Architectural Intervention  
Constructlab

September 3-13, 2018
Zone Sensible/Exposition space 365
Ferme Urbaine de Saint-Denis Paris | Saint-Denis, France  

Constructlab team:
Sébastien Tripod
Florine Cruel  

Collaborator:
Chiara Sgaramella

The project consists of a kitchen structure in the middle of the orchards of Zone Sénsible, an urban farm located in the Parisian suburb of Saint-Denis. The artist collective Parti Poétique recently restored the space to transform it into a field for research around the themes of nature, culture, and food.  

We chose to work at the centre of the star shaped orchards. Seeing the kitchen as the place where raw ingredients are transformed into meals and ideas are nourished and confronted, marking the passage from nature to culture, this spot seemed like an ideal place to install it. Building one module a day, we invited workers from the farm, neighbours or passers-by to share this space with us. Small guitar concerts, farming classes, guided tours and dinners progressively took place in the kitchen as we were building it, providing a space for an ecosystem of relationships to flourish. This processual intervention, through its mediating function, materialized the search for a common ground between farming, culture and architecture.

Some of the questions explored included: What does it mean to build in a naturally rich and fertile land which has favoured, since the middle ages, the development of an important agricultural tradition once feeding a large part of the Parisian population? What is it to cook and transform the freshly harvested produce in the middle of the fields that generated it? What cultural and social processes can originate from this transformation?