Landscape Cooking (2024)
with Kevin Bellò

Hosted in Domaine de Boisbuchet by The Gramounce, Landscape Cooking is a workshop exploring practices and ideas of cooking, fermenting, and transforming food in profound attunement with our surroundings. What forms of practical, poetical and spiritual connection can we develop with the surroundings by foraging, eating and digesting food? By blurring the division between the ecosystems we are part of and those that are part of us, we fostered a space of co-creation and mutual support in which artists, chefs and designers researched the edible landscapes we inhabit. Solar-oven cooking, ethical foraging, plant-based dyes with the river, and cooking with embers or on open fire were amongst the various practices and instruments we worked on. Poetically guided by the four elements (air, water, fire and soil), we developed dreamy guided meditations, embodied exercises, lectures, storytelling exercises and bedtime stories. 

The workshop concluded with the display of several experiments on a picnic blanket, which was realised by Inês Coelho da Silva. The menu included four types of landscape cold teas, grape leaf and vine infused milk (with a paring of soapwort foam), bread cutlery sculptures, Persian pebble bread, fig leaves butter, wild angelica polenta cake, ‘friendship pesto’ (nettle and plantago with pistachio), magical starlight salt, leaks cooked on open fire, a refreshing lavender hydrosol (or, as we called it, hydro-soil), dandelion honey and dandelion root coffee. Participants also displayed recipes, ideas, and foraging notes in notebooks, the cover of which was a portable textile tablecloth dyed with foraged plants. - Kevin Bellò

In Domaine de Boisbuchet, Lessac, FR.

Photographs by Anton Andre.