New York, Hanoi, Berlin, Antananarivo, La Paz, Bamako, London Bordeaux, Moscow, Havana… Ma cantine en ville presents a panoramic world round-up of habits, ways and means related to street eating. Like a traveller’s scrap book it will bring together all sorts of documents reflecting the wide variety of contexts and practises linked to this vital activity and the extraordinary capacity of individuals to adapt to their environment.
The content of the show derives from a call for contributions launched early this year, targeting designers, architects, teachers and – more generally – observant spirits and travellers. At the outset the aim was to collect information on the ways foodstuffs are carried, prepared, sold and eaten in public space – how things are done, where and why, etc. Almost one hundred dossiers were submitted, enabling the curators – Fiona Meadows (Cité de l’architecture & du patrimoine) and Michel Bouisson (VIA) – to put together a comprehensive and detailed overview of the techniques and equipment used in urban contexts today. From coherent methods for making the most of limited storage space and conserving perishable goods, to the many ways food is prepared, cooked and enhanced by display, not to mention the ingenious ways in which food-vending outfits are made mobile.
What emerges from the hundreds of documents on display – photographs, videos, maps, sketches, drawings and objects – is a manifold expression of situations and practises that constitute portrait reports of our contemporary world: the dizzying proliferation of modern-day cities, their density of occupation, and their flow patterns. By observing a single activity that cuts across all collective habits, Ma cantine en ville attests the wealth of imagination that people deploy to adapt essential activities to economic realities, whether regulated or informal, and the ways in which they conserve or modulate traditional notions of sociability and civility. An entire section of the show focuses on innovation from the viewpoint of our society – ways in which new responses to social problems are being developed to improve individual and collective well-being –, with proposals made by visual artists, architects and designers.
The exhibition is fenced since November 18th, 2012.
Galerie VIA
33 avenue Daumesnil
75012 Paris
Téléphone : +33 (0)1 46 28 11 11
[email protected]
