Edible Alchemy, part of the Resilients Project

Edible Alchemy is part of the multi disciplinary cultural project ‘The Resilients’ funded by the EU Culture Programme. The Resilients imagine possible futures and prototype them as artistic experiments in living and working environments. In 2011 a group of creative practitioners started the Resilients project to collect, create, share and support resilient creative practices that we believe are needed to thrive in uncertain, turbulent times. Each EU partner developed a series of events recorded on the Resilients website and online handbook. The project led by Carole Collet at Central Saint Martins explored the materiality of resilience with artist collaborator Bart Vandeput. Edible Alchemy explores the narrative of two traditional plants exploited in Europe, flax and aronia, to develop a design case study. The objective was to embed principles of resilience in the design process, and to explore how we can continuously adapt and reinvent the use of a given material over time. In a context where natural resources are increasingly becoming scarce and valuable due to over exploitation of soil and increasing world population, the ultimate aim is to demonstrate how we can reinvent the purpose of a material to adapt it to a new context or function. The final Edible Alchemy Aperolab staged a 'table landscape' where everything was made of either flax (linen) or aronia. Whilst visitors were invited to make edible photovoltaic tapas, an extreme adaptation of the use of aronia (based on a recipe developed by Bart Vandeput), Collet presented a collection of tableware made from novel linen composite. Such composites had been used in the industrial sector but had never to this date been developed for tableware. Guest exhibition designer Kieren Jones also produced the tables made from flax boards.

The project was subsequently invited to be presented at the STRP festival in The Netherlands. It was also showcased in 'Hotel Resilients' in Brussels with the Resilients partners.

The Resilient EU partners were: FoAM, Belgium; Central Saint Martins, UK; Nadine, Belgium; Performing Pictures, Sweden; Projekt ATOL, Slovenia; and Time's Up, Austria.

• http://libarynth.org/resilients/edible_a...