Live Multispecies Kitchen
LIVE MULTISPECIES KITCHEN
Fahrenheit Works, Francisca Sottomayor
ARCHITECTS
Fahrenheit Works, Francisca Sottomayor
LEAD ARCHITECT
Jeremy Morris
LOCATION
Porto, Portugal
CATEGORY
Temporary Installations
English description provided by the architects.
Live Kitchen fosters encounters between humans and non-humans, creating an ecosystem of harmony that questions contemporary urban ways of living through art and food.
Built from discarded marble and terracotta, it hosts germinated seeds, herbs, and flowers that attract butterflies, bees, and ladybugs.
More than a functional space, it is an investigation into how different disciplines, working together, can generate new forms of collaboration, care, and imagination toward more conscious and shared futures.
Live Kitchen is an open-air space that invites multiple forms of life to connect through art and food.
The project aims to spark critical reflection on issues such as the systems that feed us and the disconnection that characterizes city life, while promoting dialogue across disciplines to nurture ideas of community, connection, and sharing.
Live Kitchen brings together humans and non-humans of all ages, genders, and backgrounds.
It is a kitchen that intertwines relationships among people, butterflies, ladybugs, bees, flowers, germinated seeds, and even microorganisms: “We become with each other or not at all” (Staying With the Trouble, 2016, p. 4).
We work with materials such as discarded marble and terracotta — ecological elements that encourage us to imagine new possible worlds and more conscious, grounded approaches to food.
The project also experiments with choreographed gestures of care, where different species thrive in the symbiotic relationships proposed by a living kitchen.
Marble pieces considered unusable are the starting point for the construction of the kitchen. Between them, various species feed this space: diverse flowers, germinated seeds, and aromatic herbs grow among the stones or in terracotta vessels, attracting butterflies, bees, and other pollinators.
We live in a time when having hope is a revolutionary act. The creation of Live Kitchen is therefore a call to reflect on the urgent need to rethink food: to bring it closer, reconnect it to its sources, and make it more informed, creative, and conscious.
It also proposes to rehearse new possibilities for living in harmony — creating an intersectional, interdisciplinary, and interspecies space that invites the erasure of boundaries between genders, origins, cultures, and species.
We wish to break away the notion of the kitchen as an exclusively human space, hostile or detached from food production.
We aim to create a new kind of kitchen — part mineral, part alive — that nurtures care and symbiosis.
Ultimately, this project is also a proposal of ideas: “Human history is, in essence, a history of ideas” (H.G. Wells, cited in Roman Krznaric, The Good Ancestor, 2021, p.19).
And as Krznaric reminds us, ideas change the course of history. Likewise, ideas of collaboration, connection, and sharing may influence the path of our planet.
