms are rapidly changing, it becomes essential to rethink how this technological device can respond to the diversity of latent lifestyles in our society.” It is an interesting twist in contemporary perceptions involving human and other-than-human interactions. If the kitchen and those labouring within it, including internal and external microorganisms how does that change our understanding of the kitchen, what it is, what it needs to be and what it could be?
Future Foodscapes Research Unit (FFRU) is a collective and platform dedicated to rethinking the future of the planetary food system. It explores the food system’s relationship with the built and natural environments and the roles that technology, policy, and culture will play in its transformation. Functioning as an open research platform, the FFRU is composed of many members and agents with different levels of involvement. Core members include Eduardo Castillo-Vinuesa, Carlo Udina, Mireia Figueras Cortés, Marcia Belén Ardiles, Irene Domínguez Serrano, Pedro Sanguino, and Claudia López García. Further reading: Notes on Culinary Geoengineering, pub. eflux Architecture, May 2024
Irene Domínguez Serrano is a Madrid-based architect and researcher, who graduated with honours from ETSAM-UPM. Her work explores the intersection between architecture, art, industry, ecology, and social and cultural realms and she is part of the research platform Future Foodscapes Research Unit (FFRU). She is also co-curator of Food Engines: Laboratory of Overlooked Geographies, at Espacio Proyector in Mexico City.
Belén Ardiles is a graduate of the Universidad de Santiago de Chile (USACH). Her work bridges architecture and food systems, analyzing how food-related processes shape urban environments and redefine the relationship between architecture and other disciplines. She holds a master’s degree in advanced studies in Architecture from the Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña (UPC) where she is currently a PhD student and member of the HABITAR research group.
Cover image: A still from Territorial Stomach by Irene Domínguez Serrano and Belén Ardiles. All images courtesy FFRU.
