From British and US “victory gardens,” designed to protect against food shortages, to food rations in crisis areas to combat food insecurity: war and hunger are deeply entangled. In Europe, the term “wartime recipe” usually summons a bygone era and yet, with Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine, it takes on new relevance today. How do crises such as war and extreme weather conditions determine what we eat? How do militarized landscapes and industrialized foods interrelate and overlap? And how does food link to violence – both fast and slow? In dialogue with Anca Benera and Arnold Estefán’s exhibition Rehearsals for Peace, this workshop takes the form of a picnic and offers canned and collected foods in tandem with stories about landscapes and agricultural rituals, time and preservation, nature and war.

Participation free of charge

Anca Benera and Arnold Estefán have worked together since 2012 and are based in Bucharest and Vienna. In 2022, they received the Birgit Jürgenssen Award of the Austrian Federal Ministry for Art, Culture, Civil Service and Sport. Their work was shown at venues such as Museum Tinguely, Basel (2023); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2023); Biennale Matter of Art, Prague (2022); Trafó Galéria, Budapest (solo, 2021); Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (2021); MUCEM, Marseille (2019).

L. Sasha Gora is a writer and cultural historian focusing on food studies, contemporary art, and the environmental humanities. Her doctoral dissertation at Ludwig Maximilian University (LMU) of Munich chronicled the history of Indigenous restaurants in the lands now known as Canada, for which she received the 2021 Bavarian American Academy Dissertation Award. She was a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley (2019), a fellow at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice (2020–2021), a lecturer at the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, LMU Munich (2021–2022), and a resident at the Delfina Foundation as part of its program The Politics of Food (2022). After completing an international fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities, Essen (2022–2023), she recently joined the University of Augsburg, where she leads the research group “Off the Menu: Appetites, Culture, and Environment.”