Kristyna and Marek Milde

 

June 1 – September 30, 2014

Kristyna and Marek Milde

In collaboration with Danny Baledamic, Laze Dunimagloski,

Danielle Pottberg, Wah-Ming, Sal Robinson, and Smack Mellon Gallery team

 

 

 

 

 

à la cart is participatory, edible workshop experiment engaging in the contextualization of food production. On its beginning artists Kristyna and Marek Milde posed a question:

If we are what we eat, who are we if we don’t know the origin and the context of the production of our food? 

For the project, they invited members of the local community to grow ingredients for a single dish. Each participant submitted her/his favorite recipe to try to cultivate the ingredients in a shopping cart. 7 shopping carts filled with soil are parked at Old Fulton Plaza and in front of the Smack Mellon gallery serving as pots for cultivating the plants.

The participants are actively engaged in the farming process for the duration of the project, which will include growing, watering, harvesting, and later cooking the vegetables.

à la cart serves both as a living sculpture and a platform for growing food. The project is process oriented and it is open to being a success or a failure. It is not meant to be a farm or a professional gardening course but rather a playground encouraging new experiences while reconsidering the limits of consumerism.

Although the FOODShed exhibition ends in late June the project extends on the site till end of the September with a final event as part of the Dumbo Street Festival, where the participants, cook and prepare the food they were growing over the summer and share their experience with the àLa Cart.

 la cart by artists Kristyna and Marek Milde was created for Smack Mellon’s exhibition – FOODshed: Art and Agriculture in Action; an exhibition of upstate/downstate NY artists who work with food and agriculture, curated by Amy Lipton. The exhibition will be on view from June 7th to July 27th at Smack Mellon, 92 Plymouth Street, Brooklyn, NY at the corner of Plymouth and Washington.

More info and photos from the FoodShed show here.

 

Special thanks to Anthill Farm, BID, Smack Mellon Gallery, 7 Old Fulton Street Restaurant, Kristyna Kottova, and Kathy Stucko, and everybody else for  helping us and support

 

à La Cart Guidelines:

1. Choose your favorite dish.

2. Write down the recipe listing the ingredients

3. List the vegetables which you can grow yourself

3. Grow from seeds or obtain specific plants at a plant sale

4. Transplant the plants to the shopping carts

9. Start writing notes about the process in a diary

10. Water and return often and regularly to water again and check up on the plants

11. Harvest and prepare the dish

Enjoy and share the experience !

 

 

 

 

 

Photos from the À La Cart project at the Old Fulton Plaza and the Smack Mellon Gallery