Open Field Artist Residency
Kitchen Lab: A Mobile Hearth for Collectivist Action
Today’s kitchen is something of an oddity. Many people do little if any actual cooking there, yet it remains the heart of the home, and an inevitable center at most any social gathering. During a two-week residency, Carl and Betsy DiSalvo, a design-and-research duo from the Georgia Institute of Technology, explore the evolution of the kitchen as a place where knowledge, culture, and community are shared. Teaming up with University of Minnesota scholars and students, they will consider it from an array of vantage points—studio art, landscape architecture, food systems, urban planning, design, ceramics, public health, cultural studies, theater, engineering, and more—and reconceive its components, structure, and functions. Ultimately they will design and build a new kind of kitchen as a modular, public “lab” that can go anywhere. They envision a place that welcomes people for experiences with food, and in the process sparks new kinds of social interaction and civic engagement.
